News in the baseball world is a bit slow, and probably won't pick up until the Winter Meetings which take place before winter even begins. Stupid. So I'm going to discuss the ongoing bullying scandal in the NFL.
I realize that being a professional athlete may mean operating in a state of perpetual adolescence, but at some point your job is to go to a stadium and play a game. If you work in an office, or anywhere else on earth, you can't go to work and behave like Richie Incognito has. You have to at least pretend to be an adult.
For a long time, other work environments excused boorish behavior, but now that sort of thing leads to all sorts of discrimination and harassment suits. I'm sorry pro athletes, you make millions of dollars to play a game we teach children so they'll leave us alone for a few hours, you're just going to have to live with the fact that when you go to the locker room, you are at the office not the frat house.
What's particularly troubling to me about what happened in Miami is that Incognito is 30 years old. If he was 23, I'd still say it was inappropriate, but the average 23 year old is only a person in the most minimal sense of the word, and so it would not surprise me. At 30 though, you have to be better than this. You are 30 years old, grow up already. Really.
2 comments:
There's a powerful interest in maintaining professional sports as one of the last jobs on earth where you don't have to be a functional adult to make incredible amounts of money. The other jobs being acting, politics, and investment banking.
Ouch, and true!
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