Think of all the different things that someone trying to give Antonio Brown the benefit of the doubt has been asked to believe over the last few months.
All his Steelers issues were really the team's fault. All his Raiders antics were just an elaborate ruse to get out of his contract. All the more recent, more serious accusations are part of some scheme to shame the Patriots. Or perhaps it's all CTE, a condition that doctors cannot diagnose until after death but that some football fans can diagnose from Instagram posts.
Brown's many problems and scandals were really all a racial thing. Or a money thing. Or an NFL abuse-of-power thing. Or a mental health thing. Or, you know, because of "gold diggers." Blame Ben Roethlisberger, or Steelers general manager Kevin Colbert, or Raiders GM Mike Mayock, or Roger Goodell, or the union, or the helmet manufacturers. Blame his growing list of accusers. As for Brown, he's just a victim, a shrewd businessman, a folk hero sticking it to the establishment or the guy who's going to help your team win a Super Bowl, so who cares about the other stuff?
Sometimes, the story shifted in self-contradictory directions two or three times in the course of one long weekend.
Toward the end, giving Brown the benefit of the doubt meant taking the word of someone who may have misled the whole football world to get what he wanted just a few weeks ago, even though that may itself have been a lie.
The simple explanation for Brown's pattern of erratic, impulsive, unprofessional, alternately self-serving and self-destructive behavior—even setting the allegations aside and focusing on the documented, football-related stuff—is that this is the sort of person Brown has become, whatever the root cause may be. But a large swatch of the public (and my colleagues) have refused to accept the simple explanation, perhaps because we wanted to think the best of him, but also because we were looking for a more compelling story.
In the media, we are constantly accused of spinning "narrative." It's a lazy insult, usually slung by someone who doesn't like it when facts get in the way of the story they want to hear. But sometimes the "narrative" does take on its own life.
Over the past 10 months, Brown was shielded from consequences, not just by touchdown-hungry teams and coaches but by narratives themselves: the reality TV squabbling of the Steelers; the screwball comedy of the frozen feet and helmet sagas; the spy-thriller intrigue of his exit from Oakland; the endless, Wagnerian Patriots ring cycle; even the politically polarized, daytime-talk trivialized conversations about topics like #MeToo and so-called "cancel culture." He was aided and abetted by a news cycle with no short-term memory. The scripts kept being rewritten and revised in increasingly outlandish ways until this week, when advertisers, the Patriots and the NFL finally came to grips with what kind of behavior they were enabling.
Brown appears to finally be out of benefits of the doubt. Yet there are surely folks out there who think this is all a smear campaign, extortion scheme, abuse of authority, fake news or an indication of a serious mental health condition that comes and goes based on whether any of the other explanations fit better at that moment. For his part, Brown filed a union grievance to get his Patriots signing bonus back and spent Sunday attacking his many detractors through social media, behavior very much in character with the accusations against him.
If you are still giving Brown the benefit of the doubt by now, please step back and think for a moment of all the other things you've been led to believe in the last few weeks or months—and ask yourself if you are being duped.
And now, if you will excuse me, I'd like to not think about Antonio Brown at all for a long time.
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2854744-gridiron-digest-danny-dimes-takes-manhattan
2019-09-23 13:08:07Z
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