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CFL players sound off on Richie Incognito, and football culture comes under the microscope
The mess surrounding Miami Dolphins' guard Richie Incognito, who's currently suspended by the team following the release of voicemails where he used racial slurs and threatened teammate Jonathan Martin's life (which may have been thanks to team coaches asking him to "toughen up" Martin) has made its way north of the border, with current and former CFL players weighing in on just how prevalent hazing, bullying and intimidation are in football locker rooms. Our Sandy Annunziata shared his take on that earlier, but it's worth passing on some other perspectives from across the CFL too. First, via Mike Beamish of The Vancouver Sun, veteran B.C. Lions have made rookies bring them donuts or breakfast sandwiches, but they see a line between that and the Incognito situation:
Last season, it was Josh Bell’s turn to submit to the Lions rookie “hazing” ritual by bringing breakfast sandwiches for the group.
“Whatever the OGs (old guys: Dante Marsh, Korey Banks, Ryan Phillips) asked you to bring -- doughnuts, Egg McMuffins -- that’s what you had to bring,” Bell said. “It’s all in fun. I did it. It’s just something that you do.” ...
Doughnut detail seems to have worked to [Cord] Parks’s advantage. The sticky-fingered cornerback ended the 2013 regular season with the second-most number of interceptions in the CFL (six).
“It costs him probably $10 a week,” Phillips said. “It’s fun, it’s cool. But to take it to a whole other level, where you’re disrespecting someone’s manhood, his family and what they stand for, it would never get to that point. It’s never happened here, or anywhere I’ve been.The line is drawn where it becomes disrespectful.”
Beamish discusses some hazing rituals he's seen, which have included tying players to goalposts and pouring water on them on their birthdays or getting rookies to shave their heads in unusual styles, but they're on a substantially different level than what's happened in the Incognito-Martin situation. Are things dramatically different in the NFL, though? The most interesting comments in Beamish's piece are from former New York Giants' lineman Adrian Awasom, currently a member of the Lions' practice squad. Some of the hazing that reportedly went on with the Giants seems more substantial than what's typical in the CFL, but Awasom said the Incognito situation is still far above what he's seen:
“Hazing -- rites of passage -- have gone on in the NFL throughout its history. It’s not going to stop,” said Adrian Awasom, a Lions’ practice roster player who has a Super Bowl ring with the New York Giants. “These things happen with every job. But what I read of Incognito . . . it’s tasteless. It has nothing to do with a rite of passage. It was mean-spirited. I think he used the whole ‘hazing’ aspect as a way to explain away his behaviour. When you read the stuff he said, that’s ignorance right there.”
During his rookie year with the Giants, Awasom was required to “pay for a couple of meals” and bring breakfast sandwiches for the veterans. “You heard about it when you forget them,” he said. “It was done before me and it will be done long after me.”
Awasom said he saw nothing similar to last year’s hazing of Prince Amukamara, a Giants cornerback from Nebraska who had his tie and dress shirt cut before a road trip and was repeatedly dumped in an ice bath by members of the defensive line (eight times).
“No one likes it, especially when it’s eight-against-one,” said Amukamara, who was a second-year player, not a rookie. A video of one dunking was tweeted by Giants punter Steve Weatherford, who later regretted bringing the incident to light. The video was full of racial epithets, explicit language and calls for Amukamara to “stand up for yourself.”
“When you get in the locker room, as a young guy, men will test your resolve,” Awasom said. “That also tests your relationship with those men, when you go into battle with them. Those are uncomfortable situations. You have to ask yourself, ‘How do I deal with them?’ Amukamara got hurt as a rookie. So he went through his rite of passage in his second year. What Incognito did, I think, is inexcusable. He took it to another level.”
Meanwhile, former Argonauts running back and head coach Pinball Clemons spoke to Dan Ralph of The Canadian Press on the matter, and said bullying extends far beyond football:
"What it really shows is bullying is a microcosm of society, that it's in our daily lives," Clemons, the former Argos star player and coach who's now the CFL team's vice-chair, said in a telephone interview. "Bullying is often associated with kids but it's full grown, it's everywhere.
"It's in the office, it's on the playground. Everywhere we work, live and play bullying is present and the more we see it and understand it, I think the more capable we are of dealing with it." ...
Bullying is a subject near and dear to the hearts of Clemons and the Argos. The CFL club has been involved in the Huddle Up Bullying Prevention Program for over a decade.
Argos players and officials annually visit area schools to educate students about bullying, encourage them to stop doing it to one another and how to help those they see being bullied.
And Clemons said bullying can take place in even the most simplest forms.
"We do little things on a daily basis that bully people," Clemons said. "We lay on the horn when somebody is in traffic.
"They can't control traffic, they can't do anything but we're mad at the car in front of us. Or we're in a hurry because we didn't leave ourselves enough time and so we're mad at the car that's going the speed limit. We do this in our everyday lives but the key is most times we keep ourselves from going too far."
Clemons said something that's useful about the Incognito/Martin situation is it shows it's not just small people who get bullied, and it shows people how to deal with bullies:
"He took the absolute right route because he did what he thought was proper," Clemons said. "You can deal with the guy personally, and who's to say he didn't try? We don't know that.
"You can take it to the organization or do what he did, which was walk out and when they followed up on it said "This was why I did what I did.' In a school situation we always say you need to let someone in authority know."
Clemons said while bullying is a very serious issue, he's hopeful lessons can be learned from this.
"Many times we think of the kid being bullied is a kid that looks like me, tiny and diminutive," Clemons said. "This guy is a big dude . . . it's not always the small guy.
While Incognito's alleged attacks on Martin likely transcend what's typical in the locker room, it's worth noting that the emphasis on machismo in football can make for a problematic environment. Most of the time, that may not cross the line into something that hurts or offends the subject, but sometimes it can. Sportsnet's Stephen Brunt made excellent points on that front:
This is a workplace, and so there are rules of behaviour that ideally should apply, but it’s a very specific kind of workplace, a closed, entirely male system populated with people whose job it is to knock someone’s block off on Sunday afternoon. (Cops and soldiers are the closest parallel, but minus the celebrity, the wealth, the foreshortened careers, the need to be flying high for three hours a week, those comparisons fall short.)
This glimpse inside, seeing that it is a rough, nasty, profane, unforgiving environment in which the laws of the jungle prevail, has been an eye-opener for a lot of people.
Just not for the players, who live there.
Perhaps something good can come of the Incognito/Martin incident, though. While few accusations of similar treatment elsewhere have shown up so far, this has ignited a debate on exactly how far players should go in initiations or hazing, and that's a useful debate to have. No one's saying that the water or head-shaving incidents that have occurred in the CFL are on a level with what Incognito's been accused of, but are they really necessary to build a football team? That's a discussion worth having. Maybe it also should be discussed just what football's workplace culture is, and if it should be modified to be a more standard environment. Players are certainly going to be much more careful with how they act towards rookies in the wake of this scandal, and that doesn't seem like a bad thing.
