If you’re looking for Rob Gronkowski this week it’s probably worth eliminating any and all dudes who are wearing a shirt. Or pants.
The Patriots’ hulking, nigh-unstoppable tight end has been performing his own version of the Ghost Dance the last few days, exalting in post-Super Bowl euphoria and boogying like no one’s watching. Of course, considering there aren’t any games on the schedule that count till next September and there are a few months on the calendar left to tick off before the frenzy of the NFL draft, Gronk-watching has become the only quasi-football activity left to occupy us.
At VICE Sports, David Roth compiled a list of some of the more Gronk-tastic stories that have popped up the past couple of days, and crafted a few fakes of his own.
The reason the joke works is that the notion that Gronk might, say, accidentally set an equally bro-tastic musician aflame falls within the realm of plausibility. Thumbing through articles that chronicle America’s First Frat Boy cavorting, often garment-free, and absolutely reveling in Rabelaisian excess is good, clean vicarious fun. If only because it serves as a beer-soaked flying atomic wedgie to a year in which the league’s bumbling ginger emperor, Roger Goodell, has no clothes at all, no matter how much he squirms and chafes before podiums in hand-tailored bespoke suits, struggling to justify his branded buffoonery.
But there’s no such thing as simple pleasures in the NFL. Take the dizzying, improbable final minutes of what was probably the most exciting Super Bowl in history. You can’t watch Julian Edelman giddily scamper between the holes in the Seahawks’ secondary, coming up with one clutch grab after another, including the go-ahead touchdown, without sticking a hatpin through the part of your cerebral cortex that is aware that he may or may not have been checked for a concussion after the devastating hit he took at midfield with 11 minutes to go.
Your concerns about the long-term effects of that hit might give you pause before leaping out of your seat/couch/barstool and howling at the screen, and instead dwell upon the hospital bills that Edelman or Cliff Avril might accrue and long-term issues that might plague them once they’ve retired, what with the NFL’s concussion settlement being such a royal screw job.
Which brings us back to Gronkowski. Yes, ribald entertainment to be sure. But once again, fully relishing his antics requires that you ignore the fact that his behavior isn’t going to come under nearly the level of scrutiny and tut tut-ing that it would were his skin a few shades darker.
To wit, Gronkowski was making the late-night talk show rounds, and was asked about his participation in the brief conflagration that occurred after the game-sealing interception. His explanation: “I got pushed or something, and it was the last game of the year, and I was like, ‘Screw it, I’m throwing some haymakers.’”
Sure, no problem, bro! Sadly, were he slightly less pale, odds are said remark would have evoked a far less cheery, high five-y response. He’d have been called a ‘thug’, been on the receiving end of vile racist slurs and far, far worse, as Richard Sherman was after last year’s NFC Championship game when a fairly benign bit of boasting and post-game exuberance went viral. Compare, for example, the general hilarity with which Gronkowski’s haymakers comments were received, compared to those directed at Bruce Irvin for his part in the same fight:
LololololRT @GregLawrencee: @BIrvin_WVU11 It's not tough guys, it's logic. You're a thug. Everyone knows it but your fans.
— Bruce Irvin (@BIrvin_WVU11) February 2, 2015
“A public personality can be black, talented, or arrogant, but he can’t be any more than two of these traits at a time,” Greg Howard wrote at Deadspin. “It’s why antics and soundbites from guys like Brett Favre, Johnny Football and Bryce Harper seem almost hyper-American, capable of capturing the country’s imagination, but black superstars like Sherman, Floyd Mayweather, and Cam Newton are seen as polarizing, as selfish, as glory boys, as distasteful and perhaps offensive.”
Howard is absolutely right. Take Super Bowl media day, when Gronk chose to recite a few paragraphs of the erotica that bears his name. You didn’t hear that it was an insult to the storied profession of journalism, it was just Gronk Gronkin’! In comparison, Marshawn Lynch’s non-answers were a “mockery” that so raised the hackles of the sporting press, they called for a Skittles boycott, questioned his literacy and called him as “a professional low-life, a creep for posterity” with “no self-respect, no grasp of common decency.”
Gronk’s carousing, brawling and dalliances with adult film stars aren’t used as prime examples of “the problems with white culture”, and they never will be. Sure, there’ll be the occasional scolds that’ll clutch their pearls and fret about the children, but he isn’t expected to be a representative of an entire race or harangued with the politics of respectability. It’s far from the most damning or injurious instance, but this is what white privilege looks like.
This isn’t Gronkowski’s fault, or Sherman’s or Lynch’s either. As much as we might wish that sports was a self-contained universe, free from the biases and deep-seated issues that plague the rest of the workaday world, it just isn’t so. Nor am I saying Gronkowski and Sherman should stop deriving as much pleasure from life and their job as humanly possible – that’s the larger problem with the NFL; that it has posited itself as not just a highly popular and profitable sporting concern, but first and foremost a moral arbiter and a moral exemplar. And nothing kills joy like a business that’s selling integrity with a capital I, and marketing it with the help of venomous, integrity-free spin merchants.
What I am saying is that there’s an inequality and a double standard here that’s a result of the unsolvable problem(s) of race in America. Realizing that yes, this is manifest in our national sport shouldn’t come as a surprise, but that realization definitely makes all of this fun a lot less fun, whether or not you’re wearing a shirt.
