Now come two incredibly stupid acts two thousand miles apart.
People in the spotlight are no dumber now than they were 10 or 20 years ago, but still their newly publicized stupidity can be overwhelming. Take the cases of an NFL super star and his cell phone and a college football coach with his new program.
Antonio Brown is one of the best wide receivers in pro football and one of the big three on the Pittsburgh Steelers team that hopes to upset New England Sunday and reach the Super Bowl. Brown chose to celebrate the Steelers’ win at Kansas City, in which they kicked six field goals to beat the offensively moribund Chiefs, by turning on his cell phone camera and mugging with some teammates for 17 minutes, during which his coach was heard in the background calling the Patriots a bunch of derrières, pardon my French.
What Brown was doing while his coach addressed the team around the corner was bad enough in a sacred locker room where nothing really had yet been accomplished; then Brown put the video on Facebook Live and within an hour it had almost one million views. So the Steelers had to deal with that distraction, the 21th century version of giving the upcoming opponent bulletin board material.
Across the country at the University of Oregon, three football players in off-season workouts wound up in the hospital after so-called military training put them there. It was the Oregon strength coach who turned the weight room into a Marine boot camp, but new head coach Willie Taggart has been saying since he arrived that the Ducks must get tougher, not prettier.
The program known for Nike garb and green shoes indeed may need more than speed and fancy threads, but does it need to nearly kill three players to prove it – in the off-season eight months from its first game under Taggart? Jeez, in the age of social media, this became yet another national story that insulted the intelligence of the American public. With Wiki leaks, Wakey-leaks, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat turning private into public by clicking send, can some supposed role models prove that they have at least half a brain?
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