Salon Writer Calls NFL Fans 'Real Culprits' in Junior Seau's Death

July 29th, 2015 11:03 AM

Few things in life give liberals more joy than speaking for those who can’t speak for themselves – trees, polar bears, discredited economic doctrines. And sometimes that can even be a good thing.

Enter Salon.com writer Steve Almond. Almond decided he would give voice to Syndey Seau, daughter of Junior Seau. Sydney will not be able to give an induction speech at her dad’s NFL Hall of Fame induction ceremony due to a HOF rule stipulating that family members of deceased inductees will not give speeches. Instead, they honor such inductees with video tributes. Seau’s family has said that they “are OK” with the rule.

But Almond ripped out a big old page from the left’s patented “Never let a tragic death go to waste, Paul Wellstone Memorial version” handbook and let fly with a torrent of anti-NFL hate.

In Almonds’ “If I were Sydney Seau” screed, he left no stone of silliness unturned:

“He became one of the most feared linebackers in history because of the intensity he brought to the gridiron. He embraced the notion that his greatness resided in his toughness, his ability to play through pain. Football fulfilled his destiny as a person and made him a hero to millions of fans.

It also killed him.

Whether or not we choose to acknowledge it, these two truths live alongside one another. It would be profoundly dishonest, therefore, to pretend at a public ceremony like this that my father’s life can be separated from his death.”

Actually, Junior Seau was killed as a result of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. It was suicide, the same tragedy that claims the lives of football players who smash into each other for a living, and actor/comedians like Robin Williams who smash into nothing.

Extra rich is Almond’s warning about the implications of “profound dishonesty” while simultaneously claiming to know for a fact that head trauma and CTE caused Seau’s suicide, when in fact there is no medical way to prove that. On the contrary, it would be statistically unlikely considering NFL players commit suicide at a far lower rate than the national average.

For further proof that Almond truly has no idea of what he most stridently claims to know, see the opinion from Judge Anita Brody, who handled the NFL Concussion settlement and was privy to all the latest scientific evidence on hand.

“The study of CTE is nascent, and the symptoms of the disease, if any, are unknown … Beyond identifying the existence of abnormal tau protein in a person’s brain, researchers know very little about CTE … [R]esearchers do not know the symptoms someone with abnormal tau protein in his brain will suffer from during life,” she wrote.  “No diagnostic or clinical profile for CTE exists.”

So no one definitively knows what CTE is, or does, except, of course, for Steve Almond. Almond’s ineptitude apparently isn’t limited to science and forensics, though. It extends to reading the news as well: “… with the occasional exception of the New York Times,” he wrote, “there isn’t a single media outlet in this country that doesn’t serve as a de facto propaganda organ for the NFL … the sports media in particular … ignore the essential moral abomination of the NFL—that it is a $10 billion industry predicated on the systematic destruction of its employees.”

This is stupid even by Salon’s standards. In reality, the sports media has led the masochistic charge against the NFL, with everything from the Dean of the American sports media, the Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan, calling for “The Mothers Of America” to refuse to allow their children to play the game, to Don Banks at Sports Illustrated writing pieces titled “What Price Football?,” where he blamed the NFL for “ruining” the lives of its players, to ESPN allowing Malcolm Gladwell, a known football-hater, to get on the network right before a playoff game and tell America that football was no different than dogfighting.

Just to name a few.

But, no lib rant is ever complete without identifying the true target of their hate: you. Towards the end, Almond does all he can to figuratively place Seau’s smoking .357 Magnum right in your hand. The “true culprits here: the fans.” Yep. You, the bloodthirsty, inadequately feminized consumer. “It’s the fans who turned to men like my father to carry out savage feats they could never hope to enact. It’s the fans who have elevated football into our national religion, who ooh and ahh at the biggest hits, who pretend that such violence can be enacted with no mortal consequences.”

Seriously, how do you live with yourself? But note, just like in Bob Ryan’s article where he called people who love the game “borderline psychopaths,” your “ooh’s and aah’s” are responsible for the deaths of men like Seau. Almond and his ilk feel completely comfortable launching these outrageous attacks in the absence of any scientific back-up, and even in the presence of science that refutes them.

Their real beef is not scientific in the least, because it has nothing to do with football or football players, about whom most of them couldn’t care less. Their real beef is with you. They see you enjoying a game that, yes, is violent, but yet embodies all the virtues that make this country great, and that scares them.  The media sees, in your love for the game, a tremendous fault in you. A fault they want to correct by taking your game away for good.