The Michael Vick indictment is the cherry on top of a nightmare offseason for the National Football League. Since the Colts defeated the Bears in Superbowl XLI, the biggest news in the NFL has been the conduct of its players and the nearly daily arrests with which the league has had to contend.
And yet, even as the tales of Pacman Jones, Tank Johnson, the Cincinnati Bengals and now Vick dot the sports pages and seemingly blacken the league’s image, there is no doubt that the NFL will avoid any ill effects — as it is by far the most popular sports league in the U.S., and by the same token the most able to withstand any PR disasters. So, even as the NFL endures by far the worst offseason for any sport in recent memory, even as players seem to be arrested almost nightly, even as one of the biggest stars in the sport is facing a federal indictment, the league as a whole is perfectly fine.
And with that in mind, David Stern must be fuming.
While the NFL has, among others, Jones, Johnson, Vick and the entire Cincinnati Bengals roster — including but not limited to Chris Henry — almost constantly in some sort of legal trouble, NBA players have largely managed to stay out of significant trouble in recent months. While an NFL arrest is headline news on ESPN.com nearly every day, the newsworthiness of such events mainly the making of Roger Goodell, the NBA has had to deal with only two players in major legal trouble recently — Ron Artest and Stephen Jackson.
And yet, with most of the league staying out of significant trouble, it is the NBA that is looked to and branded a ‘thug’ league. It is the NBA with an image problem. Las Vegas reflected badly on the NBA, even though no players were involved in any legal problems — in fact, the only athlete in legal trouble stemming from the NBA All Star Weekend was Pacman Jones. A fight between players on the Knicks and Nuggets makes the nightly newscasts and is used as evidence of a league out of control, of sportsmanship destroyed, of that league shaming America yet again.
Why? Consider the fact that those who control the media actually like the NFL. They grew up playing football; it is their sport, along with baseball. It teaches their kind of morals: manhood, perseverance, toughness, sportsmanship. And even though those in the inner cities now make up the majority of players in the league, and even though their representatives such as Terrell Owens and the aforementioned Vick, Jones and Johnson have tried to ‘hood’ it up with endzone celebrations and insubordination, the game itself is still pure, still representative of what mainstream America values the most.
The NBA is a different story; the game of basketball is more suited to the tastes of those in the inner cities, the ‘others’. All flash, no fundamentals; players who mouth off at coaches and have too much power. Too much rap, too much hip hop, too much money, too much of that sub-culture that is so very despised at nearly every level within sports media. So the NBA is much easier to write off, even when the offenses of the players are not to the level of severity or frequency as their NFL counterparts. The NBA can freely be denigrated, the players referred to as a bunch of criminals, and any logic freely discarded because ‘who cares, it’s just the NBA’. ‘I didn’t grow up with it, it’s not my culture, it’s not my sport, so why shouldn’t I peddle egregious hyperbole and make the players and the league out to be gang members and criminals?’
Is it necessarily fair? Of course not. Using the legal troubles of a few players to cast aspersions upon an entire league is never fair; it is only ignorant and the action of a particularly dangerous portion of society. That is true in regards to the NFL and the NBA. That being said, it is only the NBA that suffers the indignity of its players being denigrated, of its entire image being sullied over misdeeds both perceived and real, of declining ratings being used as evidence that America is tired of players whose very existence — if one believes certain elements of the media — must have been first concocted by the writers of Birth of a Nation.
For a game that stands outside of the mainstream and resides in an oft-criticized subculture, the mainstream sports media is unwilling to look the other way. At the same time, generalizations are conveniently left at home when discussing a sport more recognizable, a sport the inner-city does not quite own yet, a sport that still has mainstream appeal.
And so, even in this offseason of discontent, even with a dizzying variety of legal issues incurred by players, even with one of the biggest stars in the sport facing a federal indictment, the NFL can rest easily knowing its image will never be worse than that of the NBA.
