Can the Colts have haloes attached to their helmets?

In comments to this post, Jess Nevins, who is a fan of the New England Stupid Patriots, takes exception to the fact that I used the word "evil" in reference to his team. Here is his comment, in full:

Yes, by all means, go Colts--let's root for the team whose coach is out there giving speeches against gay marriage and shilling for a poisonously homophobic organization. (Just do a search for "Tony Dungy" "gay marriage").

All Bill Belichick did was cheat at a game. (And run up the score). Tony Dungy is actively making life harder for millions of gay men and women. (Not to mention claiming that the homophobic organization is doing God's work, which by extension means that those who oppose that organization are doing the Devil's work).

I can understand hating the Patriots and rooting against them--but when you bandy around words like "evil," let's remember who the really bad people are.

[second comment]

Also--do some searching into Belichick's work with Jim Brown's Amer-I-Can Program, or his work with the Lazarus House Ministries.

Everyone's entitled to hate a team and individuals on that team. But, finally, *enough* with the "evil." Belichick may be boorish, asocial ,a philanderer, and a bad sport (although he's always been more gracious in defeat than Peyton Manning has been--Belichick never blames anyone else for his losses, which Manning can't say), but the man does good work outside of the realm of football, while Dungy is an activist for homophobia outside of football (and undoubtedly inside--if one of the Colts were gay, there's no way they could come out in that locker room environment). "Evil" is for God (if there is any such creature) to decide. But I know which one is the better person.

Well...lately I've noticed that more than a few commentators, as well as outright New England and/or Boston sports fans, seem utterly shocked that someone out there isn't swooning over the dreamy football feats of Brady-and-company. A few points in response:

:: This is, first and foremost, my blog, and I'll choose the words I use, thank you very much. If I want to use the word "evil" to describe Bill Belichick and the Patriots, I'll do just that.

:: That said, I will also assume that my readers are capable of differentiating "evil" used in the context of a sports team and "evil" used in other contexts. Now, I'm not sure if Jess is just a Patriots fan or if he's a fan of all the Boston-area sports teams, but I've noticed that some people are upset about the "evil" label being applied to the Patriots, where I don't recall ever seeing any such disapproval toward describing the New York Yankees as "the evil empire".

Of course, everybody knows that the Yankees are neither "evil" nor an "empire". Everybody recognizes that as a metaphor. That so many hyper-defensive Pats fans suddenly seem to be unable to recognize an over-the-top metaphor when it smacks them in the face when applied to their team strikes me as funny. Get a grip. More on sports metaphor in a moment, but....

:: Jess has been a sporadic reader of this blog for a long time, and he's been reading my over-the-top venting about the Patriots for an equally long time. I was calling the Patriots "evil" before it was "cool" to do so (here's my post from their Super Bowl win in 2004, if you don't believe me), and Jess knows this. I've also led off each season of football blathering in this space with a frank admission that what I'm doing is pure blathering, and to that point I've even taken to decorating my football posts with pictures of Homer Simpson. So Jess knows that he shouldn't take me seriously when I say that the Patriots are "evil". I suspect then that he's reacting to all the other commentators out there who have glommed onto the word -- such as the sanctimonious claptrap recently penned by Gregg Easterbrook on the subject. I've seen other Patriots fans reacting thusly to the "evil" characterization, and I never saw Yankees fans react that way. Or Cowboys fans, back in the 1990s -- in fact, they relished it. (Here's a profanity-laced post on another blog that illuminates that very point.) Tell a Yankees fan that their team is evil? They'll laugh at you. Same deal with a Cowboys fan. Tell a Pats fan that their team is evil? Break out the corkscrew, because here comes the whine.

:: Point-by-point comparisons of the off-the-field activities of the various personages involved are, for the purposes of this discussion, a waste of time. I'm not excusing Tony Dungy's stance on gay marriage, because I stand totally opposed to it (Dungy's stance, that is). But really -- since we're talking over-the-top language here, this is really all rather pointless, because except for extreme cases, sports fandom just doesn't work that way. I'll bet there are plenty of Indianapolis Colts fans who find Dungy's anti-gay views objectionable, but forgive them because he's their coach. That may be an ugly reality, but that's the reality. Arguing about it here seems odd. If, in the future, some turn of events transpired that brought Tony Dungy to the Patriots sidelines, would Jess then dump his investment of fandom in that team? Would I? Well, maybe he would -- we all have issues that are deal-breakers. I know that if the Bills are the team that gives Michael Vick his second chance in the NFL, I'm going to have a pretty hard time rooting for them.

:: This is perhaps a harder point to defend, but I can say with experience that one can hold some pretty dispiriting views on certain issues and still be a decent person. We once had a family friend who was a fine, fine friend indeed -- and he was also a terrible bigot, to the point where he stopped going to his favorite bar when the bar hired a black bartender. I don't like Dungy's stance on gays; it leaves a pretty bad taste in my mouth. But picking sports teams isn't like picking a political party, and we shouldn't act like it is.

:: From what I've read about the NFL and its general approach toward masculinity, I find it hard to believe that an openly gay player would be any more welcome in the Patriots locker room than any other. This is a serious problem with the NFL in general, not just with Tony Dungy.

:: No, Jess, you don't "know who the better person is", unless you know both of these guys personally and can assess their lives and their vices and their virtues as part of a whole package. And neither do I. This is just silly. My general impression is that Belichick is a creep. Yes, this is certainly colored by my being a Bills fan -- after all, I get to watch my team get clobbered by the guy twice a year, and he coached the Giants' D in Super Bowl XXV. But yes, his public persona is, to me, that of a creep. (And I'm not a complete homer here; I didn't like Gregg Williams when he was here, or Mike Mularkey, and Lawyer Milloy lost me with that stupid "You can't feed your family on Super Bowl rings" nonsense.)

:: I'm going to need an explanation someday about why it is that Barry Bonds's cheating is so horrible, so beyond the pale, that his Hall of Fame credentials are besmirched and that an entire era of baseball records needs to be asterisked at best and completely ignored at worst, while Bill Belichick's cheating is just "Oh, that whacky Bill, just looking for an edge!", and he pays his fine and the matter's closed.

:: On a more general point, objecting to the use of the word "evil" in a sports context seems a tad naive. Sport is founded on the entire notion of competition, and competition with rooting interests pretty much implies that for the spectators, there are "good guys" and "bad guys". And football amps this up to a very high degree. It's inherent in the game's very terminology: offense and defense. Aerial attack. Long bomb. Front lines. Shotgun formation. Blockers described as battering rams. Heavy hits. Quarterbacks as "generals", in "command". "Gridiron warriors". "Monsters of the Midway". "The Killer B's." "Steel curtain". The Bills' offense during the Super Bowl years, called the "K-gun".

Football's entire persona as a sport is steeped in terminology of conflict, war, and the like. Just watch any of those old NFL Films documentaries, with John Facenda's voiceovers droning on about the "gladiators of the gridiron" tumbling over the "frozen tundra" of the field, and you'll hear this kind of thing over and over. To take a sport like this, and then complain about the word "evil"? Come on, Pats fans.