Put me in Coach! I’m ready to fight fight fight…cops
The Mahoning Valley HitMen are an indoor football team based in Ohio. Their incoming running back Maurice Clarett was arrested this morning after being maced by police. Seems Clarett had a number of loaded guns in his vehicle at the time, and was non-cooperative with officers. Without getting into a long drawn out discussion of why Clarett is a dunderhead, let’s discuss his new coach. Jim Terry, who also owns the team, had a reaction of: “I’ve seen far worse situations than this.” He added that the encounter Clarett had with the cops will not affect his status with the team. Way to go coach! Way to enable more potentially dangerous men to have no professional ramifications from wrongdoing! Sure we’ve all seen worse, but driving around with many loaded guns and getting into skirmishes with police is not exactly jaywalking.
What is Terry’s motivation here? On the cynical side, we might assume that Terry simply doesn’t care about people with dangerous weapons mixing it up with police, and wants a running back to gain lots of yards and score touchdowns. That might sound believable, but Clarett stinks these days last I heard. Then again, I suppose a team that is offering open tryouts to anyone could embrace a player that had at least one great college season, instead of a local bartender looking to live out his dream. (That sounds like a movie I heard of) On the hopeful side, maybe Terry thinks that by giving Clarett another chance, he can finally get his life sorted out. While the first idea is irresponsible, this one seems merely stupid. If a guy like Clarett is in trouble in his life, the place for him is with a therapist or doctor of mental health, not on some football field where anger and aggression can be rewarded. If society thinks a man like Clarett is worthy of being saved, we should be trying to get him emotional help, not ask him to carry a team of the Eastern Indoor Football League. Ironically, on the HitMen website, using the mouse to select different menu options produces a sound effect like a gunshot. I should mention that Clarett was originally tazered, but was wearing a bulletproof vest, so the police then had to mace him. Looks like Mo really was fixing to be a real hit-man. And, you know, his coach is cool with that.
