Letter from Reader
The Outrage Over Pro Football Bullying: A "Guy Culture" of Rape, Racism, and Violence
November 11, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The news about Jonathan Martin of the National Football League (NFL) Miami Dolphins being bullied by his teammate, Richie Incognito, has created a firestorm of controversy and discussion in the national media around the topics of bullying/hazing, use of the n-word, locker room/"guy culture," and other important issues. Sports talk radio and sports news has put this at the front of their shows. The national media has taken it up with front page articles in the New York Times ("In Bullying Case, Questions on N.F.L. Culture") and in the Los Angeles Sentinel, the nation's second largest Black owned newspaper ("NFL Hazing Blurs Racial Lines")
Incognito's bullying and use of the n-word has been all over the news and Internet:
- In April of this year, Incognito left a voice message for Martin "Hey, wassup, you half-nigger piece of shit. I saw you on Twitter, you been training 10 weeks. [I want to] shit in your fucking mouth. [I'm going to] slap your fucking mouth. [I'm going to] slap your real mother across the face [laughter]. Fuck you, you're still a rookie. I'll kill you." (ESPN.com news services, November 5, 2013)
- Incognito referred to Martin, privately and publicly, as the Big Weirdo. In the glossy program sold at the Dolphins' Halloween night home game, after Martin left the team, Incognito called Martin the "easiest teammate to scare." (New York Times, November 4, 2013)
- Martin was pressured by Incognito and others to pay $15,000 toward a trip for the offensive linemen to Las Vegas that Martin did not attend. (New York Times, November 4, 2013)
- In a video that was shot several months ago, Incognito is seen running around a pool hall in Fort Lauderdale, FL. As the video begins, Incognito shouts, "Mike Pouncey, N**GA!!" FYI—Mike Pouncey is a member of the Dolphins and it looks like he's in the video. When Richie drops the N-bomb, it seems like he's announcing that Pouncey is in the bar. In the footage Incognito proceeds to stomp around the bar with his shirt off while patrons watch the lineman go berserk. (from TMZ.com, "Richie Incognito Drops N-Bomb On Video In Crazy Bar Rage")
- On the Dan Patrick radio show this week, Incognito was accused by Hall of Fame defensive tackle Warren Sapp of calling Sapp a racial slur during a game. "One time he kicks me in a game and calls me the N-word," Sapp said. "I looked at him and said, 'Oh you want me to punch you in the mouth so they kick me out of the game?'" (Frank Schwab, editor of Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports)
- In an email to Adam Schefter at ESPN, who criticized Incognito for his bullying, Incognito wrote, "If you or any of the agents you sound off for have a problem with me, you know where to find me. #BRINGIT." (New York Times, November 4, 2013.)
- David Kolowski, who played football with Incognito at the University of Nebraska, said Incognito bullied college teammates and one of them walked off the field. "Richie would kind of always take it to another level. The name-calling and some of the physical taunting and things of that nature were pretty commonplace." (CBS News, "Miami Dolphins coaches reportedly asked Richie Incognito to toughen up Jonathan Martin," November 6, 2013.)
It's also been revealed by Martin's attorney that others on the team harassed and bullied Martin, including Martin being told by one player that "We are going to run train on your sister. . . . She loves me. I am going to f—k her without a condom and c— in her c—." (Mike Florio, ESPN.com, "David Cornwell's statement regarding Jonathan Martin," November 7, 2013)
So what is this about? Jonathan Martin is a second-year player with the Miami Dolphins, who has started 23 of 24 games. He plays on the offensive line (very large players, 315-350 lbs, who protect the quarterback when the quarterback is throwing the ball and who block opposing linemen to allow runners on their team to make gains). Richie Incognito, who is a veteran on the team and an all-league lineman, plays on the offensive line with Martin. Martin is Black, with Harvard educated parents, grew up in California and was an All-American lineman at Stanford where he majored in Classics/Ancient History. Incognito is white, has had a very troubled background being dismissed from two college teams for violence/fighting and for off campus assaults (espn.com Nick Wagoner "Revisiting Incognito and the Rams, November 4, 2013), and is known as a dirty and particularly vicious player, including calling Black players "niggers" (to "take them out of their game," in other words make them mad so they won't play well) in several incidents.
The offensive line positions that Incognito and Martin play are the most physical and violent positions on the team and are referred to as "playing in the trenches" with "blue collar players." When Martin was at Stanford, he anchored the offensive line on a very good team that played "smash-mouth" football. At Miami he has been a starter for the past two years in one of the most difficult and "hard nosed" positions to play. However, he was perceived by the coaches as being "soft." When it comes to playing football, Martin is definitely not soft—but he does not have the macho/violent mentality that is incorrectly perceived as a needed quality to be a good football player. He is an intellectual. He is sensitive. He is soft spoken. His demeanor is different than the majority of pro football players. So Incognito was allegedly asked by a coach to "toughen him (Martin) up."
Hazing is a normal practice on NFL teams, where the rookies (first-year players) are hazed by the veterans in a number of ways—carrying the veterans' luggage, washing their dirty laundry, paying thousands of dollars for the veteran's meals, being humiliated and tied to the goal posts with duct tape, and other demeaning and more violent things. According to the New York Times, "Last year, Martin and other Miami rookies were subjected to deliberately bad haircuts at the hands of veterans. Offensive lineman Josh Samuda had his eyebrows shaved and his hair shaved into a penis-shaped Mohawk. 'Glad we're such a first-class organization, Josh,' Joe Philbin, then in his first year as head coach, said to a room full of laughing teammates, according to The Miami Herald."
A few days before Martin left the team, his agent called the Dolphins' General Manager, Jeff Ireland, and told him that Jonathan was being bullied by team members. Ireland's response was to advise Martin to go to Incognito and punch him out. That's the "locker room culture" solution to solving problems between players. Other players came forward to suggest the same solution. "Denver Broncos defensive tackle Terrance Knighton thinks Martin broke the code of the locker room by leaving it." This even came out in the classroom, where Professor Greg Dale said "I was teaching my class at Duke to a group of undergrads, and we were talking about this very thing in class...And the comments from several of the young men were, 'Well, he really needed to man up. He's a man, and you've got to handle that on your own. He shouldn't have walked away.'" (Erik Brady, Jim Corbett and Lindsay H. Jones, "Blame the victim? Some players criticize Jonathan Martin, USA Today online, November 5, 2013)
Football is given a pass by society to participate in legalized violence on the field on Saturdays and Sundays. Then, that culture is taken into the practice field and locker room on weekdays in order to "stay tough and build team unity" for next week's game. But this shit is also out there in a big way in society.
Football culture is a concentration of and promotes the kind of values associated with this society. Men across society are taught and trained from an early age to "man up." Bob Avakian, in his interview with A. Brooks, was asked about the arena of art and culture. He says, "...in an overall and ultimate sense, art and culture does give expression to one worldview or another, and it does become part of the arena of ideological and ultimately political struggle, even where it is given a lot of rein to go in a lot of different directions and is not so directly tied to political and ideological struggle." He goes on: "...football certainly does have a major influence, particularly on guys and 'guy culture'—which is not a healthy culture—it's a male chauvinist culture, for short, which incorporates the celebration of violence, real as well as ritualized violence." (Bob Avakian, What Humanity Needs—Revolution, and the New Synthesis of Communism.)
Bullying is a societal-wide horror. Just think about all the suicide deaths of middle school youth that have been in the news recently, caused by the bullying of schoolmates—and those who are bullied the most are LGBT youth. The essence of bullying, not only in football but in society in general, is tied up with patriarchy, sexism, and attacks on LGBT people. This has come out in how Martin was bullied. Horrible sexual threats were made against Martin's mother and sister. And when Martin was seen as an intellectual, being soft, and an introverted person, his sexuality comes into question, even though there has not been one actual assertion about that there have been news articles using the Martin bullying incident to talk about what might happen to an openly gay player in the NFL (see "The Jonathan Martin bullying case tells us little about what would happen to an openly gay NFL player", By Jim Buzinski, @outsports, November 5, 2013).
Just look at the abuse, bullying, and violence that are forced upon women by this male chauvinist, "locker room culture." The Steubenville, OH rape case became national news in 2012, when high school football players raped a 16-year old who had passed out at a party and then was dragged to different parties and violated at each. While she was being raped, 'guys can be heard laughing as one of them goes on for a full 12 minutes saying things like "'she is deader than OJ Simpson's wife,' and "She is deader than Trayvon Martin.'" (Revolution #299, March 21, 2013)
The Martin bullying incident has opened up in society and brought to life that being a woman in and around football players is harmful and dangerous to one's health, where "locker room talk generally treated women as objects, encouraged sexist attitudes toward women and, in its extreme, promoted rape culture." (Timothy Jon Curry, "Fraternal Bonding in the Locker Room: A Profeminist Analysis of Talk About Competition and Women," Sociology of Sports Journal, Volume 8, Issue 2, June, 2012.
In her article "Recent Events Expose Sexism in Sports Culture," Kate Fagan gives some examples:
- Sacramento Kings center DeMarcus Cousins was ejected from a game on February 5 for telling a referee to stop "acting like a f—ing female."
- The Jovan Belcher murder-suicide tragedy in Kansas City: Belcher murdered his girlfriend, killed himself and left their infant daughter orphaned—yet the ensuing media coverage mainly focused on a young, hardworking football player gone too soon, a storyline apparently easier to tackle than a national epidemic of violence against women.
- 27 Tufts lacrosse players were suspended for shouting sexist and racist comments during an on-campus women's volleyball match in September. The men, some of them drunk, directed most of their heckling at the players and coaches from Smith College, an all-women's school. (espn.go.com/espnw, February 14, 2013)
But it is gang rape by football players that has been at the heart of the "locker room/guy culture" that is physically and violently enforcing the oppression of women. Besides the Steubenville gang rape, there have been two recent gang rapes by football players at Vanderbilt University and the University of Montana. One out of three sexual assaults on college campuses are committed by athletes, while student athletes perpetrated almost six times more sexual assaults than their collegiate peers. (Laura Finley, "Campuses must act to prevent sex assaults by athletes," Barry University Department of Sociology and Criminology, September 3, 2013.)
11% of all reported rapes in the U.S. are gang rapes and are overwhelmingly committed by fraternities, sports teams, and in the military— three organizations that operate by extreme concentrations of the "guy culture"—and the vast majority of those who commit gang rapes are previously unknown to the victim. "The swarming assaults are more violent and leave more post-traumatic stress and thoughts of suicide in their victims then any other victims of other forms of rape." (Kevin Fagan, "Gang rape survivors; It's not your fault," SF Chronicle, November 15, 2009.)
This promotion of sexism in football starts early in life, as we have just found out with the revelation that the Corbett, Oregon Middle School football team is holding its awards dinner at Hooters. Despite the national controversy over having 12-year olds partying at a restaurant whose main "attraction" is the degradation of women, the coach is going ahead with it. He said, "The boys’ faces 'lit up' when they choose Hooters earlier in the season..." Many parents who opposed this argued that Hooters was the next worst place to hold this, "outside of a bar, tavern, or strip club." (LA Times, "Team still plans Hooters party," November 8, 2013),
In an outrageous promotion of this type of culture, giving full approval to racism, sexism, and violence, Damon Bruce, a KNBR (San Francisco) radio talk host spewed forth with this in a way that would make Rush Limbaugh proud. "There is a serious group of you fellas out there that have been just so feminized by the sensitive types out there who continue to now interject their ultra-feminine sensitive options in the world of sports.... This is guy's stuff. This is men's stuff. And I don't expect women to understand men's stuff anymore than they should expect me to be able to relate to their labor pains." (Dave Zirin, Edge of Sports, November 8, 2013). Fuck you, Damon Bruce and all your Neanderthal, women hating ilk!
There have been some who have spoken out about this sexist, violent, bullying "locker room culture." One of those is Brandon Marshall, the Chicago Bears receiver who has proposed a league-wide discourse on the topic of mutual respect. He says "...we're (society is) teaching our men to mask their feelings, don't show their emotions. And it's that times 100 with football players. Can't show that you're hurt. Can't show any pain. So for a guy that comes in a locker room and shows a little vulnerability, that's a problem. That's what I mean by the culture of the NFL. And that's what we have to change." (Carl Steward, "Miami Dolphins harassment scandal exposes NFL's secret locker room culture," San Jose Mercury News, November 8, 2013)
Ultimately it's going to take a real all-emancipating revolution to put this "locker room culture" in the dust bin of history—but we should think and dream today what it would be like for us to do that, and then act on that:
"Imagine a society where creative energies were no longer channeled into ever-descending new ways to demean women and accentuate oppressive social divisions, but instead, without the restrictions of gender or other unequal and oppressive social divisions, people broadly were brought into the process of creating art that uplifts people, challenges them to think critically, and expands their horizons. Imagine boys and men not mired in stupid and exploitative 'guy culture,' no longer influenced by a lifetime of bombardment with images of women's bodies, half-naked and half-starved, used to sell everything from consumer goods to ideology and wars—boys and men able instead to relate to women as equal human beings. Imagine the flowering of this radically new and liberating culture—founded on equality and mutual respect between men and women and between different cultures and peoples, teeming with diversity, and filled with fun as well as seriousness, meaning as well as humor, critical thought as well as exploration and beauty."
"A Declaration: For Women's Liberation and the Emancipation of All Humanity," Revolution #158, March 8, 2009
Finally, it is important to take on the racist nature of the bullying of Martin with the use of the word "nigger" by Incognito, and how twisted this has become.
In the bullying of Martin, we have an example of a white player calling the Black player "nigger" in what has become convoluted, twisted, and totally bankrupt locker-room logic that reverses the correct verdict on national oppression. Get this: Black Miami Dolphin football players are now coming to Incognito's defense, saying he is "an honorary Black brother and that he is more Black than Martin is." Ricky Williams said about Incognito, "I know Richie and you cannot be a racist and ask a black man for help. Not possible. Richie asked me for help." (Jonathan Bass, "Ricky Williams says former teammate Richie Incognito is not a racist," on deadspin.com, November 05, 2013) It is interesting to note that "Black players who are well-spoken or highly educated are mocked or seen as soft by other black players. Only in a locker room is a good education or background seen as a negative." (Mike Freeman, "How Could Black Miami Dolphins Players Be OK with the N-Word? This Is How," Bleacher Reports online sports news, November 7, 2013.)
It even gets more convoluted when sports reporters and players talk about the locker room being racially open because of the "friendly" use of racial slurs the players use against each other. "Things get so open (in the locker room), in some cases, that they get raw. The Dolphins case exposed this rawness to a world that lacks racial openness. From the outside, we see these dynamics, and are shocked." (Mike Freeman, "How Could Black Miami Dolphins Players Be OK with the N-Word? This Is How,"Bleacher Reports online sports news, November 7, 2013.)
Well, Ricky, Mike, and all those who support or try to rationalize Incognito using the word "nigger" against a Black person, I'll tell you, it IS racist. It is in the service of white supremacy, and it reinforces the national oppression of Black people that has continued since Day 1 of slavery in this country.
(It seems as if new information comes out every hour and new articles are being written about this incident of the bullying of Jonathan Martin and all it reveals about sports and society. It's happening so fast that's it's almost impossible to keep up with what is going on. Today, Saturday, November 09, 2013, the New York Times ran an article on Richie Incognito's tortured upbringing. So there will be more to write.)
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