Greg Hardy is Back in the NFL [The Tuesday: Week Five]
My initial plan was to watch football all day on Sunday & watch the Monday night game & then, when the afternoon games started & Greg Hardy got a sack & then Greg Hardy forced a fumble, I turned off football & watched Homeland instead.
I’m not sure where to start with Greg Hardy because so many voices have already covered Hardy, so I suppose I’ll start with links to those other voices:
Two Things by Jessica Luther: [ONE] & [TWO]
Diana Moskovitz: [LINK]
Katie Nolan:
I don’t know if adding another voice to the Hardy Chorus is going to change anything — maybe someone on my Facebook friend list will read this & change their minds about how the NFL’s dealings with domestic violence make them feel, maybe someone who supports the Cowboys will start to question that support — when I mentioned Hardy in class on Monday, a student — always adorned with a Reagan/Bush hat — said he wasn’t a Cowboys fan, said the Dallas-area’s quick forgiveness of Hardy was a problem.
Everything I need to say has been said up above my Luther & Moskovitz & Nolan, & if you haven’t read/listened to them yet, please go back & do so — it’s important, I think, in discussions about domestic violence & sports to center this discussion around the female voices that are often relegated to the sidelines by the over-the-top masculinity of sports.
It’s important, too, to move past that masculinity, to not let shitty actions exist behind the veil of manhood.
This all started with Ray Rice, but I don’t think Rice is the best example to use here. Rice apologized. I do not, in any way, believe that apology changes his actions or excuses his actions or makes it okay for an NFL team to give a platform to someone to has so publicly committed acts of violence, but it does make him a slightly different person than Hardy, who hasn’t admitted to anything or apologized for anything & keeps saying shitty things about women.
Remember, Hardy was found guilty by a judge, but his lawyer asked for an appeal & his accuser was then (likely) paid off.
Last week, someone at the university where I teach was caught physically harassing women on campus, in the building where the English Department is housed. We were told to keep an eye on him, but we weren’t told what he looked like, we weren’t told what he’d done, we weren’t told anything. On Wednesday night, he was sleeping on a bench inside the building & we didn’t even know it.
Men who commit violence against men are protected by the legal system, by the capitalist free market, by society. This man in the English Department & Greg Hardy differ in many ways — Hardy has a product to sell & can provide large monetary reasons why he’s valuable to certain parts of society — but both committed acts of violence & were not removed from the public spaces they occupied. The man on campus wasn’t banned from the campus, not yet. The man in the NFL hasn’t been banned from the NFL, not yet, not until he does something like this again in a few years, after his physical skills have declined, after he stops generating the profit that teams are looking for.
Greg Hardy is valuable &, so, he gets a pass from many people inside the NFL. It’s fucked up, but it’s what happens.
I’m torn on the idea of second chances. I think the American prison system is terrible & does nothing to rehabilitate inmates. If Greg Hardy had gone to prison, he’d have left it without changing much. If we’re going to have for-profit prisons & we’re going to incarcerate millions of people, we need to do something to make sure those people who are incarcerated can learn from their decisions — not mistakes, as so much of the rhetoric around public figures who commit acts of violence says — and leave prison having, in some way, changed. I believe this. I believe that doing nothing but punishing is a way of making people commit these actions again. We need education. We need a culture that works to change the patterns that lead to violence, not one that throws violence into a prison with more violence.
But Greg Hardy is a violent offender. He’s also shown no remorse, no growth. To give him a “second chance” is a joke when players in trouble for non-violent crimes don’t get those chances. That Greg Hardy spent all of last season GETTING PAID & sat out four games this year while Josh Gordon will likely never see an NFL field again is a joke, a goddamned fucking joke that speaks beyond sports — that non-violent offenders receive punishments worse than violent offenders is among the most fucked-up things about the American prison system.
Ray Rice has shown remorse. Does he deserve a second chance? Depends on what we mean by that — if he’s learned, then he deserves a chance to live his life, but he doesn’t deserve a chance to be a public figure again. Violent offenders should not be allowed to return to the NFL because it teaches a terrible, terrible lesson — if you can make money for multi-billion dollar corporations, then beat all the women you want. Hell, until Aaron Hernandez did that whole murder thing, I assumed murder would be treated the same by the league — you killed someone a couple years ago? Ehh, you got out on parole, or there was a mistrial, or whatever — welcome back.
PEOPLE WHO COMMIT RAPE, ASSAULT, MURDER, & SIMILAR CRIMES SHOULD NEVER BE ALLOWED TO REGAIN PRIVILEGED SPACES IN AMERICAN CULTURE.
The tldr; version of this: Greg Hardy does not deserve to be on an NFL field. America supports domestic violence. Things are fucked up & things need to change.
Terry Bradshaw’s point on the FOX pre-game show seemed a little too “good ‘ole boy” for me, but it was an important point to make: there shouldn’t be a place in the NFL for violent offenders, but as long as people like Jerry Jones own teams, there will be.
Regular The Tuesday probably returns next week.
