You knew someone was going to say it. At least one sports athlete always seems to end up sticking his foot in his mouth during high-tension times such as the NFL lockout. It’s usually the idiot who’s been mouthing off all year, while underwhelming us with his performance, and not the soft-spoken superstar with the crazy amount of endorsement deals to protect.
Sparticus: "Is that you Adrian???"
Adrian Peterson of the Vikings decided to break that particular mold yesterday and was quoted in an interview comparing the NFL labor battle to modern-day slavery. Err. Not the best of analogies there, AP. Unlike you, there’s a few people in this world who don’t take the term “slavery” too lightly. And AP, if you haven’t taken off your helmet to notice, slavery still exists to this day in various places all over the world, which some might consider to be “modern-day.”
Adrian tried making a point to help his cause and further line his own pockets, but all it did was fall flat on his projected audience. It was a somewhat humiliating, awkward moment for Peterson and ended up making him look just plain ignorant. If he was foolish enough to make a boneheaded blunder of that caliber in an interview, he’ll probably never understand how unsetting a statement like that can be. The subject matter seems so distant from our communities due to our relatively free and prospering society, but one only has to travel as far as Mexico to witness the horrible exploitation of free labor.
There are so many different scenarios you can bring up to utterly dissect and tear apart the point AP was trying to make, but it almost gets to a point where you don’t even know what direction to go in. There doesn’t seem to be any documented proof in history of a slave being paid millions of dollars while getting deep tissue massages on the team jet. None of the players have come out saying their bare backs were slashed with a leather whip in the locker room after they dropped a couple touchdown passes in the first half. But let me get this right. The NFL labor talks have come down to “Modern Day Slavery”?
As stated earlier in the piece, someone is always going fumble the ball (Sorry AP, bad analogy?) went it comes to not knowing when to shut their mouth, whether it be Kellen Winslow and his stupid soldier tirade or The Rocket “misremembering” his own lies. The lesson one would hope they would take away from this, is learning to think before they speak.
It’s nice to hear other players like Green Bay’s Ryan Grant come forward and apologize for Adrian Peterson’s foolish comments. It would be even better to hear those words from AP himself.
Take a lesson from Mr. Kirk Douglas Adrian…tell the people “I am… SORRY!”
—By Seth Newton
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