Peter King Draws “Line In Sand” Over Serial Rapist

Sports Illustrated’s MMQB boss thinks Darren Sharper should be considered for Hall of Fame induction. Yeah, so, about that.

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We sure do assign a strange amount of importance to who gets into a people museum, don’t we ? Baseball’s is far and away the worst at measuring the subjective worthiness of other human beings, but all of the major sports Halls are pretty silly when you think about it. “That person for whom I once rooted is agreed by ‘experts’ to be worthy of our everlasting admiration!” A former player receiving a plaque or bust is supposed to somehow validate our religious devotion to an idol — our superfanhood — and ensures the beloved player will never be forgotten.

I used to easily compartmentalize the entertainer and the real life person behind the television screen. Make good movies, shows, and music, or score a lot of points in the sports I watch, and I won’t judge you in the context of anything you do as a regular person. That was the deal. Of course, that was before I was privy to cultures of violence and how the actions by those who think they are somehow above the law is often perpetuated by compartmentalizing like mine. I regret much of that outlook, but I’d like to think that I’ve also evolved, and I hope that collectively, all of us are, too.

Well, maybe not all of us.

Halls of Fame, sadly, present just the sort of “important” American cultural issues that cause Bigfoots of sports journalism like Peter King to wade knee-deep into shitstorms of epic proportions. Recently, and then more recently, King took to social media to justify the hypothetical induction of a serial rapist into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. Shortly after the last Super Bowl he voluntarily(!) answered a reader question that didn’t need to be dignified with a response:

You can’t possibly envision a scenario under which Darren Sharper is even considered for the Hall of Fame at this point, right? — Jim, New Orleans

“I certainly could. If you’re asking me if I think it’s logical, the answer would be no. But Darren Sharper will be considered on his football merits alone. That is all that we are allowed to consider when cases of players are brought before our committee. [Sharper, who played 14 seasons for three teams, has been indicted on multiple rape charges in California, Arizona and Louisiana.] I know the public doesn’t believe that we separate someone’s ugly personal life from his football life, but that is what our bylaws tell us to do, and I know at least that is what I do. I think Sharper is probably a borderline candidate anyway, but I included him in the group who’ll be eligible in 2016 in yesterday’s column because he is a six-time All-Pro and had several outstanding years in Green Bay and New Orleans.”

King continued:

To his surprise, lots of people took issue with his unintentional rape apology, but, as luck would have it, the discussion laid the foundation for a subsequent reader response mailbag piece that accomplished little more than allow for King to try to show that he acknowledges a difference in opinion, but isn’t changing his mind.

The debate over Helmet-wearing Sharper over Woman-drugging Sharper went away for two months, but on Monday night, King inexplicably returned to the scene of the crime:

King’s summative defense is that he is nobly beholden to the bylaws the Pro Football Hall of Fame has for its voters:

It’s a scrivener’s Nuremberg defense, and though I am quite sure King truly feels his argument is sound and justified — despite the fact that his indulgence of dissenting opinions on Twitter and in mailbags suggests he isn’t willing to consider that if bylaws are flawed — this is less about adhering to bylaws than it is about doing the bigger, better thing.

One particular response from King’s February mailbag stands out as the fundamental problem with compartmentalizing athletes and felonious behavior:

“Michael Irvin’s influence as a leader in the locker room and on the field for the Cowboys should matter, in my opinion. That is a football thing. Crimes after a player retires are not a football thing.”

Michael Irvin is deserving of a bust in Canton despite his drug and prostitute issues. At the end of the day, those transgressions were largely victimless crimes. But they are a football thing, no matter how much King wishes to pretend they are not. Irvin doesn’t have the coke and hookers without the football, the money it paid, the status symbol it created, and the silent consent of the organization to do whatever the hell he wanted so long as he produced on the field and didn’t get himself suspended.

Analyzing Ray Rice’s NFL future after punching out a woman is a football thing. Qualifying Ray McDonald being a bad guy versus a good defensive lineman is very much a football thing. And even though we rarely mention it anymore, Ben Roethlisberger’s alleged conduct should have been much more of a football thing than it was.

Nowadays, a culture of prioritizing the sport over holding its players accountable for violent crimes seems to be a distinctly football thing.

And while Peter King is taking a pseudo-lawyerly, fear-of-a-slippery-slope approach to Hall of Fame consideration, asking that we not talk about the rape part of a rapist’s candidacy stands in direct opposition to the “No More” campaign. Has Commissioner Goodell’s coziest of scribes forgotten about the NFL’s insistence that it cares about violence toward women? What about the players King has endorsed and published at his own Monday Morning Quarterback?

Which is why Darren Sharper the serial rapist is a football thing, as is asking for consideration of his Hall of Fame candidacy. The extensive report by ProPublica and The New Orleans Advocate shows as much. If not for football, Sharper does not have as friendly of an approach to a former Saints cheerleader whom he would drug and rape. He does not have an inside man in law enforcement aiding, abetting, and sharing in his horrific acts. Football gave him a guise to operate as a predator above suspicion.

“He had a charity for kids. He took an interest in women’s issues. He briefly dated actress and former model Gabrielle Union, a rape victim who became an outspoken advocate. He raised money for breast cancer. The NFL as an institution embraced him, and he was selected to appear in a league book, NFL Dads Dedicated to Daughters, designed to raise awareness of battered women. In the book’s photo, he draped an arm around his daughter.

‘My daughter makes me mindful of how women are treated: undervalued and exploited,’ he wrote. ‘Which is why I feel compelled to take advantage of this opportunity to speak up about domestic violence.’”

Any one of us would be hard-pressed to name a profession outside of the sports (or maybe entertainment) industry that would openly ignore a person’s illegal (and despicable) actions away from the job. As a classroom teacher, there will be no Golden Apple possibilities for me should I be accused of a felony. “Sure, Baffoe may have been involved in weapons smuggling, but we need to focus right now on how his students sure as hell appreciated Othello as an allegory for 21st century America” sounds incredibly asinine, no?

Then again, this isn’t a teaching thing, it’s a football thing.

A football thing is saying that blinders should be put on for all but the football aspect. A football thing is retorting that Sharper statistically “wouldn’t be a Pro Football Hall of Famer even if he were a model citizen.” Only, he isn’t a model citizen, and hypotheticals in a discussion of rape culture are counterproductive. Sharper is a younger, faster, more athletically gifted Bill Cosby; a shattered façade of public figure who had achieved greatness at his profession. And clinging to that façade or asking us to consider all the good about the façade is so awfully a football thing.

The Pro Football Hall of Fame and its loyalists are a fairly static entity, very much representative of a game and culture that hasn’t evolved. Even the possibility of immortalizing Sharper’s name as one of football’s best under a molded representation of his face makes a mockery of the sheer horror suffered by the women that he preyed upon — and it’s difficult to understate how terrible King’s awkward defense of the idea is. Maybe, in time, he will look back on this, shake his head, and think, “I can’t believe I said those things publicly.” Maybe, when more of us have evolved, the compartmentalization of the athletes and the persons that portray them will be less of a validation of our love of a game at the expense of things that are more important.

And that will be when, beyond the mere discussion of a Darren Sharper bust in Canton being not my thing, this no longer stands to be a football thing.