This Week In Racial Double-Standards: Football vs. Hockey

Hockey is a sport, I am told, wherein it is considered standard to ram your opponent into a wall, talk trash in the rink to get in your opponent's heads, and tear off your gloves and throw off your face mask and get into a fist-fight right there on the ice.  There is even always a penalty-box for just this contingency.  Some Hockey fans even joke that they only go to games for the fist-fights.

And I'm not even condemning that: it's all part of the game, the trash-talk, the fist-fights, I understand.  Everyone's racing around the rink in a mad fury, the adrenalin gets pumping, emotions run high, I get it.  It's all part of the fun, in fact, it's cool.  I salute you Hockey fans, I really do.  May your fist-fights always keep Hockey America's 4th most popular sport, edging out Soccer, Arena Football, Pro Lacrosse, and the WNBA.

I just can't help but note that, despite all this nakedly violent behavior, no one ever calls Hockey players thugs, is all.  And not coincidentally, Hockey is a predominately white sport.

I bring this up because my Seahawks just had the most miraculous comeback in football playoff history last night, and I'm still riding the buzz off that.  Yet while I was reading too many game recaps this morning, I learned that Marshawn Lynch may be fined by the NFL yet again for some celebratory touchdown crotch-grab that would've been considered tame by Michael Jackson 20 years ago--and which, compared to Ray Rice's wife-beating and Ben Roethlisberger's sexual-assault, seems downright petty.  I then made the mistake of skimming some of these comments sections, where of course I encountered the common label of "thug" lobbed against Lynch.

To which all I can say is: Really?  The man who runs a non-profit that helps disadvantaged youth in his native Oakland, and by all accounts will literally give you the shirt off his back if you compliment it, and, you know, doesn't rape or beat or murder?  This is the guy getting called "classless," a thug?  (We have some very differing definitions of what it means to be "classy".)  Guys, if you don't like the Seahawks, that's fine, I hated the Steelers after Superbowl 40, I understand--but don't pretend to some smugly-hypocritical moral superiority here.

Richard Sherman likewise gets the "thug" label a lot--that is, a 3.9 GPA honor student at Stanford who actually attended classes and successfully escaped the ghetto, is called a "thug."  He trash-talks, yes, but certainly not to Hockey levels--in fact, he usually just trash-talks back (he's never said a mean thing about Peyton Manning or Aaron Rodgers, for example), and usually apologizes afterwords--even though, like Hockey, where the adrenalin gets pumping and emotions run high, trash-talk is all part of the game.

But of course, Lynch and Sherman are black.  And so despite being far less violent or mouthy or prone to fist-fights than a white Hockey player, they are the ones getting labeled the heavily-loaded and racially-encoded term: "thugs."  This is something I can't help but notice on this MLK Day.