Athletes are Craaazy: Super Bowl / No Homo Edition

Posted by dudeyoucrazy on January 31, 2013 in Blog, NFL | 1 Comment

This is the first post in what I’m sure will be a series examining the ridiculous things that the world’s best athletes do (or say) when they’re not competing. 

 

I have a love/hate relationship with anyone who claims to be a “consultant.”  I’m sure at some point those folks do add value, although it might not be financial value, or else they would be out of the job.  But more often than not – at least in my experience – consultants are more encouragers than experts and more knowledgeable than actually connected.

That being said, someday I’d love to be a consultant.  I’d love to know (or at least know of) enough entities that my connections alone could demand a high retainer fee.  I like people and I like business and nothing sounds more fulfilling than listening to what someone does, taking notes, thinking about it for three or four weeks, offering them a few things to work on and then insisting that they keep working on those things for a couple years while they keep writing me checks.

You might think I’m being snarky and you’d be correct, but seriously, I’d love to be a consultant.  Being a consultant is on my bucket list.  And today, I’m actually going to assert that one breed of consultant – the sports media/public relations consultant – is drastically underpaid.

On Tuesday, an athlete, San Francisco 49ers cornerback Chris Culliver, was asked if any of his teammates were homosexuals.  (Dude’s note: I’m going to ask you to “move past” a number of things in this article, the first of which is the utter ridiculousness of that question.)  Here is Culliver’s response:

I don’t do the gay guys man.  I don’t do that.  No, we don’t got no gay people on the team, they gotta get up out of here if they do.  Can’t be with that sweet stuff.  Nah…can’t be…in the locker room man.  Nah.

There is a hip-hop term that is quite popular (actually, if I know about it then it’s probably not popular any more) and used to clarify that a person or statement is not gay despite evidence that might be portrayed as to the contrary.  That phrase is “no homo.”  I might tell a co-worker that I like his shoes, and then clarify by saying, “no homo.” I should probably put “no homo” after every single recruiting piece that I write.

Chris Culliver offered up a historically thorough and yet barely literate “no homo” when asked about gay teammates.  Now if you can get past three more things: the statistics that say Culliver probably has played with a homosexual teammate, the fact that he lives in the most alternative-lifestyle-friendly city in the country and finally the double negatives (“We don’t got no gay people” actually implies that the 49ers do have gay people, although that is clearly not Culliver’s sentiment), you can get to the real meat of why athletes are craaazy.  And, for what it’s worth I’m going to skip over the fact that Culliver appears to be referring to homosexuality the way most people refer to dessert (calling it “sweet stuff”).

Chris Culliver remembers when, he remembers, he remembers when he lost his miiiiiiind.

You can learn one very clear thing about this athlete in particular by reading his statement:  when faced with a question (albeit an inappropriate one) Culliver offered up an answer that was terribly worded, grammatically disastrous and probably offensive to many citizens of his home town.  You can therefore deduce that a sports media/public relations consultant is a necessary commodity for the San Francisco 49ers.

That very sports media/public relations consultant sprang to action yesterday afternoon.  How do I know?  Because someone with a clearly worded and logical voice claimed to be Chris Culliver last night and offered the following statement (the real “sweet stuff”):

The derogatory comments I made yesterday were a reflection of thoughts in my head, but they are not how I feel,” Culliver said in a statement released by the team. “It has taken me seeing them in print to realize that they are hurtful and ugly. Those discriminating feelings are truly not in my heart. Further, I apologize to those who I have hurt and offended, and I pledge to learn and grow from this experience.

Chris Culliver, the “no homo” guy, didn’t write those words.  I’m not completely sure that he could even read those words.  A consultant crafted that apology.  A consultant turned a string of fractured thoughts that offended people into a beautiful apology wrapped in words with real meaning and tied up with a bow of self-evaluation.

Consultants are underpaid.

That’s all I got/

Andrew