The fear of having no skin
My father never laid a hand on me.
The stiffest punishment he ever gave me came in the form of a frequent threat: “Allen, I’ll skin you alive,” he’d say, after my youthful exuberance would overwhelm my ability to walk the straight and narrow.
It worked.
The mere thought that my father could strip me of my outer casing, usually required no further action.
It wasn’t ’til I had long since escaped my adolescence that I realized I’d never seen a skinless child.
Childhood skinlessness was an invention of my father, who was more at ease enlivening my imagination, than doing worse things.
Perhaps the Minnesota Vikings star running back, Adrian Peterson, should’ve threatened to skin his four year-old son alive, instead of using a tree branch that caused him serious injury.
Peterson has now been indicted, and the owners of the Vikings are sanctioning him – but only after widespread criticism.
It’s just another fine mess the NFL has gotten itself into.
Peterson was made to sit out one game; was reinstated for the next game; then, he was deactivated a few days later.
The Vikings, by the way, have had more of its players arrested or cited by police authorities (44 of them) than any other NFL team since 2000.
The Pittsburgh Steelers, by contrast, have only had 19 players pinched since then.
USA Today maintains an online database listing every alleged offense by NFL players, and it indicates there’ve been a total of 713 of them. That’s nearly one a week.
The most kinds of arrests, by a wide margin, are for driving under the influence – 202.
It’s hard to believe, but there’ve been seven cases involving murder, manslaughter or attempted murder.
As shocking as that number is, it’s the 85 cases of domestic violence (about five of them a year), that are the most troubling.
Sifting through those arrests, it’s clear that the NFL didn’t really take many of those cases seriously.
Many of the players who were charged with beating their wives or girlfriends, simply got one game suspensions.
Even with the release of the first video showing the Baltimore Ravens’ Ray Rice dragging his future wife from a casino elevator, he was only given a two-game suspension.
It’s been reported that Rice, himself, had admitted to the NFL that he’d knocked out his wife, and there was a police report that acknowledged it. Yet there was no further penalty until the release of that damning video inside of that elevator.
By the time an unnamed police official in New Jersey claimed the NFL was in possession of that video all along, it was clear the National Football League only acted, not in good faith, but out of fear that it was hemorrhaging public support.
And the mess continues to get messier.
The National Football League Players Association (the player’s union) has gone to bat for Ray Rice.
The NFLPA claims Rice’s subsequent indefinite suspension was a labor law violation.
That since the NFL already knew all of the relevant facts about the incident when it gave Rice that two-game suspension, “an employee cannot be punished twice for the same action…”
And the plot deepens even further.
Last week, the assistant executive director the player’s union, George Atallah, appeared to make an even stronger claim that all players should be eligible to take the field on Sundays, no matter how serious the charge is against them.
“It is the position of the union, barring something extraordinary something-or-other, that unless a player is convicted he should have the right to play in the NFL?” asked ESPN’s Bob Ley.
“The entire legal process has to play out,” Atallah replied.
“Including the appeal?” asked Ley.
“Including the appeals – all of the appeals,” asserted Atallah.
That could be a problem.
Of the 38 arrests of NFL players this year, all but two of those cases are listed as “resolution undetermined.”
That means 36 of those players, according the NFLPA, should be playing every Sunday.
Didn’t I say this is a mess?
Edward A. Owens is a three time Emmy Award winner and 20 year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net