Even if you don’t follow or care about professional football, you’ve probably heard of the full-blown scandal enveloping the Miami Dolphins that has pushed the crystal-ball soothsayer ship and fawning that generally composes the 24/7 sports news cycle onto the backburner for past two weeks.
You may have heard the racially and sexually explicit transcripts of voicemails Richie Incognito allegedly left fellow offensive lineman Jonathan Martin in nauseating detail. A polarizing firestorm has since erupted over what is considered normative locker room banter and culture, where some players denounced and belittled Martin, who is of mixed heritage, for “ratting out” a fellow teammate, whilst embracing Incognito, a Caucasian man, as an honorary “brother.”
After Martin walked out of the Dolphins facility and checked himself into an unspecified South Floridian hospital seeking treatment for emotional distress, his replacement Tyson Clabo perfectly summarized the sneering, juvenile mentality that doubtlessly extends beyond Miami’s locker room when he excoriated Martin for failing to “stand up and be a man.” If you don’t get the gist of that statement, he was nonplussed that Martin failed to address the situation by delivering a fist to Incognito’s face.
The liberal white-collar media has used broad brush strokes to paint complex interpersonal dynamics, which themselves are influenced by prevailing social trends, beliefs and expectations. Jason Whitlock of ESPN, who doubtlessly meant well in an article on November 8 entitled “Martin walked into twisted world,” repeatedly compares the Dolphin’s locker room to a prison facility and identifies Incognito as some sort of sadistic cell-block leader cut out of The Shawshank Redemption.
“The Dolphins don’t have the kind of environment to support someone with Martin’s background,” writes Whitlock. “It takes intelligence and common sense to connect with and manage Martin. Those attributes appear to be in short supply in Miami.” He bases his thesis, that Martin is an incredibly intelligent, well-bred and soft-spoken John Coffey-esque gentle giant solely on Martin having graduated from Stanford, which appears to be the rallying point of most of the second-year lineman’s supporters. Of course, if he graduated from an Ivy League school, he has to be far more well-adjusted than the other thugs in the Miami locker room — right?
The liberal scribes may not be too far off-the-mark, but as always with cases like these, both sides are far too quick to utilise broad labels to depict the behaviour and characteristics of the opposing group. It is unlikely that Martin, given the response of his teammates, will return to Miami’s locker room. He’s been described, variably, in a myriad of emasculating terms — “pussy, selfish, a little girl,” etcetera.
Meanwhile, Martin’s detractors are almost to a man denounced as “thugs,” “gang-bangers,” “socially backward” and “uneducated primitives.” If there’s a middle ground to be had in all of this, it’s difficult to find underneath the hail of arrows being volleyed by both sides.
It is difficult for us to empathize with victims because to be a victim is considered a self-admission of weakness.
So what do we learn from all of this? In a venerable display of showmanship, a number of former players in the media have nodded their heads sagely in insistence that the locker room culture around the NFL has to change. Michael Irvin, a Hall of Fame wide receiver who won three Super Bowls with Dallas in the 90s, threw his hat into the ring, insisting that he never would have allowed something like this to happen in his locker room.
In an interview last week with the Cleveland Browns Daily, Irvin recounted an event on a chartered team flight where former defensive lineman Charles Haley — who was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder — bullied and physically threatened a team staffer. Such behaviour was not out of the norm for Haley at the time. Irvin described in pulse-pounding detail how he stood up to the larger Haley and insisted he step down.
Irvin failed to mention however, how, some years later, he again attempted to exercise seniority while waiting in line for a haircut at the Cowboys facility and, in the ensuing argument, stabbed former teammate Everett McIver in the neck with a pair of scissors.
This is not to say that Irvin’s original point is invalid, far from it. The desire to change a locker room culture seeded on macho displays of exaggerated masculinity that serve little to no purpose is a noble goal; but it is not a modern day invention. It is founded on so much more than sociological trends driven by rap music and glorification of the gang-banger lifestyle, as supposed by the many two-cent behavioural psychologists who populate the mediasphere — whom I count myself among, of course.
But consider that up until Martin stormed out of the team’s cafeteria, the word “bully” or any of its derivatives was hardly a pressing concern in the world of sports — indeed, it barely existed. Homonyms or softer terms were more commonly heard, embraced and even canonized within the cultures of teams: rookie initiations, or rites of passage. According to Miami defensive lineman Cameron Wake, “I don’t want to call it hazing. I mean, that’s rite of passage in this league. It’s a group of elite men. It’s a fraternity, it’s a brotherhood. It’s a lot of things. And there’s a membership. You have to pay your dues to get certain privileges.”
Bullying is, of course, not simply limited to the NFL. It pervades the locker rooms of all sports at every level, and flowers out into the world of workspaces, schools and offices. It is symptomatic of a broader cultural disease, one that idealises and deifies power and its attainment with a certain sense of modern nobility. In this context, the bully is an individual of greater power and social standing. The bullied individual, the victim, is therefore weaker and subservient.
It is, however, an individual inability to empathize with that all-too-common weakness that enables bullies and further empowers them, even as lives may be irrevocably ruined as a result of their actions.
In a society that values strength as leadership, it is often the most boisterous and vocal individuals who are capable of commanding and holding the attention of others around them. Richie Incognito is one such individual for the Dolphins. Despite a slew of on and off-the-field issues that saw him bounce from franchise to franchise, Incognito’s overwhelming popularity within the Miami locker room may be rooted in part to his domineering and forceful personality, which was captured a multitude of times on HBO’s Hard Knocks. His capability to express himself and dominate other individuals on the team, potentially espousing the bully-victim relationship, allowed him to allegedly torment Martin.
In an excellent piece for Slate, Emily Bazelon and Josh Levin dive into how Incognito’s strong level of play absolved him of his sins in the eyes of the Miami Dolphins’ management, and how his forceful personality attracted the admiration of teammates. So much so that they were either unwilling to disagree with his alleged actions towards Martin, or unwilling to rock the boat themselves, “the implication was that if Martin couldn’t hack it in the Dolphins locker room, he was the one who needed help.” The Dolphins closed ranks around Incognito because in their eyes he was a leader. Jonathan Martin, however, was just a guy, and therefore utterly expendable.
I have never played for a professional or collegiate team, nor have I been privy to the locker room shenanigans that go on within, so it’s impossible for me to relate to what is and isn’t acceptable in terms of behaviour and convention. Boundaries vary from team to team based on personnel and personalities, and it is a self-righteous task for any of us with little experience in anything other than a white-collar work environment to harumph at the locker room actions of professional athletes.
But, as it goes with the general issue of bullying (physical or psychological), it remains difficult for us to empathize with victims because to be a victim is considered a self-admission of weakness, a condition only magnified in professional athletes whose job descriptions involve active, aggressive physical violence.
It is all too simple for Tyson Clabo to quizzically ponder why a Martin wouldn’t deck an Incognito, because he himself was not placed in the situation. Instead, Clabo is explaining how he would have acted in the situation Martin was in, without all of the other sources of pressure bearing down on him. He is pontificating on an immediate and emotionally volatile situation while bestowed the benefit of distance and absence of an imminent physical threat.
Football players aren’t seen as ‘bullied’ in this hyper-macho environment. They are ‘inducted.’
It’s easy for us to denigrate the victim of bullying or abuse because we feel that if placed in their situation, we would do better. Call it the gut reaction you have when someone enters a dimly lit basement in a horror movie.
The individual ideal of a person — well-adjusted, confident, physically fit, attractive, intelligent — is a dictum we each strive towards and fantasize ourselves to have, at least in part, achieved. Of course, it is nigh impossible to check all those boxes, and self-criticisms may always exist, but these are weaknesses that are actual and tangible. Individuals who do check all these boxes (or at least appear to) are empowered by the remainder of society. Politics runs on this: the development of cults of personality. Attractive and positive qualities are magnified while those minor blemishes are excused or forgiven without question because we cannot allow ourselves to believe that they exist.
The weak who are victimized by the strong are, therefore, incapable of fulfilling all of our fantasized tenets. It is difficult to empathise with their plight because with that empathy comes the understanding that anybody can be a victim. This realisation is hard to indulge because we like to think that we are not personally weak enough to be dominated.
This is why we find it hard to empathize with victims of bullying and abuse, and why we as a society tend to look for reasons to blame them for their own victimization. Believing that these victims are at fault for being harassed because they are ‘not tough enough’ is preferable to the idea that they were dominated by someone — and that the same thing could happen to us.
Athletes, whether male or female, are driven by the innate desire to be the dominant individual, engendering a (gender nonspecific) machismo that makes it even harder to relate to those ‘weak’ individuals capable of being bullied. Hazing is rampant within the culture of sports because of the self-propagating nature of it — a belief that team unity and individual acceptance into the group is dependent on kowtowing to the absurd requests of elder statesman.
This is what Cameron Wake was getting at. Those individuals aren’t seen as ‘bullied’ in this hyper-macho environment. They are ‘inducted.’ And that means sometimes they have to pick up the tab for team dinners (which may run into the tens of thousands), carry pads, stand on tables and sing on command and/or accept torrents of physical, verbal and emotional abuse. All in the name of T-E-A-M.
It is this skepticism and reduction of the victim’s experience that makes our culture one in which it is all too easy to be a bully. It’s the societal painting of the victim as weak, the thorough and systematic emasculation by a society that empowers abusers to ply their trade. Until we fix this, the likelihood of change of any sort is slim to none.
