Josh Brent drove drunk, after a previous conviction for doing just that, and was going between 110 mph and 134 mph in an area with a 45-mph speed limit, when he killed his friend and teammate Jerry Brown.
Michael Sam is the first publicly gay player drafted into the NFL.
Both men are defensive lineman who have a chance to play for the Dallas Cowboys at some point this season. The comparisons should end there.
If you want to find examples, it’s not hard. I’m not going to name names, because it’s been done on TV, on radio, on blogs, and in at least one local newspaper. And I’m pretty sure the people doing it don’t realize how it sounds. Because with sports, we talk about a player “making a comeback” and “career rehabilitation” and teams “taking chances” and potential “distractions.” And in the world of sports, those phrases are amoral. The virtue of a player’s return or a team’s gamble is directly related to the result. An upstanding citizen who fumbles? Gone. An abusive felon who can catch a pass over the middle? At the end of the day, what matters most — to most people who care about sports, anyway — is wins and losses.
This sort of thinking — embraced by both fans and people paid to comment on various ongoing sports narratives — can skew our perceptions, and we forget how something might sound outside of the world of Ws and Ls. Sometimes it might even be intentional, to get a rise or to use as clickbait. Sometimes we might just be trying to fill the echo chamber. We group people and events and stories together in ways that might make some sense in a world created for entertainment and distraction, but makes no sense outside of that world. Conflating the situations of these two men is ridiculous.
Not all comebacks are the same. (Sam isn’t even coming back. He’s a rookie trying to find a roster spot after getting cut.) Not all distractions are equal. Some rehabs are about ligaments. Some are about lives, and the pain and tragedy brought about by a series of terrible decisions. And sometimes it’s our society that needs some rehabilitation. Let’s do better.
