Football Is No Place For Fun!
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by Ea34
Apparently scoring a touchdown in an NFL game should not, I repeat NOT, be the source of any pleasure or light-hearted celebration. The league that regularly fines its top performers for the small display of emotion in what is, by definition, an incredibly intense and emotional setting, is at it again. The NFL has doled out fines to, among others, Chad Johnson ($5,000 for his Velcro “Ocho Cinco” nameplate), Maurice Jones-Drew ($7,500 for pretending the goalpost was an ATM machine) and Terrell Owens ($7,500 for making a video camera gesture in the wake of the Patriots’ “Spygate”) during the 2007 season. Well, the big, bad league office is at it again.
Worst-human-being-ever-and-all-that-is-wrong-with-civilized-man, Terrell Owens, had his best game of the 2007 season last Sunday in the Dallas Cowboys ’ 38-10 over the Philadelphia Eagles, catching 10 passes for 174 yards and a touchdown. Following the score, while on the bench, T.O. pulled out a small white “Terrell Owens Touchdown Towel” and playfully waved it in front of a TV camera, apparently drawing the ire of the league. Thursday evening, the NFL fined Owens $10,000 for this heinous display of joy while engaged in a childish pursuit (football is still a game, right?) because the towel is not an officially licensed league product and is thus prohibited from being used on the sideline during a game.
I’m not sure exactly what the NFL is trying to do, but this is troublesome. With this act of petty overregulation, and several others just like it, the NFL league office is sending the message that it believes itself to be beyond reproach. Combined with steroids (a MUCH bigger story than we’re allowed know), coaches cheating, the DirecTV monopoly on NFL Sunday Ticket and the elite quarterback becoming an endangered species, this kind of absurd dictatorial regulation of otherwise meaningless gestures will one day (maybe not for a while, but one day) cost the NFL its spot atop the American sporting scene. For now, the league office will have to be satisfied with turning T.O. into as sympathetic a figure as he’s been in many years.
Napoleon attacked Russia in the cold of winter; the NFL has launched a full-scale attack on everything that is fun in its sport. Never mind, bad example. Napoleon was drunk with power and thought himself completely invincible. They're two totally different circumstances. Right?
