Has anyone heard of any football players, specifically offensive linemen, that have defended Jonathan Martin lately?
Some wide receivers, like retired Pittsburgh Steeler Hines Ward and current Seattle Seahawk Doug Baldwin, have publicly supported Martin in the wake of his allegations against the Miami Dolphins. Columnists who formerly played in the NFL, such as ESPN’s Mark Schlereth, have also supported Martin. Which is good, but, to me, there’s nothing more telling about this situation than the fact that no part of the Dolphins’ offensive line, whether a player or a coach, has taken his side.
The NFL and HBO have teamed up to give us “Hard Knocks,” the award-winning show that gives those of us on the outside a chance to look inside NFL locker rooms and get a different perspective of the players we watch every Sunday. As an HBO program, it’s not exactly family friendly. But what’s important to know about “Hard Knocks,” if you haven’t already realized it after this past week, is that it doesn’t tell us everything.
The locker room, in just about any given sport, is sacred ground for the athletes. They bond in there, before or after a hard day of work. Reporters can get in there every so often and pull someone aside for an interview which, for many athletes, is predictable enough for them to invent all the answers beforehand and wrap things up quickly. When all of the cameras and tape recorders are gone, everything goes back to “normal.”
“The locker room is very fun-spirited and it’s sexist, racist at times,” NBA legend Charles Barkley has said. “It’s all over the place, and I’ve got no problem with that. You know, I got white guys, and I’m racist toward them in a fun way, and they’re racist toward me in a fun way.”
You’re not going to see that in an HBO special, because none of the leagues will allow it to happen. Although all teams know that they can’t control everything that seeps its way into the public eye, they’ve generally been good at keeping most locker-room shenanigans under wraps.
Until now.
Now that the transgressions of Richie Incognito and other Miami linemen have been uncovered, we can expect NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to hammer at least some Dolphins and their coaches with fines and other forms of punishment. We can expect a flurry of statements coming from the Dolphins, from owner Stephen Ross and head coach Joe Philbin, and from others around the league about how no such abuse will be tolerated further; how everything is going to change, and how the locker room culture will be monitored to prevent anyone from having to endure the things that Martin did.
I don’t know how many of those statements will be completely realized.
Perhaps this is why those Dolphins haven’t stepped up to the plate for Martin: They enjoyed the disconnect between themselves and the rest of the world — even some of their coaches. They enjoyed the freedom to do as they pleased, and that’s now in jeopardy.
That disconnect is why things like this happen, though not all teams have characters and plot lines that are quite as severe. As with Las Vegas, the culture is, “what happens in the locker room, stays in the locker room,” and outsiders either get it, or they don’t. We’ll see the most obvious of the rookie hazings — Tim Tebow’s friar-inspired hairstyle with the Denver Broncos comes to mind — and nothing more. We know that this happens in every locker room, and we choose to ignore that until a problem crawls out of the woodwork.
Ask football veterans about locker-room hazing, and many will say something like this: “We all got hazed, and going through all of that stuff together brought us closer as a unit.” Let’s not expect football players to bond over tea parties and sleepovers: these are sports for kids, first and foremost, and young kids do and say plenty of dumb things.
We can’t act like a bunch of 15-year-old boys are too saintly to use foul language when they’re alone together, because many of them say things that are just as filthy as Incognito’s text messages. And, we also can’t act like those boys are too good to dare each other to make questionable decisions — when I was 15, for example, I had friends who used to take their shirts off and shoot each other with Airsoft guns to see who could take the most pain.
Locker-room hazing happens everywhere and, in many cases, it’s not harsh enough to worry about. It’s never going to go away completely until there are cameras and microphones in there — and that’s not a good idea at all.
What we actually need to worry about is where the line should be drawn. Now that the full investigative report has surfaced, it’s painfully obvious that Incognito and the other participating Dolphins not only crossed the boundary between playful and abusive but also blew it to smithereens.
Just read Martin’s texts to his parents — they’re heartbreaking and revealing of his character. Many have called him “mentally weak,” a “snitch” and a number of other words that aren’t suitable for this newspaper. OK, perhaps he doesn’t have the thickest skin of anyone on the team. Although he didn’t deserve to have Incognito go all-in on him, guns blazing, he could — should — have done something to stop it earlier.
Now is as good a time as any to remind our young athletes that it’s OK to talk to the head coach if there’s a problem in the locker room. Martin messed up by not reporting to Philbin, instead going to the abusive offensive line coach and leaving it at that. I’m not saying all assistant coaches are terrible people. But, the head coach’s word is the law of the whole team, and there’s no more effective way to stop abuse than to go straight to the top. Having thick skin will get you far in all walks of life, but nobody has to let themselves be “broken” like Martin.