Sports

Going off the grid

By Matthew Semisch

09/16/2014

It’s tough for a Nebraskan of German and Polish extraction to ask the following question to a very Scandinavian North Dakotan audience without it sounding patronizing, but let’s just go with it.

You’ve heard the saying “uff da,” right? Of course you have; it’s not at all an uncommon expression around these parts.

I can’t recall ever having said it myself, but I’ve been living here long enough now to know what it means.

It refers to its utterer experiencing sensory overload, and that’s a good way to describe how I felt most of this past week.

Part of it had to do with something I saw coming weeks ago. Something I couldn’t prevent but that I  could certainly predict and plan for.

It’s surely not lost on anybody reading this that last Thursday was the 13th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia. That was easily one of the darkest days in our country’s history, and one on which I still remember where I was and, if you even vaguely approaching adulthood back then, you know what you were up to, too, when the attacks happened.

Ever since then, when Sept. 11 has rolled around, I’ve made a point of not watching television that entire day. People deal with grief in their own ways and it’s not my place to suggest how to do it, but I know the TV would constantly remind me of that day if I ever watched on the anniversary of 9/11, so I don’t.

It’s not just on that day, though. Every now and again, so-called “truthers” – revisionary historians, conspiracy theorists or both – will fly off the handle and broadcast crackpot notions no one asked for.

At any rate, being reminded of that terrible day can easily become too much to handle.

That’s why the whole not watching TV on Sept. 11 thing happened again this year.

Well, actually, let me correct myself: That’s what happened nearly all of last week.

I went out to lunch last Monday and, while waiting for my order at Herbel’s Dario, I sat down and opened the Twitter app on my phone and saw friends and colleagues talking about a new video of Ray Rice that had been broadcast.

If you don’t already know who Rice is, he was until last week a player for the Baltimore Ravens of the National Football League.

He was arrested in February for assaulting his then-fiancée and now wife Janay Palmer in an elevator inside an Atlantic City, N.J. casino, and a video clip of him dragging his unconscious partner out of said elevator was released to the public.

He was later handed a two-game suspension by the NFL, which roughly all of the media-consuming world found disgusting on account of the fact that it was.

Last Monday, most of his remaining support quickly evaporated. This happened after another video of Rice and Palmer was released by the celebrity gossip website TMZ.

This one came from a security camera inside that elevator. The footage showed Rice delivering a punch that sent Palmer what appeared to be head-first into one of the elevator car’s walls.

In the time since that second video clip was released, the Ravens have terminated Rice’s contract and he’s been suspended indefinitely by the NFL. These things had to be done – and should have been done sooner – and the general public’s disgust over what happened is entirely warranted.

There’s likely more to come. This whole debacle isn’t over, although the league wishes it was.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell repeatedly claimed that no one from the league’s front office had seen that second video before last week. However, an Associated Press story on Wednesday stated that the league received in April a DVD containing the security camera footage in question.

With what we know now, it’s not unfair to say that situation may yet become an even bigger mess than it already is.

The NFL’s headache then got even worse on Thursday. It was then that a Montgomery County (Texas) grand jury indicted Minnesota Vikings star running back Adrian Peterson with child injury charges.

Peterson allegedly injured his young son with a switch and turned himself in last week to authorities. Any trial on this case is not expected to take place until next year.

Big news came from college football last week, too. Last Monday, the NCAA announced it was lifting its unprecedented sanctions on the football program at Penn State.

After former Nittany Lions assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was charged with 52 counts of sexual abuse of young boys over a 15 years span, the school was hit with major sanctions by the national major college sports governing body.

Sandusky, 70, was convicted on 45 of those charges.

The NCAA provided more dust to cleared. Penn State was handed a $60 million fine, a four-year ban from postseason football bowl games, the voiding of 112 previous on-fieldvictories and a cut in the number of available scholarships.

Nittany Lions head coach Joe Paterno, who died of cancer in January of 2012 at age 85, was dismissed from Penn State in 2011. He’s seen by many as having enabled Sandusky by helping to cover up the atrocities.

It’s my opinion that the school had to be punished for what happened, and, especially as players were given an option to transfer to other schools without penalty, I recall feeling OK with the sanctions when they were handed down.

Having said that, those players who stayed didn’t deserve to have to help pay for what was nothing to do with them, and I’m just as fine with sanctions on their program being lifted now.

What irked me, though, was Penn State students celebrating in State College, Pa. on Monday night and chanting both Paterno’s name and “409,” the original number of games Paterno won before the NCAA came down on his program.

Let’s make something perfectly clear here: Nobody won out of the Penn State scandal, just as nobody won on 9/11 or during the ongoing scandals involving Rice and Peterson.

The four cases are obviously entirely unrelated, and I am by no means comparing them to one another.

What I do know, however, is that what I’ve seen and read about these issues is more than depressing enough and that I needn’t torture myself further with any of it.

This isn’t about forgetting, and nor is it about burying one’s head in the sand. People should know what happened in these cases so as to hopefully not let such things ever happen again.

Even still, though, in the age of 24-hour news and sports networks, this last week served as a reminder of how remarkably easy it is to overload yourself to a degree that in no way helps you.

What’s abundantly clear is that these four cases have combined to make up the sports news equivalent of a perfect storm.

I’m sure I’ll go back my regular TV viewing habits here quickly enough. However, I hope I wasn’t the only person that couldn’t handle a lot of the coverage last week.

Moving forward, what do we say we all work on not being horrible to others? That would very much be a move in the right direction.