Bottom line: A lot of your university’s sports heroes – coaches as well as players – are seriously scary people. That’s why even though many of them quite often do horrible things – crimes of violence – they almost never get prosecuted. Everyone’s too scared.
Some of these people are scary for obvious Richie Incognito reasons: They’ve been recruited because they’re humongous, violent motherfuckers and you really really really do not want to be anywhere in their way. Or in their vicinity. We all had a very good laugh when we saw this take on Rutgers coach Mike Rice (start at 1:05), but it’s kind of nervous laughter, isn’t it? It’s kind of like I cannot believe that a highly paid, high-profile representative of a university is a violent psycho… I don’t want to believe this…
I love my team! Want to cheer them on! Want them to win!
Oh. But in order to win a lot of teams seem to need psycho coaches who recruit angry motherfuckers like Richie Incognito.
Hm. Hm. Yes, it’s a problem…
Around midnight on April 12, 2014, Oregon State student Michael Davis said he and a friend had been arguing with some football players about cutting in line at a bar and he had fallen to the ground with one of them while fending off a punch. As Davis stood up, tight end Tyler Perry ran up and punched him in the head, knocking him to the ground, the police report states.
According to the report, Davis said a friend who played football told him that he “shouldn’t call the cops. We won’t have a starting lineup next year.” Another person involved in the incident said he “knew the males to be OSU football players so did not really want them in any trouble.”
Days after the incident, Davis said that one of his professors noticed several football players milling outside the door of a classroom and the professor told him to exit through a different door because she was afraid they were going to harass him.
Fuck, man. What did I tell you? Stay out of the way.
But hey. UD, qua professor, finds the bit about the professor really interesting. Look at the intriguing relationships and experiences you can have as a professor at a major sports school! There you are lecturing on Marcel Proust or the Burgess Shale, and you notice that outside your classroom door there’s all these big guys from the team milling about!
It’s like living in Naples, and I don’t mean Florida! It’s like – there they are! You know them. Your students know them. The police know them. The judges know them. Everyone knows them. They run the place, and they can do anything they want because they scare the shit out of everyone.
Yes, turns out there’s nothing sacred even about the classrooms at the big sports universities. Of course, we already knew that from Julius Nyang’oro’s University of North Carolina… Nothing sacred there at all… Nothing even semi-sacred… Professors are just as scared as everyone else.
***************
UD thanks the several readers who linked her to the ESPN article.