Richard Sherman and People Who Complain Too Much

Dear Aunt Slugger,

I was thinking that perhaps you might offer some advice to Richard Sherman, the football player who ranted to a sports reporter after a football game. He is so not classy.

Sincerely,
Britney Heather Clark
Muncie, Indiana


Dear Britney,

Well you know there's nothing your Aunt Slugger likes more than sports. And by "nothing," I mean, "everything." Your Aunt Slugger hates sports, sports fans, sporting events, and sports players. All of them. My parents are heavily into football and attempted to get me and my older brother interested in watching it. When football failed, they tried basketball, since that is a very popular sport in my home state. Baseball was also a huge bust because it was not clear to us how baseball is a sport. Then they got desperate, finally installing a tetherball in back yard. This, my brother and I enjoyed. We played a lot of tetherball. We excelled at tetherball. But none of the other sports took. We are a huge disappointment to our parents.

So I am finding it somewhat difficult to weigh in on the Richard Sherman thing. Prior to this incident, I had never heard of Richard Sherman. When Facebook blew up over him, I assumed that he had murdered someone on live television. I Googled him. I watched the interview.

I will grant you that it was weird. What the fuck is a "corner?" And who is "Crabtree?" So it was weird. He yelled. He ranted. He came across as arrogant if not slightly schizophrenic.

However. HOWEVER. I a.) do not understand what all the fuss is about, and b.) think all you people complaining about what a dick Richard Sherman is need to stop it with your double standards.

First of all, what Richard Sherman did in that interview is exactly what Lewis Black does every single time he opens his mouth. And people routinely exchange cash for tickets to see Lewis Black scream about something nonsensical. Your Aunt Slugger owns all his albums.

Second, and more important, let's stop for a moment and take a look at what happens when white people do the same thing.

First, we've got the wife of the New England Patriots quarterback pissing about why the Patriots lost a game. People were surprised, but no one called her a "thug" and she didn't have to draft a goddamn treatise explaining her actions. 

And on the subject of cocky douchebags, how about Adam Levine? The white frontman for Maroon 5 has run circles around Richard Sherman in the cocky quotes department. Yet people love him, except for your Aunt Slugger, who hates him. Facebook doesn't explode with anger or call him a thug when Adam Levine opens his mouth. Instead, people weep as though they have heard the voice of an angel.

Then there are of course the 65,098 political shows that air on news networks in which (mostly) white men scream at the camera about [insert some political issue]. So for those of you complaining that Richard Sherman had a chance to cool down before his interview (thus inferring that he should've sounded like Alan Greenspan reading an encyclopedia on camera), why aren't you saying the same thing about any political commentator who has ever appeared on "Meet the Press?" I mean, those folks have time to put on MAKEUP before they get in front of the camera and they STILL end up in fisticuffs on stage.

So I feel bad for Richard Sherman. I do. Yeah, the interview was weird, but no weirder than anything that's been said in the halls of Congress. He's also a pro athlete. Since when do we expect pro football players to be refined, aristocratic gentlemen? These are folks who get paid to voluntarily jump on a pile of wriggling, 300 pound men who are all fighting over a ball. I don't know what a "corner" is, but I am fairly certain (though don't quote me on this) that the corner's function is not to wear toe shoes and a tutu on the 50 yard line and perform "The Nutcracker."

Though I would actually pay to see that. Are you listening, NFL? Boom. Two advice columns in one. 

When Idiots Are Given Access to Technology

Here at Aunt Slugger HQ, we do still periodically find ourselves amazed by what people are willing to put on the internet. And here I am not referring to videos of animals bathing in time with an intolerably high-pitched version of a Bobby Darin song, because really, that's art. No, what I am referring to are people who do not realize that the magnitude of their ignorance is a.) not recordable by any standard cognitive tests, and b.) so outrageous it's comical.

The story I am referring to is, of course, the Twitter response to a performance of "God Bless America" at the All-Star baseball game. It seems that Marc Anthony, a well-known singer from New York, sang this song at the game. Your Aunt Slugger is actually familiar with Marc Anthony, despite being almost clinically unable to match a song with its artist; I was introduced to Marc Anthony in college, when a classmate in my "International Political Economy" class invited me over for a study group and played this song on repeat. So whenever I hear or read about Marc Anthony, I think about the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

Anyway, it seems that our fellow Americans took to Twitter en force to bitch about "a Mexican singing God Bless America."

Some examples of these Tweets include, but are not limited to, the following:

• "How they going to pick a got (sic) damn Mexican to sing God Bless AMERICA?"
• "Shouldnt (sic) an AMERICAN be signing (sic) God Bless America? #getoutofmycountry #allstargame"
• "Another disgrace (sic) Marc Anthony singing god (sic) bless (sic) America. Is he even an American citizen?"

Well, there you have it, readers. Apparently, our nation's xenophobes have decided to fight the allegedly deleterious influence of non-English speaking immigrants by having what is at best a weak grasp of the English language. They are going to preserve the nation's dominant language by making flagrantly false and racist statements in Tweets so laden with grammatical errors that we are left wondering if a feral animal has walked across their keyboard.

So to my foreign-born readers who sometimes think their English isn't great, or who are embarrassed by their language skills, stop. Because here we have a group of Americans who were born and educated here, and they are barely literate. You are already ahead of them.

And with that, I am going to go listen to some more Marc Anthony and think about Alan Greenspan.