NFL Bullying Report
We Knew It, but It’s Even More Outrageous Than That
March 3, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Letter from a Reader
The NFL (National Football League) released its “The Wells Report,” on the Richie Incognito-Jonathan Martin bullying incidents, and we are finding out that it’s even more outrageous than what we knew when this first surfaced several months ago. (See “The Outrage Over Pro Football Bullying: A ‘Guy Culture’ of Rape, Racism, and Violence,” Revolution #322, November 11, 2013.)
Incognito and Martin played side by side on the offensive line (those who block the defensive line players to protect the quarterback and the running back) for the Miami Dolphins. Incognito was told by a coach to toughen up Martin, who was perceived as being “soft.” Incognito sent bullying texts to Martin calling him the n-word, “Big Weirdo,” a “piece of shit,” and threatened to rape Martin’s sister without a condom. Martin could not take the bullying any longer, so he quit the team. Incognito was suspended from the team for his bullying of Martin.
The report was released two weeks ago, and now we know that the bullying in the Miami Dolphins’ locker room was not just confined to Incognito bullying Martin. The report reveals that:
- On December 7, 2012, the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Incognito, who is white, and fellow offensive linemen John Jerry and Mike Pouncey, who are both Black, put on “traditional Japanese headbands that featured a rising sun emblem” and then threatened to harm an assistant trainer of Japanese descent in retaliation for the Pearl Harbor attack. The three of them also referred to this trainer as a “Jap,” a “Chinaman,” a “chink,” and a “dirty communist.” Right after Martin left the team this assistant trainer texted Martin, “Hey JM I understand how [y]ou feel man... They are relentless sometime.... Some day I wanna do exactly what you did today [leave this job].”
- Incognito, Jerry, and Pouncey regularly called Martin a “cunt,” a “bitch,” a “pussy,” and a “faggot.”
- Incognito continuously texted about Martin’s sister. “Hey, Jmart’s sister is in town. Get the plastic sheets ready, she’s a squirter. I’m going to bang the shit out of her and spit on her and treat her like shit. Hear your sister has a wolf-puss. A fat, hairy pussy...” Martin said that Incognito, Jerry, and Pouncey would call his sister a “squirter.” Then “they would squirt water onto the field from their water bottles and that, while engaged in certain warm-up exercises, they would simulate having sex with his sister.” (The Wells Report)
- Right after Martin left the team, Incognito and Pouncey had the following text exchange:
“Incognito: Fuck Jmart That faggot is never [allowed] back
Pouncey: Bro I said the same thing I can’t even look at him the same he’s a pussy
Incognito: My agent just asked if we held mandatory strip club meetings Jmart is fucking ratting on everyone
Pouncey: Lol wow are you serious he is a fuck boy
Pouncey: He’s not welcome back bro I can’t be around that fucking guy
Incognito: Fuck that guy if Ur not with [u]s Ur against us
Pouncey: No question bro he’s a coward for snitching
Incognito: Snitches get stitches Blood in blood out Fucking guy
Pouncey: He’s dead to me”
- The report indicates that Incognito used many racial slurs against Martin, who is Black. The following exchange took place between Incognito and an unidentified player about a rifle and shooting Black people and Latino immigrants that suggests the kind of thinking of those who support George Zimmerman and his murdering of Trayvon Martin.
“Player B: Especially if u plan living in Arizona in the future, that’s exactly what you want
Incognito: Yea. For picking off zombies 32
Player B: Lol isn’t that why we own any weapons!?
Incognito: That and black people
Player B: Mmm def all black ppl”
Four days later, Incognito and Player B discussed rifle scopes in text messages.
“Player B: Yes. That’s a solid optic made specifically for a .308 battle rifle
Incognito: Perfect for shooting black people
Player B: Lol exactly”
- Besides regularly calling Martin the “n-word,” Incognito also referred to him as a “stinky Pakistani.”
- Incognito and others used homophobic and sexist language and actions in the locker room. Jim Turner, the Offensive Line Coach (who coached Incognito, Pouncey, and Jerry), was aware of another player being harassed as being gay and he, too, participated in the taunting of this player. At Christmas 2012, Turner gave each offensive lineman a gift bag that included inflatable female dolls, except for the player they were taunting as being gay, who received a male inflatable doll.
When Martin was considering leaving football he texted to a friend a list of positive and negative things in trying to figure out what decision to make. On the positive side he wrote:
“-I hate going in everyday.
-I am unable to socialize with my teammates in their crude manner
-I already have a lot of money. I could travel the world, get my degree. Then get a real job
-I could lose 70 lbs and feel good about my body
-I won’t die from CTE [Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a progressive degenerative disease of the brain found in athletes.]
-Maybe I’ll start to LIKE myself
-I don’t need to live lavishly. I could live very frugally
-why do I care about these people? All I need is my family.”
A week after the report was released the Dolphins fired Offensive Line Coach Jim Turner and the head trainer, who tried to block the investigation.
The report exonerates Miami Dolphin Head Coach Joe Philbin and the front office of the team in that they did not know this was happening. It’s hard to believe that others, besides the offensive line coach and players, did not know what was going on, given the normal locker room culture in the NFL—a sexist, racist, homophobic, violent “guy culture.”
In speaking to this, Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, says that “...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.)
Young boys and teenage boys are conditioned in this “guy culture” whether they play football or not, and this “guy culture” in the NFL is a huge part of this conditioning. As we have seen in the t.v. documentary show Friday Night Tykes, 7- and 8-year-olds are being told not to be emotional like women but to “man-up” as football “is a man’s game, not a woman’s game.” This shit that has happened in the Miami Dolphins’ locker room happens because these young men in society are being conditioned and trained to think about women in these degrading and dehumanizing ways and then to act on that with violence and rape. Richie Incognito thinks that there is nothing wrong with telling Jonathan Martin that he is going to “rape his sister” and “cum in her mouth,” and this outlook was further reinforced by Bryant McKinnie, a Miami Dolphins player, who on a radio sports talk show said that the report was not true in that there was really nothing wrong with what was going on in the team’s locker room.
As the Revolution article, “There is some justice—but there’s no cause for joy—in the Steubenville verdicts,” where high school football players in Steubenville, Ohio brutally raped an unconscious 16-year-old girl at a party and then dragged her to different parties where she was further violated, stated:
“Who or what is more profoundly to blame for all this? Yes, the culture which mythologizes football and football players played a part, as did the culture of alcohol and binge drinking, as did the culture of reckless and heartless defamation and degradation through social media...but these kids didn’t invent this stuff or decide on their own that it was OK to develop and tolerate such a culture—the fact that there is a whole systematic social conditioning of boys and men that is systematically undertaken from the earliest years, and actively tolerated and encouraged in countless ways, including through the encouragement and official acceptance of and involvement in the multi-billion-dollar porn industry, as well as the global sex trade which teaches kids from an early age that it is normal, routine and perfectly OK to buy and sell girls and women as literal chattel, to manipulate and torture their bodies for sexual titillation.”
And why do Richie Incognito and other NFL football players think that it is absolutely fine to talk about Jonathan Martin’s sister in such foul ways or to use woman-degrading and homophobic words in describing Martin himself? It is because the entire social fabric of this society is based upon the oppression of women as something less than full human beings, and this is actually institutionalized in many different ways, including in football.
The dust has not yet settled from what has now been revealed about the ugly and outrageous Miami Dolphin locker room behavior. Some people have been let go from the Dolphins and some reforms may take place. There’s no way that Incognito, Pouncey, or Turner should continue being employed by any NFL team. What they did CANNOT BE TOLERATED in any way and should be the source of OUTRAGE for all those who oppose this horrific “guy culture” and the atmosphere of violence against women and the LGBT community that it creates. This shit needs to be stopped right now.
And the conclusion of this report, that there needs to be more tolerance in the locker room and that the NFL needs to provide for a safe work place for its employees, stays within the confines of football as it currently exists and within the confines of this system of capitalism-Imperialism. We have to bust out of those confines to bring about what is required overall in this world.
Ultimately it’s going to take a real all-emancipating revolution to put this “locker room culture” in the dustbin 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.)
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