Recently, sports fans have been inundated with news and stories about guns. This is primarily so because of Plaxico Burress’ arrest for illegally carrying a handgun in a New York nightclub, and subsequent suspension from the Giants. Just when you thought the story might die down, the human controversy machine Joey Porter had to open his yap and take Plaxico’s side, leaving the story open for another news cycle.
Here is a sample of what Joey Porter said, per ESPN:
“Plaxico is like a brother to me. I take it real personal how he’s being treated,” Porter said. “Everybody has their mistakes, but that’s exactly what they are … Until you’ve been in that situation, when you’ve been robbed at gunpoint or you’ve had a gun waved in your face or had your house broken into before or been carjacked, you really don’t know what it’s like.”
I am not writing this post to judge the comments of Joey Porter. Rather, I am using his comment as a segue into a discussion of my inundation with guns this morning; and on this day, Joey Porter’s comments are a primary reason why.
I have a half hour drive to work every morning. During my drive, I typically toggle back and forth between Dallas’ legendary 1310 The Ticket and 103.3 ESPN Radio, during The Ticket’s commercial breaks. Here is a timeline of my morning drive today:
- It started by listening to Mike and Mike in the Morning, who were discussing Joey Porter’s comments and Jeremy Green’s comment that 75% of NFL players carry guns. As per usual, Lady Bird Greenberg said nothing of substance, while Mike Golic poorly argued both sides of the issue at the same time. Just another day at the office for those two.
- I then thought to myself that listening to Mike and Mike in the Morning is like listening to a plain glazed donut and an eclair argue over who has more sprinkles. (Hint: Neither one does.)
- As his teaser for the next segment, Lady Bird Greenberg (doesn’t that first name just fit perfectly?) implored listeners to stick around to hear “fascinating” comments from Bob Knight.
- I promptly switched over to The Ticket, where they are doing a little one-day experiment where they switch up all of their radio hosts to different time slots with different people. I heard Norm Hitzges’ voice and immediately felt clouds of darkness beginning to form over my morning.
- Foolishly, I flipped back to Mike and Lady Bird in the Morning because I love Bob Knight and wanted to hear his purportedly fascinating comments about the Plaxico Burress situation. Before discussing Knight, they briefly touched on C.C. Sabathia signing with the New York Yankees, and played one of their stupid parody songs from last year about C.C. Sabathia being a “hired gun” for the Brewers.
- And what about Knight’s comment? It was something to the effect of, “I don’t understand why an athlete would need to carry a gun, unless he’s out hunting pheasants.” WOW! STOP THE PRESSES! What brilliance! What insight! Bob Knight is only the one millionth old white guy over the past two weeks to say something similar. But that part about the pheasants — wow! He really broke new ground there. I understand the whole situation better now. (This is not meant as knock on Coach Knight, but on Mike Greenberg, for being a shlong and over-promoting Knight’s comments.)
- I then briefly searched around in my car for a gun to shoot myself for listening to Mike and Lady Bird, and for believing Lady Bird’s teaser. When their conversation then turned to Hannah Montana, I strongly lamented the absence of a gun in my car and considered just driving off the road. I decided to switch back to The Ticket instead.
- Norm Hitzges and whoever else was on with him this morning were talking about Tony Romo and whether his “gunslinger” mentality was helping or hurting the Cowboys.
My point in giving you this rambling diary of my morning drive is to illustrate how much guns and
gun-related or gun-inspired topics and euphemisms are permeating sports news these days. The only thing that Mike and Lady Bird said that had any relevance whatsoever is that Roger Goodell has to be frustrated that with such a great NFL season happening on the field, so much of the discussion is themed around Plaxico Burress and issues relating to guns.
With this in mind, I decided to do some investigative (fake) journalism this morning and reach out to important figures in the sports world and get their thoughts on the gun issue. After drowning in gun-speak this morning on the radio, what I “discovered” was hardly surprising (or true):
The first person I contacted was Denver Broncos quarterback Jay Cutler, who loves him some him, and is rumored to have proposed marriage to his right arm recently. When I asked him about Jeremy Green’s estimation that 75% of NFL players carry guns, Cutler replied, “I have no idea, but I know I carry one. It’s a combination of a rifle and a shotgun. I call it: ‘my arm.’ And in most states you can’t even get a license to carry one so powerful. I usually bring it out on Sundays and it’s definitely more powerful than any of the guns anyone else in the NFL now or in the past has ever carried.”
I next spoke with Vishante Schiancoe of the Minnesota Vikings, who made some pretty interesting headlines this past weekend. Shiancoe says that he carries a gun, and that he doesn’t mind people seeing it. In fact, he’s so unabashed and proud of its size that he says he’d willingly flash it on live TV. “Why not?” said 
Shiancoe. “It ‘aint like I’m carrying around a Derringer.”
In related news, plenty of famous sports personalities do, in fact, carry concealed Derringers in their pants on a daily basis: Jay Marrioti, for example. Others, like Alex Rodriguez and Tony Romo, typically carry their shriveled Derringers during the playoffs or in other key games for “protection,” but seem to suffer adverse effects that hurt their teams.
Bob McKillop, head basketball coach at Davidson, says he has carried a gun into every basketball game his team has played the past two-plus seasons. It’s a Stephencurry .30, and while it only has range up to about 35 feet, it is deadly accurate. In fact, McKillop’s Stephencurry .30 can fire off rounds of 44 in a single 40-minute span before needing to be reloaded.
Another prominent sports personality, Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, also carries a gun with him everywhere he goes and typically shoots from the hip when using it, which can often get him into trouble. Case in point, his recent comments at MLB’s Winter Meetings in regards to the White Sox and Dodgers opening up a shared Spring Training Facility in Glendale, AZ. Guillen is quoted as saying:
“One thing is we will not be on a bus for 3 hours a day. It will be an honor to be in the same facility with Joe Torre. The only bad thing will be having my wife there every weekend.â€
I followed up with Ozzie to get some clarification as to what he meant about it being a bad thing that his wife would be there, and Ozzie promptly pulled the trigger straight from his hip again and told me to “shut the f*$k up and go root for the Cubs.” When I explained that I was a die hard White Sox fan and hated both the Cubs and Jay Mariotti, he apologized and then laughed after making disparaging remarks about Jay Mariotti’s “tiny Derringer.”
So as you can see, guns are everywhere in sports — not just in the NFL. From “hired guns” to “gunslingers”, to phrases like “shooting a basketball” and “shotgun formation”, to athletes shooting their own legs, guns are as widely and varyingly intertwined into the lexicon of sports as a word like “balls” or the constant war metaphors that are always used by athletes, coaches, and announcers.
When viewed that way, I guess I shouldn’t be so disappointed or surprised at what I heard on the radio this morning. Joey Porter may be to blame for bringing guns back to the forefront of the sports news cycle and discussion today, but they are always there in the not-too-distant background in some form or another. The big problem is that unlike my fabricated attempts at irony and humor in this post, or the “innocent” gun-related euphemisms in sports talk that we simply take for granted and that have seemingly been around forever, guns are coming up in sports conversations more and more for real.
Players like Sean Taylor are being brutally murdered and athletes are feeling an increasing necessity to take the extra measure of protecting themselves with firearms. But ask the New York Giants if guns have positively or negatively impacted their franchise? Ask the Indiana Pacers the same thing. For a topic that has had such a seamless assimilation into the figurative world of sports talk and description, it has had a decidedly more invasive and negative impact on the actual players, teams, and games that create the need for such description.
What is troubling is that, if the recent Plaxico Burress and Marvin Harrison examples are any indication, it seems like the problem of athletes and guns will continue to get worse before it gets better. Unfortunately, that may mean many additional mornings like this one where innocent gun metaphors mix with the serious stories of athletes and guns in an overwhelming amalgamation of gun-dominated sports talk.
Most sports fans can handle the metaphors, and have for years. But if the trend of guns infiltrating sports in real and specific ways continues, I wonder how long will it be before sports fans say enough is enough. Or do we simply live in a culture of violent entertainment in which gun metaphors are more a manifestation of our willing acceptance than an example of our oblivious perpetuation? Based on the instinct I displayed in taking the initiative to write this post and exploit the current the Plaxico/gun issue by starting it off with humor and irony, it appears that, at least for me, the former is closer to the truth.
And now as I end this post, certainly wondering how it veered into the serious after starting out much more lighthearted, I can’t decide how I feel about that — the fact that I could be so flippant about an issue that, in reality, is pretty damn serious. We have always talked about guns figuratively in relation to sports, in innocently descriptive ways. Now guns are actually a topic that we talk about specifically in sports stories more and more, and with a decidedly negative connotation.
What I don’t know is whether it’s really worth worrying about. At the end of the day, I’m just a blogger trying to make sense of it all and find an angle to entertain my readers.
- But am I really just one more vehicle of sports talk, no matter how small or insignificant, driving the real-life transition from guns-as-metaphor to guns-as-reality in the sports world?
- Are the two topics mutually exclusive?
- Or am I searching for angle that just is not there?
I have no answers to those questions, or even an idea if there really are answers. I just figured I’d rifle them out in bullets in my ultimate quest as a blogger to shoot you straight about my immediate sports opinions.
One of the biggest stories of the 2008 NFL season was New York Giants WR Plaxico Burress shooting himself in the leg with an unlicensed handgun. Adding insult to injury, the Giants suspended Plaxico Burress and then proceeded to claim the #1 seed in the NFC Playoffs without him.
