His appearance on ‘The Dan Patrick Show’ might not have reached deeply into the complex heart of the Gregg Williams/New Orleans Saints bounty controversy, but one thing was made perfectly clear: if you go to the police with this, Charles Barkley is willing to murder you with a nail gun he bought at the Hardware Barn and drag your dead ass into a vacant building.
“You have to be a punk to snitch that out,” Barkley said. “That’s like giving a reporter an anonymous quote. That makes you a punk, if you do anonymous, but also, you don’t bring that out x amount of years later. I mean you don’t compete in it if you don’t want to be in it. But I’ve seen at least three or four well-known NFL players say all teams have bounties. So I’m glad they came to Gregg Williams’ defense. Because I’m pretty sure all teams have that.”
(via Pro Football Talk)
A few things shouldn’t be surprising here:
1. “Every team encourages and rewards you for injuring opposing players” is the NFL equivalent to baseball’s “everybody’s on steroids” … it’s unfortunate, shocking at first and completely true. These are sports, but they’re also businesses, and people do objectively sh*tty things to make sure their business thrives. Way of the world.
2. Every person who has ever done a job well and stopped doing it thinks they were one of the f**king Boondock Saints when they were in their prime. Has Charles Barkley personally injured someone to keep them from doing something he didn’t like in a grown-up version of a kids game? Of course he has.
“I’m a firm believer, if a guy shoots a three, that you knock his ass as far in the stands as you possibly can,” Barkley said. “We were getting beat by 30 or 40, I can’t remember, and the guy was shooting threes, running up and down the court, and I said, ‘Hey, we’ve got to hurt that guy right there.’”
Sports guys have always clung to the idea that if someone’s playing TOO well (scoring when they don’t need to score, stealing when they’re winning, whatever) you should hurt them physically to make them stop. Personally, I’m on the side that thinks you shouldn’t have to stand still and let the other guy catch up, and that instead of whining and taking out their aggression on you personally, the losing team should focus the energy that makes them want to slide into you with their spikes up into catching up and winning anyway. But hey, people who play sports have their code~, so what do I know?
The one thing we can all agree on is that Brett Favre deserved to be hurt for being annoying, right?
“I think Brett Favre was just annoying people at that point,” Barkley said. “He had been annoying people for the last five years of his career. I think players resent that. Were they trying to hurt him? I don’t believe that. Did they want to hit him hard? Of course they did. Because you have to admit, his last five years he was very annoying.”
I do have to admit that.
