The NFL is facing into a major brand-salvaging operation
I’ll deal with that bastion of dysfunction, the NFL, in a moment. Baseball is saving our souls as much as it can at the moment.
Because there’s no mistaking it, the heat has finally tapered off and the leaves are finally falling.
That means baseball is starting to become as meaningful as possible. The World Series is a month away and the hits, the extra bases, the sloppy errors, they’re all starting to really matter now. The New York Yankees are on the verge of occupying the also-rans column but on Sunday, they hit the right autumnal note when bidding an official farewell to the greatest sports star this city has known since — arguably — the 1960s.
Of course it was another overwrought farewell show for a living legend.
Derek Jeter, the captain and shortstop who has worn the number two on the back of his pinstripes since the early 1990s, has been doing a long lap of honour all season.
Jeter is 40 now and his career has been impactful enough to remove any risk that he will be judged by the low calibre of this season’s performances.
He has won enough to be a hall of famer and he has been an incredibly positive influence on the greater New York area during a tumultuous era.
Jeter’s World Series successes arrived either side of the September 11 atrocities and his career has fully encompassed the resurgence of the city… twice.
Both since that awful day 13 years ago tomorrow and — prior to that — the massive economic boom that carried New York through the 1990s.
Of course the Yankees are the personification of all that Manhattan excess but Jeter always managed to stay somewhat above that criticism, even taking into account the long list of women and unimaginably lucrative contracts.
October was what he lived for but it looks like he’ll miss out this time around. Once he retires, the ‘2’ will follow him soon after. Sandwiched between former player and manager Billy Martin and Babe Ruth, a couple of digits behind Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio.
As much as that ceremony warmed the hearts of even the most cynical of observers, reality landed back in all too quickly first thing Monday morning.
We knew it had to be bad when we saw footage of the Baltimore Ravens NFL player Ray Rice drag his fiancée out of an elevator in Atlantic City in February.
It’s difficult not to disagree that the sight of that alone should have warranted Rice being jettisoned for the foreseeable future.
However, the severity of what he did to the then soon-to-be Janay Rice was so shocking that it needed to be seen to be believed.
Of course, the NFL and the Ravens top brass were quick to say this was as new to them as it was to us, these shocking images of the venomous left hook which sent the victim’s head careening off the rail of the elevator.
And this was their chance to act, their chance to right the wrongs they admitted to — prime among those lapses being the disgraceful attempt of someone at the Ravens PR department to paint Rice’s partner as somewhat blameworthy.
So they fired the player and the NFL chief Roger Goodell warned other teams to discuss any future appointment of the player with him first, if this open-ended suspension is ever lifted.
Rice was probably past his prime — it’s a short shelf life for running backs like him, the big-necked barrels whose careers depend on making it through the next rushing play with all their limbs and brain cells intact.
As the game gets faster their huge opponents become more mobile and it’s becoming a more and more fraught existence for that rare breed of player.
But Rice would rather have that hardship than the one he woke up to on Monday, exposed for all the world as the aggressor in an extreme example of domestic abuse which even many of his loyal teammates could not abide.
He lied to them and their dissatisfaction was expressed anonymously as the whole sorry mess escalated once again. Unfortunately, leaving teammates down was the cardinal sin.
Even the victim herself stood by her man, a complex reaction which none of us could even begin to understand or construe.
The NFL is now facing into a major brand-salvaging operation. When one experienced NFL reporter described it as the lowest of low points for the sport, that was hugely telling.
New transgressions are already being heavily scrutinised. Tough times for HQ on Park Avenue.
* E-mail: johnwriordan@gmail.com Twitter: JohnWRiordan
