I’ll admit it — I cringed and turned off the TV as soon as Richard Sherman began to blow up during his post-game interview on Sunday. The look of confusion and abject horror on Erin Andrew’s (a top 5 candidate for love of my life, making her pain feel like my pain) face as he yelled like a crazy person was too much to bear for me. I felt bad for her.
No matter how bad I felt for Andrews, I felt worse for Sherman. I knew the backlash was coming. I knew people were going to chastise him, rip him on Twitter, and kill him on talk shows for what he had said and done. Yelling into a camera after the biggest play of his career was one thing, but running around handing out sarcastic handshakes and throwing up choke signs was going to push him into the villain zone, and it was going to be ugly. (Sherman said later that the handshake was a legitimate gesture to say “Good game.” Bullshit. He knew what he was doing, he knew he was mocking Michael Crabtree, and he deserved to get smacked in the head like he did for being the cocky asshole that he was.)
But an amazing thing happened after the interview: it seemed, from as much as I could tell, that Sherman’s actions had overwhelming support. Sure, there were the naysayers calling Sherman a thug who disrespected the game, but many more people understood Sherman’s actions and words and actually wished they could see more of it. The consensus was this — if you want a player to play with his heart and hold nothing back, you can’t be upset when the passion overflows.
I finally watched the whole interview on Monday morning, after the initial reaction had blown over. I made sure to forget about the fact that he had made Andrews so uncomfortable, or that he called Michael Crabtree a sub-par receiver (as a Rams fan, I’ve carefully watched Crabtree play, and he is definitely not sub-par. Or maybe the Rams’ secondary sucks. Or both), or that he sounded like a man who just snorted 3 lines of cocaine and drank 7 cups of coffee to wash it down. I watched it through the eyes of a competitor, and I understood wholeheartedly.
To anyone who has ever played a game of pickup basketball and drained a three while whispering “splash” to your defender, played a game of Call of Duty while yelling “HOW DOES THAT FEEL, BITCH?!” to the 12-year-old on the other side of your mic, or simply let out a “Game…Blouses” as a Ping Pong ball destined to land in your opponents final cup flew through the air, they understood. Sometimes, you get caught up in the game. Sometimes, your passion is too much. And sometimes, you look like an asshole because of it. As Sherman wrote afterward “It was loud, it was in the moment, and it was just a small part of the person I am. I don’t want to be a villain, because I’m not a villainous person.” (Incidentally, as I’m sure most of you heard, Sherman is a Stanford graduate. He explained himself extremely eloquently after the fact, and I believe the fact that he did graduate from Stanford makes this even better. Someone that intelligent and that high profile, allowing himself to get caught up in the moment and just say whatever he was thinking? Amazing.)
Before we forget, this was the biggest game of the season, between two teams that absolutely hate each other, and Sherman had just made the game winning play. And the play was a remarkable one at that. If I’m allowed to run around celebrating and talking shit after draining a three to make the score of my pickup game at the park 7-3, I’m pretty sure a guy who made an amazing, ridiculous, game-ending play to send his team to the Superbowl should be allowed to celebrate in whatever way he sees fit. It was perfect. Except for the Erin Andrews thing; leave her out of it next time.
Image by kcconfidential
