I don’t watch The National Football League (NFL) beyond the New Orleans Saints or the Dallas Cowboys games, or maybe just to view New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning, or to see crazy sports fans who burn jerseys at the start of the football season.
I’m more interested in watching the Canadian Football League (CFL) and the rivalry between Edmonton Eskimos and Calgary Stampeders or the crazy antics of the Saskatchewan Roughriders fans.
To say I was shocked when I turned on US tabloid TV news station TMZ and watched the Baltimore Ravens player Ray Rice’s elevator surveillance video would be an utter understatement. It wasn’t so much the fight that sickened me, It was his lack of remorse for the wellbeing of his girlfriend, now wife.
It was also the fact that after he allegedly knocked her out cold, it appeared on the video that he tried to give the illusion she was drunk and he dragged her out of the elevator into the lobby of the building. In the video, she appeared lifeless in that moment. It looked like he was taking out the trash. To me, he didn’t seem to value her life at all in that moment.
I don’t think I truly understand how the NFL and its Commissioner Roger Goodell found an initial standard of a two-game suspension appropriate for domestic violence. I mean at first, before the video spread among social media, Rice was only to be suspended for two games.
I routinely watch a show on Spike TV called JAIL. When domestic violence occurs with normal people they go to jail, they don’t get suspended from work for two days. How the NFL wasn’t able to simply call up the casino and ask to view the surveillance video is a mystery to me. Rice has now been suspended indefinitely. I just don’t seem to understand how his fiancée Janay Palmer was able to marry him months later, then again, I’ve never been the victim of domestic violence.
The NFL seems to have a big problem with domestic violence.
According to a USA Today study, 85 of the 713 arrests of NFL players since 2000 have been for domestic abuse incidents.
Three days after Goodell announced a new standard of six-game suspension of domestic violence incidents and a lifetime ban on repeat offenders, San Francisco 49ers Ray McDonald was arrested and is suspect for hitting his pregnant wife.
In my opinion, the reason why the Ray Rice video has circulated like wildfire within social media is because of the appearance of a cover up by the NFL and the severity of the action. For the last seven years, Ray Rice has played professional football for the Baltimore Ravens. He stands at five feet and eight inches and he weighs 207 pounds. He clearly had a physical advantage over his fiancé at the time.
Domestic violence is a hot issue in the media right now. But there seems to be a inequality with the media coverage.
While not the same in severity, earlier this summer a video of Solange Knowles, the sister of Beyonce, abusing singer Jay-Z in an elevator also surfaced. She repeatedly punched and kicked him. Perhaps there was less outrage because it was a woman abusing a man in that case. But they were both issues of domestic violence. Perhaps the best way to deal with domestic violence in the NFL is to let the full weight of the law fall on offenders. NFL players are no different than you or I. If they commit a serious crime, they should lose their job and go to jail like everybody else.
