Taunting and Toxicity
My most old-guy-coded Take
The AFC and NFC championship games took place this past weekend, and I ended up watching a good long stretch of the AFC title game from the exercise bike in the basement. The game pitted the Kansas City Chiefs against the Baltimore Ravens, with the Chiefs taking a big lead in the first half and then hanging on to win. This result has been met with a surprising amount of grumbling on social media, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me. Personally, I loved it, because I really hate the Ravens.
This is, admittedly, in no small part because they famously beat my Giants in a Super Bowl back in 2001. Even before that, though, I intensely disliked that team, because they always kind of epitomized a style that I hate— the whole Ray Lewis flexing-and-yelling thing, where every good play has to be followed by self-aggrandizing strutting and mean-mugging. And don’t get me started on coordinated choreographed TD celebrations.
(For the record, I also hate this stuff when it’s done by teams that I like. My least favorite Giants of all time are Jeremy Shockey and Odell Beckham, who were big taunters, and I wasn’t all that sorry to see either of them go. I am not entirely looking forward to Juan Soto on the Yankees, either…)
Lewis is long gone, of course, but this kind of thing continues to be a big part of the Ravens. Sometimes to their richly deserved detriment. A key play in the game was when the Ravens completed a long pass to receiver Zay Flowers who was tackled well short of the end zone but in excellent position to set up a score that would make the game really tight. After which he stood up, shoved the guy who had just tackled him in the chest, spun the ball on the ground next to the defender’s head, and posed for the crowd. Whereupon he was promptly flagged for taunting, moving the ball back fifteen yards. It’s not the main reason they lost, or anything, but it was absolutely the factor contributing to the loss that I enjoyed the most…
My anti-taunting views are, to put it mildly, not widely shared in the sports commentariat. On the contrary, it’s pretty common to find people writing pieces with titles like “NFL taunting needs to be celebrated, not penalized.” Twitter was full of sports media folks lamenting the flag on Flowers, with the usual “No Fun League” references and all that.
This has been the basic situation for years and years— I’ve hated this stuff since before Ray Lewis— so I’m accustomed to it. I do find it a bit puzzling, though, since a lot of the same people who lament well-earned taunting penalties in NFL games are in other contexts quick to denounce “toxic” attitudes around football, and sports in general. When it comes to old-school approaches about playing through injury or “mental toughness” they’re among the first to— correctly— denounce this as Neanderthal behavior that we’re better off without. But when someone gets penalized for being a colossal dickhead toward an opponent, they sound just like the meatiest of old-school meatheads: “If you don’t want to be taunted, don’t get beat,” and that kind of thing.
I find this really jarringly incoherent, because to my mind, both of these things come from the same place: the valorization of needless risk and the drive to show up an opponent come from essentially the same model of demonstrative “toughness.” But one of these is to be denounced, while the other is to be celebrated? To my mind, it would be far more consistent to say that both “Rub some dirt on it and get back out there” and “Man up and make the play next time” are attitudes we’d all be better off without. You want to jump around excitedly with your teammates after a big play, great, but jawing at the other team is classless and should be avoided.
(Or, you know, you could go with my joking all-old-school approach: we remove the penalty for taunting, but also eliminate any penalties for retaliating to being taunted. You want to stand over a guy who just gave up a play and flex, go ahead, but if he takes offense and kicks you in the nuts, that’s fine, too. You pays your money, you takes your chances…)
As I said, though, I’m pretty much resigned to being out of step with the sports world on this. To the point where I’m not doing all that much to rein in The Pip’s tendency to imitate the bad behavior of star players. It’s near the top of the list of sports things he does that I don’t care for, just ahead of talking about teams he roots for as “We.” (Unless you’re cashing paychecks from the team, I believe you should stick to the third person.) But, you know, as a parent you have to pick your battles, and I’m not really up for taking on the whole world, here.
It does significantly reduce my level of interest in hearing a lot of these sports pundits hold forth about broader societal attitudes, though. And is a great source of schadenfreude when bad things happen to showboating assholes. (Go Chiefs…)
So, that’s this week in Old Man Yells At Cloud. If you want more of this for some reason, here’s a button:
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I try to thread the needle: Celebrations: Good. Taunting: Bad.
Funny, this is the only game I watched any of this year. And I tuned in just prior to the taunting play. Maybe I will watch part of a game next year. Or not.