Now I've been following the playoffs and was watching most of that game but I honestly wasn't very familiar with Sherman prior to Sunday night. And yeah, first impression when seeing his (loud) comments: He sounds like just another arrogant jerk.
But I've been doing a lot of reading and was pretty impressed with his background and rather remarkable defying of the proverbial odds. It reminded me that we're all more than what people can assume about us after a 30-second soundbite.
And then you have to put into context that we expect our professional athletes (especially NFL players) to leave it all on the field and play like cunning-yet-aggressive animals...then turn around and bear their soul eloquently in a post-game sideline interview or press conference. Most of us can't do that (play a professional sport or speak like a rational, functioning individual in front of a camera). It doesn't mean he didn't sound like an arrogant jerk when he trash-talks his opponents into a microphone, but it reminds us that most of us don't know what that's like and how we'd react if we just made a freakishly athletic play to send our team to the SuperBowl.
Sidebar --- on a semi-related note, I find this to be another example of the sports media being a bit out of control, for lack of a better description. Reporters, anchors and analysts dissect every aspect of players from the time some of them are in high school and in many cases, build them up to be the next coming of Christ, only to tear them apart the second they stumble. I mean why do we participate in and encourage that? Why do we allow companies to profit off of a self-constructed cycle of hype (I'm a fan and regularly watch ESPN, I know I'm part of the problem)? A question for another day, I suppose.
I think that --- we all have moments that we wish we could take back when in retrospect we realize that we could have said or done something differently... times when, even if we were speaking the truth or still stand behind our opinion we realize it could have been said it in a better way, or we could have represented ourselves in a more positive fashion.
I think maybe this was his moment (luckily for the rest of us, we don't usually have those moments in front of 30million).
Given that we're all human and have had Richard Sherman Moments, I think we all know that you can sound like an asshole in the moment and not actually be an asshole in every aspect of your life.
Richard Sherman, I'm willing to going to guess that in the last couple of days you have at some point felt the way I did when I got completely tounge-tied in AP History and in the moment, couldn't elegantly express my opinion on Al Gore's campaign to save my life and to this day wish I could do that over again (and to show how that minute of shortfall affected me, I was totally blacklisted for the rest of the year by a teacher already biased against women and liberals... #FirstWorldProblems?).
------
Also, let's remind ourselves that it's football and that if we put this much energy and passion into eradicating hunger or solving global warming, we would have fixed both of those issues by now.
Willing to give second chances,
No comments:
Post a Comment