Here are the highlights of what Donovan McNabb said in an interview with HBO’s “Real Sports” that aired Wednesday:
“There’s not that many African-American quarterbacks, so we have to do a little bit extra. Because the percentage of us playing this position, which people didn’t want us to play … is low, so we do a little extra.”…”I pass for 300 yards, our team wins by seven, [mimicking] ‘Ah, he could’ve made this throw, they would have scored if he did this,’
“Doesn’t every quarterback go through that?” the interviewer, James Brown, asked.”Not everybody,” McNabb replied.
Brown then asks if the media is tougher on him than on white quarterbacks such as Carson Palmer and Peyton Manning.
“Let me start by saying I love those guys,” McNabb tells HBO. “But they don’t get criticized as much as we do. They don’t.” …
“Every year I’m part of some criticism,” McNabb tells HBO. “But every day that we go through life, you’re faced with a lot of adversity. Now the answer is how do you handle the adversity. How do you respond?“I try to handle myself with class. I try to handle myself with dignity. I think sometimes people look to players to act out, speak loudly, pretty much be an idiot. But that’s not me.”
The easy reaction is to say that McNabb’s being a baby, nothing is more tedious or overdone than “playing the race card,” the chip on this guy’s shoulder has its own agent, etc.
Easy and not inaccurate. Some of what McNabb said is ludicrous. Until Peyton Manning won a Supe, he got killed all over the media, nationally, with the can’t-win-the-big-one nonsense.
Caron Palmer? That’s laughable. What is there to get on him about, failing to be a designated driver for his criminal teammates?
People have largely forgotten how Ron Jaworski got killed by Eagles fans. Believe me, it was brutal, way beyond what McNabb has had to deal with. Of course, Jaws is Polish….
McNabb is simply childish about this sort of thing. His constant crying about the media and “respect,” during the Eagles’ Super Bowl run, for example, was nothing short of pathetic.
But there’s more to this story.
I was listening to “Mike and Mike” on ESPN Radio Wednesday morning and one of the Mikes, Greenberg, pointed out that while both he and his partner, Mike Golic, get the same hateful criticism everyone in the media does, Greenberg gets a certain type, rarely but occasionally, that Golic doesn’t.
Greenberg is Jewish, if you follow me, and I know you do.
I doubt Donovan McNabb gets ripped more than anyone else in his position and I know McNabb isn’t capable of being objective about it. But I wonder if, more often than you’d think, McNabb gets a specific kind of criticism/hatred that Manning and Palmer and (despite my dumb joke above) Jaworski will never have to deal with.
And I wonder how many people know that, when McNabb was a kid, his family’s home in suburban Chicago was broken into and trashed by people who spray-painted the N-word on the walls.
Four paragraphs up I used the phrase, “get the same hateful criticism everyone in the media does.” I wonder of people around here (meaning Lancaster County) realize how brutal it can get.
Lancaster is a very soft, mild-mannered sports media town, for some reason. I can rant like a loon about sports on this blog and get no feedback, but the few things I’ve done about politics reliably get dozens of responses. Its’s probably not a coincidence that locally produced sports-talk radio has never taken off here.
My work gets mentioned on the chat rooms of PennLive.com, the web site of the Harrisburg and Allentown papers, 10 times as often as it does on LancasterOnline.
In the Beaver Stadium press box a couple weeks back, a guy who covers Penn State for a large paper in Western Pennsylvania showed me mail he’d received from a reader. The envelope included a ripped-out (from the actual newspaper, not an Internet printout) copy of my column in which I called Penn State’s non-conference schedule a joke and a fraud.
The reader attached a note suggesting, in profusely graphic anatomical terms, that the writer do some things and stop doing some other things and grow some things and starting acting more like this guy (meaning me) from “the heart of Penn State country.”
This writer had not defended Penn State’s schedule. He had written about it, and not kindly. But he’s not a columnist, so he doesn’t get to use words like joke and fraud. To this angry reader, the guy just didn’t rip JoePa enough.
Can you imagine being that mad about it? People are. It’s out there.
In a February column, I had some relatively mild and nuanced (I thought) criticism of ex-NBA player Tim Hardaway for comments he made about homosexuality. I received a series of e-mails from a single source that were so hideously vile and insane and personal and over-the-top that at first I assumed they were a joke. Then I realized they weren’t. Then I considered contacting authorities. I’m not kidding or exaggerating.
And I’m obviously not one-millionth the “public figure” McNabb is.
Don’t you wonder what kind of “fan mail,” he must get?
This is not a defense of the guy. Just suggesting that the phrase, “walk a mile in his shoes” might have some utility here.
Tomorrow: Live from the Detroit airport, the Penn State prediction.
