Over the past several weeks, the National Football League has taken its hits. There was the appalling elevator behavior of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice, brought to renewed public attention by gossip website TMZ. There was the overzealous corporal punishment meted out to his young son by Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson. And tying those two together was the incompetence — or worse — of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. Add to these public-relations nightmares the ongoing hate crime being perpetrated by the league’s Washington franchise, and the NFL would seem to need a Hail Mary to escape intact.
After all, this is what critics have been claiming for a generation: A sport that permits violence on the field is likely to facilitate violence off it. Thus football players are likely candidates to be wife beaters, child abusers, and all-around thugs — as are the beer-swilling fans who cheer them on. Now along come Rice and Peterson, and their adoring crowds: swaggering proof. In the words of the narrator of Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel Speak, “The same boys who got detention in elementary school for beating the crap out of people are now rewarded for it. They call it football.” Naturally, the book’s villain — a serial rapist — is on a football team.
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