On Oct. 31, 2018, Derrick Rose scored a career-high 50 points and had the game-winning block against the Utah Jazz. The game came at a point in Rose’s career when few assumed he could be a capable player again, much less the former MVP he used to be. After being dumped by the Knicks, Cavaliers, and Jazz, Rose seemed destined to be out of the league before the age of 30.
Derrick Rose exposes our toxic role in the sports redemption narrative
The way Rose has been lauded during his renaissance season suggests that we need to fundamentally break the way we think about athletes.
Then, Tom Thibodeau gave Rose a chance with the Wolves. Somehow, Rose has not only managed to find a place in the league, but is having one of his best seasons ever. A season full of career highs and game winners; one in which he says he’s playing better than he did when he won MVP in 2010-11. The 50-point game essentially marked the start of Rose’s rebirth, the second stage of his basketball life, away from his history of injuries and doubts about his ability to play at the highest level of the sport.
In the process of celebrating Rose’s 50-point game that night, Wolves analyst Jim Petersen said:
“He’s got a lot of stuff going on off the court, and I’m not a judge, and I’m not a jury. And to my estimation, he’s not been convicted of anything. ... But what he is, he plays hard. He is a gutty basketball player.”
The “anything” in Petersen’s statement is an allusion to Rose’s 2016 civil trial, in which he and two other men were accused of raping a woman. Rose was eventually found not liable and the woman appealed the decision last November.
But Petersen wasn’t the only person who struggled to properly reconcile that accusation with Rose’s great game. Many outlets decided to side-step the issue entirely to praise the athlete, as a way to separate Rose’s personal life from his basketball career. The Ringer confronted the issue, and wrote about the difficulties of assessing Rose in the context of the case.
The New York Times’ Marc Stein celebrated Rose’s accomplishments that night, before later clarifying the next day he didn’t know whether the case belonged in the same conversation as Rose’s on-court achievements:
The generous conclusion from that night was that sports media and fans don’t know how to deal with a good athlete who has been accused of something terrible. Most of the time, the people who cover sports (including SB Nation) are tasked with filtering events — wins, losses, injuries, etc. — in terms of how they affect a player’s narrative, or team’s chase for a championship.
But when that filter is applied carelessly, serious accusations like sexual assault and domestic violence are reduced to “obstacles” that athletes have to overcome. Or, those issues are dismissed with the suggestion that sports exist in their own bubble, and those within it have no responsibility to deal with issues that are outside of that bubble.
If we’re being cynical — and more true to the world we live in — it’s more likely that the sports world doesn’t care enough about sexual assault and domestic violence to treat them with the care they deserve. And, it plays a deliberate role in making the conversation go away as quickly as possible, so that athletic achievement can be celebrated guilt-free.
The coverage of Rose’s night showed the lengths that many will go to avoid a moral reckoning with the athletes who they want to applaud. The importance of sports gets pushed so high that real-world situations are forced into the background, eventually becoming a footnote in the greater sports story, if not invisible altogether.
The cycle of conversation and redemption for problematic athletes is so rehearsed that it doesn’t even need the participation of the athlete to be fulfilled. It works like this:
This is a condemnation of a world where those who are tasked with telling the stories of athletes dismiss and erase anything that encroaches on its bubble
As soon as an athlete is accused, the victim is blamed for their accusal. If they’re a woman, they’re slut-shamed, and whatever the athlete is accused of is reduced to a “mistake”. A teachable moment. Then, it’s suggested that the athlete is as flawed as the rest of us, thus worthy of forgiveness, and that it would be hypocritical not to find forgiveness in our hearts. The argument goes that we should be able to separate the athlete from the person, which conveniently sets the stage for the athlete to be redeemed even as their transgressions are surfacing. As soon as the situation occurs, we’ve already begun moving on.
After the rash of arguments about the flawed nature of humans, all the athlete has to do is have a defining moment or series of games, after which it can be claimed that the athlete has finally overcome the error of their ways. If the athlete isn’t convicted of the crime that they were accused of, then that can be used as a shield to keep away any criticism, regardless of the details of the case or the well-documented issues with the justice system.
And that’s how we end up with Petersen saying, “And to my estimation, he’s not been convicted of anything ... But what he is, he plays hard.”
When that’s done, so is any concern about what the athlete was accused of, and the complexity of a good athlete possibly doing terrible things. The athlete is forever redeemed as long as they’re good at their sport.
Kobe Bryant is a classic example of this rebranding. After he went through the process of his 2004 rape case, he remade himself into “The Black Mamba”, a new identity he gave himself that played into his controversial image. He leaned into the villain role. Not only were the media and fans happy to ignore this link between his identity and the case, they helped him rewrite the story. He was successful in changing who he was publicly, because the sports world was eager to assist.
Rose didn’t take an active role in rewriting his story, but the machine went on without him. Now he’s at the permanently redeemed stage, where he is being championed to make the NBA All-Star Game (he’s the fan vote’s No. 2 guard in the West, behind Stephen Curry and ahead of James Harden) and profiles of him are being written without the word “rape” (though making sure to mention “adversity”).
This is not necessarily a condemnation of Rose, or a suggestion that Rose cannot have a life after his rape case. This is a condemnation of a world where those who are tasked with telling the stories of athletes dismiss and erase anything that encroaches on its bubble when given the chance. There’s no attempt to deal with these athletes as complex creatures, or even time to let those athletes reflect on what they’ve done.
Rather, we engage in a willful and engineered blindness. There’s no difficult conversation that might lead to a standard on what we’re willing to accept from our favorite athletes. What we have instead is an abdication of that personal responsibility to preserve comfort.
Rose doesn’t have to be condemned forever, and there are nuances in the case that make it difficult to process. Rose wasn’t found guilty, and the appeal didn’t go through. But to say there’s no space for the conversation about the details of his case — which included his admission that she never gave consent and did not even know what consent was — is a dubious position. If that space doesn’t exist, it’s because some people are more comfortable that way, not because it is an impossibility.
Transgressions don’t have to be mentioned every time we talk about an athlete, but they shouldn’t be dismissed immediately
In the same way that hiding behind the legal system can be a blinder to the complexities of a case, so is the idea an athlete can be separated from their person. It’s an open lie that is postured as intelligent argument.
The narrative of any athlete is built on the foundation of who they are as a person, or at least the person they’re presented to be. When Rose helps out the children of Chicago, there’s no argument about whether those stories should be reported. His perseverance over so many obstacles in his life, from environmental to personal, his own personality, are all used to engineer an emotional connection to Rose the athlete. There’s never a debate about whether those positive parts of his life should be separate from his achievements on the court. Entire ad campaigns are built from them.
Yet, when those elements of the athlete’s personal life are negative, we feel the need to pretend the athlete and the person are different people.
We need to do a better job of taking the discussion about the moral qualities of our favorite athletes seriously. What should be the consequences when they falter? What does true redemption look like if it can ever be achieved? What personal qualities should we separate from the athlete? Perhaps then there wouldn’t be so much discomfort around how we talk about players like Rose.
It’s because the general effort of sports fans and media has always been to hide from the complexity of athletes as people who are capable of good and bad that the present position on these issues is so embarrassing. Transgressions don’t have to be mentioned every time we talk about an athlete, but they shouldn’t be dismissed immediately to make way for a more a positive sports narrative.
Only when we stop being concerned with preserving a sanitized image of an athlete can we ever start having honest conversations about athletes like Rose. More importantly, and hopefully, we can signal to victims that what happened to them mattered. Otherwise, we’re actively creating a deceitful world in which we only pretend to care about the problems we routinely dismiss.
See More:
