And their main object of hatred is Jay Cutler, the Bears QB who injured his knee and didn't give it a go.
Cutler is getting flamed by former and current players in the NFL along with all variety of sports journalists. This should keep ESPN tongues wagging for days.
If you teach rhetoric/writing/communication and you want a good example of someone having a bad ethos, Jay Cutler is your man. I listened to a small bit of sports talk radio yesterday, and there wasn't as much vitriol as I had expected. But then again, here in downstate Illinois I can only pick up 570 The Score. Maybe the message boards did their jobs and vented hatred effectively, or maybe talk show hosts are trying to just invite callers by defending Cutler. Regardless, when you see videos of Bears fans burning Jay Cutler's jersey, it's obvious why they're called "fans," which is short for fanatics.
In what has been described as a "warrior culture" of the NFL, Cutler not playing with a sprained medial collateral ligament in his left knee makes him an apostate. And his status as a weenie is only amplified by playing for the Bears, a ball club that traditionally prides itself on being tough coupled with a fan base that reveres players of full of pluck and grit. To give you an anecdote that might reveal some of the mindsets out there, an ex-girlfriend of mine who hailed from the Chicagoland area really disliked Jim Harbaugh (QB of the Bears at the time I dated her) because she said he was a "pretty boy from Michigan." For Cutler, a guy who has a hang-dog, me-first look to him, the Windy City isn't going to be kind.
And if you haven't heard about this already, I'm sure you will. Monday wasn't a good day to be a car salesman who wanted to show his support for his team, the Packers, in the Chicago area. "Packer Backer Fired for Wearing Green Bay Tie" provides a darkly humorous account of what transpired at Webb Chevrolet in Oak Lawn. Most of the time I intensely dislike the use of rhetorical questions in writing and presentations, but "But what if the Bears had won?" is a good one.
That unfortunate incident gives a whole 'nother meaning to "Go Pack Go."
3 comments:
It kind of irks me when fans point to one thing as being the reason their team lost. A bad call by a ref. Not going for it on fourth down. An injured quarterback not playing hurt. I've always thought that a really good team wouldn't let a game come down to one single determining factor. Of course, what I really think is the fix is in, always, in pro ball, but that's another story.
Yeh Babe, usually it's a constellation of factors that creates victory or defeat.
In my opinion, within the course of a game there are usually a handful of pivotal, opportune moments (to get academic on you, I could invoke kairos here) where you can point to the game being won or lost.
People are also making the argument that the third string QB really should have been the second string, which isn't a bad argument to make.
The "warrior culture" in sports is the height of stupidity.
Cutler has a serious knee injury and should not have been on the field. In the same game Aaron Rodgers had "his bell rung" and "shook it off" to keep playing. What that really means is that he had a mild concussion, that is, HE HAD A BRAIN INJURY, and since he is a manly man he ignored the symptoms and kept exposing himself to further injury in an attempt to win a game.
If there was a rational decision on the player's part to accept the risk because of the potential gain, then that is defensible. But we all know what happened is that the players have been told since 6th grade that a real man toughs it out and keeps going, so he did.
I love football, but everyone involved in professional sports, from the owners to the broadcast booth, needs to reassess how they glorify big hits and playing hurt.
I am struggling with balancing how much fun I had playing football in high school with letting my boys play a contact sport that does such a poor job in protecting its players. At least I have another 7-ish years to make that decision.
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