(*) will forever be the sitgmata next to his 2014 Super Bowl victory, right down there with the Black Sox World Series win of 1919 and Mark McGwires 70 home runs of 1998.
In every possible locution but the blunt word “guilty,” the National Football League has found Tom Brady and others on the New England Patriots guilty of illegally deflating footballs for the American Football Conference championship game against Indianapolis last January.
Apparently, deflated balls were more comfortable for the star New England Patriots’ quarterback.
Tom Brady is a cheater. Like Pete Rose. Like Shoeless Joe Jackson. Like Mark McGwire. Like Sammy Sosa. One bets on the game. One throws the game. One takes illegal, performance enhancing drugs. One uses illegally deflated footballs. Cheating is cheating. It’s irrelevant to “measure” the degree. We are reminded of the bon mot of the East European sage, Chofetz Chaim, who commented, “A 99 percent truth is a 100 percent lie.”
Notwithstanding the punishment meted out to Brady, his associates in crime and his team, the primary victims are the fans. They are the ones who put their trust in the integrity of the game and they are the ones who pay the freight.
Brady and his ilk once again have highlighted the already inflated (pun intended) importance of sports and especially of the money paid to sports stars in our culture. The least that fans have a right to expect against these distortions of value is honesty. Brady robbed the fans of this indispensable element of sports.
The anti-value that Brady represents is to win at all costs. Competition, of course, means that there will be and should be a winner and a loser. But not at all costs. The insouciance with which Brady has so far addressed this issue is evidence, if more evidence were needed, of the anti-value that drives him. It’s not a pretty sight.
It’s not pretty watching Pete Rose grovel, trying to get into baseball’s Hall of Fame that his statistics otherwise justify. Ditto for Mark McGwire. That degraded position is all that Tom Brady deserves now.
There’s always a lot of talk about ball players being role models for kids. Many of them are, as much by what they do off the field as on. Many players take pride in the charities they support. Then there’s the anti-role model. That’s the club, more than the New England Patriots, that Tom Brady belong to now.
Copyright © 2015 by the Intermountain Jewish News
