The $44-million-a-year man, NFL boss Roger Goodell, admitted mistakes on Friday and promised to do better.
But when it comes to domestic abuse and the National Football League, ESPN senior writer and legal analyst Lester Munson has zero optimism.
Zero.
It was Munson and William Nack who co-authored a devastating Sports Illustrated investigation in 1995 titled: “Sports’ Dirty Secret: When Scarcely A Week Passes Without An Athlete Being Accused of Domestic Violence, It Is No longer Possible to Look The Other Way.”
Turns out, despite their superb reporting two decades ago, pretty much everybody looked the other away.
Long before Baltimore Raven’s running back Ray Rice cold-cocked his then-finance in an elevator and before Minnesota Viking’s MVP Adrian Peterson whipped his four-year-old son bloody with a wooden switch, there have been so many other so-called “teachable moments” from which the league was unwilling to learn anything.
Munson reels off a long list of names and dates of athletes involved in “domestic disputes” that the NFL has had no appropriate outrage over. So for Commissioner Goodell to allow as how this is now a teachable moment is, well, less than credible.
We as a society haven’t learned much either.
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