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Stop Fussing Over That Belichick Kiss

I’ve said it before: My interest in football is minimal, though my attention perks up a bit when my hometown New England Patriots play the Super Bowl. My focus usually turns to how people behave in the heat of the moment. Whether their team wins or loses, people latch on to the supremely stupid after the big game.

Mood music:

Sometimes Patriots fans are the worst. After the team lost the Super Bowl a couple years ago, people started picking on quarterback Tom Brady’s wife, supermodel Gisele Bündchen. It happened again last year, after the Pats lost in the playoffs. The suggestion is always that she’s somehow turned Brady into a sissy. Fortunately, from what I can tell, the Pats fans who do this are a small minority.

This time, the most glaring acts of stupidity are in the media. Case in point: the reaction to Patriots coach Bill Belichick getting a smooch from his daughter. News sites went wild about the “unusual” kiss.

Bill Belichick Kisses Daughter After Winning Super Bowl
Photo by Matt Slocum/AP Photo

TotalProSports.com expressed its horror this way:

After winning Super Bowl 49, passions were running high, and the Patriots coach kissed like no one was watching. Only there were a ton of people watching because it was the Super Bowl. And the person he kissed was his daughter, Amanda. But there was SO MUCH passion in that kiss.

The Stir even brought in a family physician to asses the situation. The reaction of Dr. Deborah Gilboa:

I think this is a reach for scandal … Being able to show affection between adult parents and their adult kids is lovely, and it’s great if Bill Belichick has such a positive relationship with his daughter.

Nothing to see here, right? But Stir writer Jenny Erikson couldn’t let it go:

OK … in theory maybe it’s a good idea that parents and their adult children are so close that they kiss on the mouth … but I just can’t see it. I have a very close relationship with my own dad, and kiss him on the cheek almost every time we greet and say goodbye, but on the lips? Never. Not even a little bit. It kind of makes me uncomfortable even writing this paragraph.

She’s entitled to that opinion, of course. I even share her preference for planting parental kisses on the cheek. But she’s making something out of nothing like the others who were scandalized by this.

This father-daughter kiss was no big deal. Parents and adult kids kiss each other on the lips all the time. I don’t see any tongue jamming in that photo. Do you? That would have been a different story altogether.

Tom Brady and his mom also kissed on the lips after the win, but no one is making a big deal out of that. Nor should they.

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David J. Phillip/AP

 

Give it a rest, folks.

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The Jokes About Aaron Hernandez Are Sad

Update April 15, 2015: Hernandez has been convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole.

A lot of jokes are making the rounds after the arrest of former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez on first-degree murder charges. It’s human nature to do this sort of thing. But it’s also sad.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/1e3m_T-NMOs

One of the more popular jokes had to do with Hernandez switching from tight end to wide receiver, a reference to prison rape.

This is how we can get when the mighty fall. In Hernandez’s case, we have a football star making millions of dollars, living in a mansion and seemingly having life by the balls, only to piss it away by allegedly murdering someone. Hernandez is charged with first-degree murder and faces five firearms charges. According to prosecutors, he drove his friend, 27-year-old Odin Lloyd, to an industrial park in the middle of the night and orchestrated Lloyd’s murder. Hernandez was said to be enraged after a fight at a nightclub three nights earlier.

If he did indeed murder his friend, Hernandez should suffer the consequences, possibly by spending the rest of his life in prison. That’s as it should be. But there’s a lot about this case we don’t have the details on, and we seem to forget that in America, we are innocent until proven guilty.

Life is hard and we all stumble through it, no matter how successful we are. So when someone who has achieved greater success than the rest of us goes down in flames, we tend to find comfort in it.

What we often forget is that we’re all constantly inches away from that one bad decision that can lead us to ruin. I’ve made a lot of bad decisions in life and paid for them all, though it has almost always involved me hurting myself. Some of us abuse and kill ourselves. Others kill someone else.

Of course, it takes a special kind of bad to snuff out someone else’s life, and when that person is atop the world as Hernandez, the shock and disappointment are sharper. No one likes to see their heroes fall. So the harsh judgments come, wrapped in bad jokes.

It’s a shame that we get this way.

I won’t lie: I’ve made the jokes when the mighty have fallen. I’ve laughed at a lot of them when made by others. When Paris Hilton faced jail time a few years ago, a lot of similar prison jokes were made and I chuckled at them.

But more recently, I’ve tried to be better than that. Maybe that makes me a little more self-righteous about the Hernandez jokes than I should be. But there it is.

Ultimately, my hope is simply that those hurt by this case — friends and family of Hernandez and Lloyd — will get the help and support they need in what must be an exceedingly difficult time.

Aaron Hernandez