Category Archives: Race Relations

In Cooper’s Corner

Leave a reply

By GORDON GLANTZ

Gordonglantz50@gmail.com

@Managing2Edit

GORDONVILLE – I always liked Riley Cooper.

I thought the Eagles committed highway robbery in 2010 when they snagged him in the fifth round of the NFL Draft out of Florida, where he was the favorite target of roommate Tim Tebow for the two-time national champion Gators.Image

As a rookie, when Cooper was in the midst of what seemed to be a breakout game against the Tennessee Titans (during which Andy Reid managed to snatch a defeat from the jaws of victory), my exuberance led to a halftime Facebook status that Cooper was the object of my man-crush.

I was kidding, but the point was that I have always been in this kid’s corner.

I remember the recovery of the onside kick in the 2010 remake of the Miracle of the Meadowlands, and his highlight-reel touchdown catch last season, after coming back strong after from a broken collarbone.

While the Eagle Nation mourned the loss of Jeremy Maclin for the season, I saw an opportunity for Cooper – along with Damaris Johnson – to step up and fill the void.

I was encouraged to read quotes from Reid’s replacement, Chip Kelly, who seemed – through layers of Coachspeak, one of the few foreign languages I comprehend – to be giving Cooper a vote of confidence.

He talked about all the attributes I always saw – Cooper’s size, hands, downfield blocking (a must in this new offense) and physicality.

Seemed like opportunity had knocked — and fate was answering — for Cooper in a sport where back-up players keep their heads down and work at their craft, not wishing for injury to teammates but are keeping themselves ready for the inevitable.

His career totals of 46 catches and five touchdowns seemed likely to be topped in just one season.

And that fast, penalty flags all over the field.

He was caught on tape in the middle of a drunken tirade at a Kenny Chesney concert. He cursed at a security guard and used the “N” word. It happened weeks ago, but came out this week to the normal shock and dismay.

If you would have told me this had happened and to guess which white player would be guilty of something so moronic, Cooper would have been about the last guy I would have guessed.

He always seemed so laid back when interviewed, and maybe we were fooled by him saying semi-religious stuff about “being blessed” to have made a catch and so forth.

Cooper is a rarity in that he not only got his college degree, despite being a two-sport star pro in either football or baseball (ironically, he was drafted by the Phillies out of high school). And his degree was in family, youth and community services (a stark contrast to some of the laughable fields of study chosen – i.e. recreation — by athletes).

That should provide more of a window into his inner being, at least for those who want to dig that deep.

Giving him the benefit of the doubt, you would have to say he is a decent person. Whatever he feels in his heart and soul, he revealed that he is only human.

And humans make mistakes.

Even sure-handed receivers, like Cooper, drop the ball.

And he dropped it hard.

Now the question: Should his illegal procedure be followed by more penalty flags for piling on and for late hits from the peanut gallery?

“All men die, not all men live,” is his favorite quote, according to the team’s media guide. Should others now sentence him to live in infamy?

The guy is a football player – one who will be 26 in September.

Stop and let that sink in.

And consider:

-More tapes of Richard Nixon’s psychotic rants have come out and the only response from the mainstream media is that they are “interesting.”

-Bill O’Reilly race-baits nightly on Fox News but because he hides behind buzzwords, as opposed to the “N” word, he is right there on the air every night.

-Rick Santorum said homosexuality equated to bestiality and he was a serious candidate by a major political party for president (winning four states, good for 248 delegates and 20 percent of the vote).

-Jesse Jackson, in 1983, referred to New York as “Hymietown” and his only excuse – in lieu of an apology — was that the conversation with the reporter was off-the-record. He also said that he was “sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust.” A civil rights leader to this day, he was a presidential candidate, not to mention a Baptist minister.

Until we hold people like these to a higher standard, we should think twice about a football player who wasn’t allowed backstage at a concert and used a word he likely hears daily.

Even if Riley Cooper wasn’t “brought up like that” by his parents, which is what he says, the culture has brought the “N” word to lips.

Cooper works in an environment where that word, for better or worse, is probably tossed around more than the oblong pigskin that he is paid to catch 1,000 times in practice just so he can get his paws on IT a few times 16 weeks of the year during the season.

It likely comes from locker-room boom boxes, or from teammates rattling off the lyrics to the latest rap song (a genre Cooper also likes, along with country). It comes from joking around. It comes from quotes on tattoos on their muscled-up bodies.

And, let’s be honest, that word – or ones like it – can be heard in small groups of same-race players talking about others.

I have been in pro locker rooms. Trust me on this.

Sometimes athletes get caught doing whatever and they issue apologies that we dare judge as true, false or somewhere in between.

The sense here is that Cooper is genuinely sorry – and no, not just because he got caught, which is the cute riddle with no rhyme the public lynch mob enjoys.

From reports, he actively apologized. None of it was staged. The team fined him, after consulting with the NFL – an entity besieged with players doing a lot of more egregious things (including Aaron Hernandez, Cooper and Tebow’s college teammate) than a guy going temporarily insane at a concert.

The team is also going to send him to sensitivity training, even placing him on leave as of Friday (we’ll probably see him back sometime between the first and second preseason games, when other storylines emerge).

That’s more than teammate Jason Peters got from the team for allegedly drag racing and leading police on a car chase prior to camp. It’s more in the way of ramifications against LeSean McCoy for a Twitter war with the mother of his son, or for the alleged incident last December which involved a woman who said he, and others, assaulted her on a party bus he rented – while he was supposed to be preparing to return from a concussion – to go from Philadelphia to New York City.

Cooper lists McCoy as his funniest teammate. Maybe he thought the star running back was kidding when he came out and said he couldn’t respect Cooper anymore and felt that he lost a friend.

Surely, McCoy is not alone. Cooper has a lot of damage control ahead of him. And it’s all with a target on his back for a few seconds of indiscretion.

He has already punished himself. No matter what he says or does, probably for the rest of his life, he will be branded as “that guy.” There will be protestors at away games. There will be boos whenever he makes a catch.

It’s a bad situation, but there is no need to make it worse.

They say that those without sin should throw the first stone, and yet stones are coming fast and furious at Riley Cooper – at least until the next pro athlete steals the headlines for something stupid they said or did.

No one knows this better than quarterback Michael Vick, who spent 21 months in jail for well-documented transgressions, only to come out and be voted “most courageous” by his mostly black teammates.

Vick, along with the ultra-religious Jason Avant, have been the first to forgive – without necessarily forgetting – in the case of Cooper.

As for me?

I still like Riley Cooper.

I just don’t like what he did.

I’m still in his corner.

And I’m not ready to throw in the towel.

This commentary also appeared at phillyphanatics.com

Related articles

The Ghost of Trayvon Martin

2 Replies

By GORDON GLANTZ

Gordonglantz50@gmail.com

@Managing2Edit

ImageGORDONVILLE – There may not be an American old enough to understand who does not have an opinion on the George Zimmerman verdict in the killing of Trayvon Martin, and now is not the time to mute discourse because we are “tired of it.”

After the verdict, I immediately tried to put myself in the place of a black American who is the parent of a teen, or pre-teen, and wondering what – in the wake of the not guilty verdict – I could possibly say to my child about simple things, like walking down the street to or from the store, that would make sense.

I came up empty.

Instead, Ifollowed a path to try and connect the dots and make sense of it.

I went back to the recent July 4th weekend, when the discussion with my friends for life drifted from each of the four major sports teams in town to the television show “Freaks and Geeks,” the critical acclaim of which could not push it past one season.

It sparked a spirited debate.

Were we more like the class-cutting, music-loving “freaks” or the un-athletic, oft-bullied “geeks?”

We probably weren’t as cool or free-spirited as the “freaks” or as pathetically nerdy and neurotic as the “geeks” (only one friend saw us that way, which may say more about how he sees himself) but it was an interesting drill.

The truth is that we were neither back in the day.

In the early 1980s – the setting of “Freaks and Geeks” — we were just kids.

I am no sociologist (my uncle Oscar was, though, if that counts), but my unscientific analysis views that time period like this: About 5 percent of the kids were too good to be true.  Angels on earth, they rarely got less than an A on their report cards, helped old ladies cross the street and spent their spare time volunteering at the hospital or church.

Another 5 percent were completely incorrigible devils who probably should have been locked up early to avoid the rush.

The rest of us, the other 90 percent, were – to varying degrees – somewhere in the middle.

If we were at-risk, it was for being most likely to fall through the cracks.

Temporarily lost, we usually managed to find ourselves later along life’s crazy path, but high school was a time to be a ghost.

We all had scrapes with disciplinarians in school, earning detentions and suspensions for silly transgressions like having a Sony Walkman in the hall or going up the down staircase, but we had no juvenile records or anything of that magnitude.

Like most, I wore the standard uniform of the time – beat-up jeans and one of my concert shirts (the ones where the sleeves came three-quarters of the way down the arm).

I had wild and crazy hair that, outside of school, often had a bandana buried in it (I couldn’t quite bring myself to try the Steve Van Zandt look).

For a mental picture, try a thinner Juan Epstein with a Led Zeppelin or Rush or Yes concert shirt.

We spent our weekend nights – and some days when attending school didn’t seem to make sense, for a variety of incongruent reasons – on the streets of Northeast Philly. You could find us  in the local record store, debating the merits of vinyl versus cassette (CDs were looming, but not yet in hand). Later at night, when the Roosevelt Mall closed, we would be ducking in and out of the shadows of back alleys and what passed for urban woods.

I don’t mean to over-romanticize it or make it sound like fodder for a Springsteen song. It was, more or less, pathetic.

Mostly, we staked out these concrete havens to drink beer – and other stuff – and then we dispersed, usually at or around whatever curfew was, and made our way home in separate directions.

I’m sure, while walking alone, we each appeared aimless; as if we were up to “no good.” Surely, people peered out of their windows with a suspicious eye. A few times, we each interfaced with police. It seemed like a stroke of bad luck if an officer – likely smelling alcohol (or something) – reminded us of the time of night and took down our names and addresses.

It likely never progressed beyond that because, well, these officers were trained professionals. They had “cop’s eyes,” and could tell if someone was really a menace to society or just another kid on his way home – more or less a ghost — on another Friday night.

There was one thing working in our favor, too. We all had white skin. That surely stopped any wannabe cops – any Charles Bronson types – from taking the law into their hands in what then was an all-white working class ’hood.

It may have saved our lives so that we can reflect, more than 30 years later, about whether we were “freaks” or “geeks” and laugh about it.

By contrast, we didn’t have the experience relayed by President Obama the other day about his teen years 35 years ago.

He, like us, lived to tell the tale.

Trayvon Martin was not so fortunate on the night of Feb. 26, 2012.

For him, there will be no chance for hindsight about a semi-misbegotten youth, a time when it is a natural instinct to challenge authority on some level and to have a fight-or-flight response that is not fully formed.

As we all know, Martin was in a townhouse development as an invited guest of a resident – the fiancé of his father – walking alone.

Like a lot of teens, he probably wanted to be somewhere else. And if he were somewhere else, he probably wouldn’t want to be there, either.

He was wearing the uniform of his generation – a hoodie — and dared to not walk on the sidewalk and cut between houses. And topping it off, he was not affected by the rain.

Consult any Psychology 101 textbook and it will tell how teens feel invincible from greater dangers than some water falling from the sky. A trained professional, not a wannabe cop like George Zimmerman, might have known that.

And let’s say, for the sheer sake of argument, the 17-year-old Martin was “up to no good.”

Is a sudden death sentence, without a trial, the proper punishment – in America or any other civilized nation – for crimes such as vandalism or petty theft?

Zimmerman, playing judge and jury, seemed to think so.

No one really knows exactly what happened right before Zimmerman shot Martin through the heart at close range, but we can deduce that he – thinking he was standing in as an officer of the law – was profiling Martin because of his skin color and perceived menacing appearance. For lack of a better term,  Zimmerman“stalked” him for it.

Martin felt a need to defend himself against a man who did not identify himself as a police officer. He got the better of Zimmerman in the ensuing physical struggle, and it cost him his life.

He was the one who was unarmed in the encounter. He was the one who ended up dead. Zimmerman is the one found not guilty.

Not guilty?

It may not have been second degree murder, but it sure seems like a clear-cut case of manslaughter.

This is a quirk in the system, not only judicial, but in workplaces and schoolyards and taverns.

Someone (Martin) is sufficiently baited by another (Zimmerman) and justifiably responds. They are then vilified, after the fact, because they had the temerity to adequately defend themselves.

Of all that was considered as court fodder – like Martin breaking some oft-bent rules in school and Zimmerman doing the same when he tussled with a cop and had a PFA filed against him by his former fiancé – the fact that Martin was whipping his profiler’s butt seemed, to me, not as relevant as the cause-and-effect of the original interaction between them.

Saying Zimmerman acted in self-defense and calling it a day, well, it just doesn’t fit.

And if it doesn’t fit, you can’t acquit.

But the jury did anyway, pretty much killing Trayvon Martin all over again, and turning him into a ghost who now haunts the nation as it sleeps.

Related articles