Listening to Richard Sherman

By the time the contenders for Super Bowl XLVIII were set, two weekends ago, a hero and a villain had been chosen, too. The Denver Broncos’ quarterback, the aging, lovable Peyton Manning, had outplayed the Patriots to win the A.F.C. title. Meanwhile, in the N.F.C. championship game, Richard Sherman, a cornerback for the Seattle Seahawks, became the designated bad guy. With thirty-one seconds left to play, Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, had the ball on Seattle’s eighteen-yard line—the 49ers were losing by six points and needed a touchdown. He spotted Michael Crabtree, a wide receiver, and sent him the pass. Sherman twisted up in the air until he seemed almost in synch with the ball’s spiralling, then tipped the ball into the hands of another defender for an interception, and won the game.

Sherman was swarmed by his teammates but broke away to chase after Crabtree. He stretched out a hand and said, “Hell of a game, hell of a game,” to which Crabtree responded by shoving him in the face mask. Moments later, Sherman was surrounded by reporters and cameramen; by then, he had acquired an N.F.C. champions’ cap, which left his eyes in shadow, and his long dreadlocks hung loose. When Erin Andrews, of Fox Sports, asked him about the final play, he more or less exploded. “I’m the best corner in the game!” he proclaimed. “When you try me with a sorry receiver like Crabtree, that’s the result you gonna get! Don’t you ever talk about me!”

“Who was talking about you?” Andrews asked.

“Crabtree! Don’t you open your mouth about the best, or I’m gonna shut it for you real quick! L.O.B.!”

L.O.B.: that’s Legion of Boom, the nickname of the Seattle defense. The video of the “epic rant,” as it was called, went viral. Andrews told GQ that the response was so overwhelming that her Twitter account froze. She added, “Then we saw it was taking on a racial turn.” Some people expressed alarm that an angry black man was shouting at a blond-haired woman. (Andrews immediately shut down that line of complaint.) Many people expressed a hope that Manning would put Sherman in his place. The names that he was called were numerous, offensive, and explicitly racial, but one that stood out—it was used more than six hundred times on television, according to Deadspin—was “thug.”

It’s worth noting that Sherman, who grew up in Compton as the son of a garbageman and a social worker, was his high school’s salutatorian and that, according to Sports Illustrated, “eight players from Sherman’s graduating class earned scholarships to Division I schools, several of whom had walked into the coach’s office at one point or another to ask, ‘How do I get into college? Because if I don’t, Sherm is never going to let me hear the end of it.’ ” Sherman turned down the University of Southern California for Stanford. He said, “I had to prove it was possible: Compton to Stanford.” He did well there academically; he also stayed in touch with his high-school friends, helping to make sure that they graduated, too—something that, according to several studies, many colleges fail to do for their athletes. After the Seahawks drafted him, in the fifth round, he became known as an inventive verbal provocateur on the field, as well as one of the best players in his position. But he is, by all accounts, a considerate and community-minded teammate.

Sherman said that he first grasped the power of words at the age of twelve, when he saw a documentary about Muhammad Ali. If Sherman lost control of that power in his interview with Andrews, he regained it quickly. The next day, Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, he posted an essay on Sports Illustrated’s Web site with the title “To Those Who Would Call Me a Thug or Worse.” (“It was loud, it was in the moment, and it was just a small part of the person I am.”) Later, he said that he regretted going after Crabtree (“that was immature”), while making it clear that he still didn’t like him. At a press conference, on Wednesday, Sherman talked about the word “thug”: “The only reason it bothers me is because it seems like it’s the accepted way of calling somebody the N-word nowadays. . . . What’s the definition of a thug, really?” If it’s something other than a person who occasionally forgets that he is supposed to be humble, it is hard to discern thuggishness in the way that Sherman seems to conduct his life. On CNN, he talked about the switch he has to turn on and off to play “a very barbaric sport.” (Crabtree’s shove in the face may have given it a flick.) We watch violence on the field and expect the young men meting it out to be as detached from it as we are.

But there is more at work in the thug issue than the very real racial angle. Professional football has never been more profitable or more popular, bringing in annual revenues of over nine billion dollars. Yet the sport is changing, with the end of a decades-long dodge about what the constant collisions do to its players. The stories of former stars brought down by early dementia, depression, A.L.S., and suicide are now familiar. The N.F.L. has, after much pushing, agreed to a seven-hundred-and-sixty-five-million-dollar settlement, the bulk of it as compensation for retired players. (The judge who has to approve the settlement doubted that the sum would be enough.) There is a risk that the sport will become like boxing—too dangerous to encourage one’s own children to play, and, therefore, marginal. For now, there is too much money—and even the players would say, too much pleasure—for the league to have a problem finding takers.

What bargains will we be making when we cheer for the players on Sunday—for Peyton Manning or Richard Sherman (or the Seahawks’ underestimated quarterback, Russell Wilson)? Some people might find it convenient to dismiss players as thugs. Discussions about the ravages of the game often come around to questions posed mostly to give fans some dispensation, such as: Given where these guys are from, how good were their other choices? What worth did their futures hold anyway? That sort of rationalizing serves only to make watching a beautiful but violent game less uncomfortable. And that’s the most thuggish thought of all. ♦