Time for Young to quit being a knucklehead
Full of excuses again, Titans QB needs to learn how to carry responsibility
OPINION
By Johnette Howard
NBCSports.com
updated 6:27 p.m. ET June 15, 2010
 | Johnette Howard |
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Did you ever get the feeling when athletes screw up that they’re all working from the same crisis management playbook, and you’re at the point now where you can almost mouth the dialogue along with them like someone who’s watching Bull Durham or Annie Hall for the 1,423rd time? When umpire Tim Joyce painfully confessed to messing up Armando Gallaragga’s perfect game – now that was an unscripted apology. When Tennessee Titans quarterback Vince Young’s resorted Monday to some familiar old standbys to explain why he swung at a man in a Dallas strip club sometime after 3 a.m. on Sunday?
Not so much.
In a perfect world, when a 26-year-old grown-up like Young says he touched off a brief but unnerving brawl that was captured on video by the strip club’s security camera — all because the man flashed Young an upside down Hook ‘em Horns hand sign that Young took as an unpardonable slight against his alma mater, the University of Texas — Young and anyone else who tried to explain away what he did would be laughed out of the room as ridiculous.
Even for Young, who has a short but tortured history of lukewarm apologies in his increasingly oddball NFL career, the statement he gave when he emerged at the Tennessee Titans minicamp on Monday was a notable performance.
First he went for the “Expression of Contrition” move — “It was a bad decision,” he said twice — and quickly moved on to the “Hanging With the Wrong Crowd” alibi: “At first I was going to lay down in my hotel, and somebody talked me into [going to the strip club].” Then he tried to finish strong with the Plea for Understanding, saying he prayed to God that “[NFL commissioner] Roger Goodell don’t come hard at me.”
Nice try, but Young’s last appeal might’ve been more persuasive if he hadn’t pre-empted what little Goodell is inclined to publicly say on the matter by issuing his own summary verdict of the fight: “It’s in the past…It is what it is”, and this cringer:
“I’m letting my legal folks handle it.”
Now, this is just an educated guess, but the sight of the Titans’ franchise quarterback standing in front of the cameras and invoking his personal squadron of crackerjack legal minds rather than, say, the air-tight pass protection offered by his left tackle had to be another unpalatable sight for Titans coach Jeff Fisher and Bud Adams, the Titans owner who ordered Young to be put back in the starting lineup last season with great success.
Young’s importance to the team probably explains why even Fisher, a normally reasonable man, invoked another dog-eared old excuse — the Maturity Defense — for Young on Monday — as in, “This is all part of [Young] becoming a leader.”
Actually, it’s not.
What part of knowing you shouldn't take a swing at a guy in a strip club if you're a franchise NFL quarterback (or anyone, for that matter) is so difficult for Young to get?
And what part of Goodell’s reputation as the Law & Order commissioner was so hard for Young to appreciate before he started the brawl?
Young is a good, potentially great player who has consistently had a hard time adjusting to the status and responsibility of being an NFL quarterback and team cornerstone that other people are depending upon. That’s the real story here. Candor is needed, not covering up his tracks.
It should be noted there are a lot of anecdotes about laudable things Young has done, like going back to Texas to finish his degree, or taking care of the children of former Titans’ teammate Steve McNair after McNair was murdered by a woman he was having an extramarital affair with. And nothing Young has ever done has risen even close to the level of a serious criminal allegation.
But there is, at minimum, a worrisome knucklehead factor in play with Young that’s often a predictor of more trouble to come.
He’s not just a knucklehead. He’s a recidivist knucklehead.
And as these incidents go, Young was lucky. The fight could’ve easily escalated into something tragic if anyone involved had been inclined to pull a gun, as someone did at the Las Vegas club where PacMan Jones and his crew were partying a few years ago. When a brawl broke out there, a bouncer ended up taking a bullet in the spine and is now paralyzed for life.
Young has had an eventful career since joining the NFL after his junior season at Texas. He immediately had to beat back an embarrassing story about taking the Wonderlic intelligence test before the NFL draft and scoring a mortifying 6 on a scale of 50 in his first attempt. He later told NFL.com that he considering retiring after his rookie season because football “wasn’t fun anymore,” but credited a stronger inner circle for helping him endure.
"Now I can handle this kind of stuff without it making me want to give up football,” Young said. “I learned that 24/7 I'm representing the Titans and, especially, the kids all over I am trying to influence. I look at my man Michael Vick. I learned from that. I look at PacMan [Jones]. I learned from that.”
Or not.
In May of 2008, Young joined the long list of internet casualties when he was photographed shirtless and drinking straight from a liquor bottle at one of at least three birthday parties he threw for himself in a three-day span.
After the Titans season opener in 2008, he was accused of quitting on the team in mid-game, skipped a scheduled MRI the next day, and sparked a four-hour police manhunt that evening after leaving his home with a gun. In a police report obtained and reported by The City Paper of Nashville, Fisher was quoted as telling a police investigator that a Titans’ team psychologist who had visited with Young earlier in the day told him Young had mentioned suicide several times. Young denied it.
Now this.
Shoving a guy in a strip club doesn’t make Young the worst guy the NFL has ever seen. But it would be nice if Young could somehow skip the sideshows and settle for being the quarterback and good man he’s shown glimpses of being.
No excuses necessary.
Johnette Howard is a New York-based writer who has worked for Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post, and Newsday. She is the author of, "The Rivals: Chris Evert vs. Martina Navratilova" (Broadway Books).
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