Miami Dolphins guard Richie Incognito (68), suspended amid accusations that he bullied his teammate Jonathan Martin, told Fox Sports that everything he did was “coming from a place of love.”
Here is an excerpt from an especially thoughtful article by Juliet Macur for The New York Times during which she provides an update on the background and current status of issues by no means unique to the Miami Dolphins, a National Football League franchise. I can only wonder what retired Dolphins’ Hall of Fame coach Don Shula thinks about this. I am also curious to know whether or not Richie Incognito ad well as any of his coaches and teammates ever saw the film, A Few Good Men.
To read the complete article, please click here.
Photo Credit: David Duprey/Associated Press
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By now we know what Richie Incognito is accused of doing to his Miami Dolphins teammate Jonathan Martin. Name-calling. Bullying. Threats. What we don’t know is the truth of what happened between them, or who is going to fix the cruel locker room culture that the situation has exposed.
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Richie Incognito’s teammates said he was just “being Richie” when he threatened to kill a teammate.
We’ll have time to ponder possible solutions when, in an extreme case of bad luck for the N.F.L., the Dolphins play the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on “Monday Night Football [Veterans’ Day, November 11, 2013].” That game will showcase the league’s two most dysfunctional teams.
The Bucs are winless. Their players are ready to mutiny against their unpopular coach, Greg Schiano. Staph infections have swept through their locker room this season. Despite all that, the Dolphins would probably give anything to trade places with the Bucs right now. After all, there are proven remedies to the Bucs’ problems. Win a game. Replace the coach. Disinfect the locker room. Move on.
The Dolphins’ case is much more complicated.
Roger Goodell, the league’s commissioner, has promised to get to the bottom of the Incognito-Martin situation. He hired what he called an independent investigator to learn the details, to uncover who knew what and when, and to find out how a player had come to feel so bullied that he left the team. Goodell would also want to know how it all could happen under the watch of coaches who often make it their business to know what’s going on in the locker room.
Given the investigator’s findings, Goodell should be able to create rules to prevent a similar situation from happening again. If bullying is found, he should be aggressive about making changes, if only to protect the league’s brand. But will he? And if he does, when?
Look at this quotation from Goodell: “We are changing the culture of our game for the better.” Sounds good, right? But he didn’t say that last week, or even in the last month. He said it in 2009 during congressional hearings as the league was being pummeled for its denials about football-related concussions. It took the N.F.L. years even to acknowledge that head injuries posed a serious problem for its sport, and that was an issue dealing with life and death. So perhaps people should think twice about putting their trust in Goodell this time around, in trying to fix this problem that upon first glance seems ingrained in the league’s culture.
To read the complete article, please click here.
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Juliet Macur is a sports reporter for The New York Times. Since 2004, she has covered the Olympics and Olympic sports, doping and legal issues.
She has written features on a variety of other subjects, including coyote hunting in Oklahoma, former Yankee owner George Steinbrenner’s fear of mortality and the plight of N.F.L. quarterback Michael Vick’s pit bulls that were deemed unadoptable.
Her projects include a series called “Countdown to Beijing,” which examined the sports machine in China as that country geared up to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, and another called “In Two Arenas,” which looked at the Iraq war’s effect on athletes.