TKO Creations

More sportyball topic today.  I’m sorry, but bear with me.  It’s really only tangentially related.

Long story shorter, there is a basketball player named Nick Young, who is (presumably still present tense as of this writing) engaged to Iggy Azalea.  He decided to (allegedly) cheat on his fiancee because hey, NBA player and all, and then brag about it to his teammate D’Angelo Russell, who in turn was recording the whole thing and it somehow magically went public.

Now, Young is all pissed off (demonstrating the value of a USC education in the process), and the entire narrative that I have read so far centers on how Russell betrayed his teammates’ trust, and how it’s going to cripple his ability to be anyone’s teammate in the future.

It’s not that this sentiment is wrong inherently.  I can promise you Russell didn’t record and leak that video confession to be a valiant defender of the social contract of engaged people.  He did it to be a dick, and on that score… well… mission accomplish buddy!  I hope “getting over” on Young was worth being a pariah in your chosen profession for the rest of your career.

But I want to talk about Young, and more specifically the “boys will be boys” mentality that allows our talking heads to completely gloss over or outright ignore Young’s stupidity in their rush to eviscerate Russell.

Those that do address Young’s idiocy effectively couch it in the idea that “he shouldn’t have been engaged as a young athlete” and not “he shouldn’t have been cheating on his fiancee.”  The idea is that athletes are surrounded by women throwing themselves at them at every opportunity, and the temptation is simply too great to ignore.

Sure, there is a sizable amount of women who are perfectly fine with one night stands and the desire to be bedded by someone “famous.”  I’m not going to demean them.  You girls do you (or whatever star studded man or woman decides you’re a good one-night stand).

But this idea that there’s just so many of those girls out there that no man could possibly resist the temptation basically reduces men into hormonal balls of instinct, and that lets people like Nick Young off the hook.

Once you “put a ring on it”, to borrow the vernacular, the “game” changes.  Nick Young wasn’t helpless.  He knew exactly what he was doing, and decided that his fiancee didn’t matter in the pursuit of short term pleasure.

He then had the unmitigated gall to brag about his sexual conquests to his teammates, which would be a fairly stupid thing to do even if he trusted them implicitly.  It again demonstrates a man who knows exactly what he is doing, knowing exactly who he is hurting, and simply doesn’t care.

Nick Young isn’t a victim.  This isn’t “boys will be boys.”  This is a shitty human being doing shitty things, and getting those secrets exposed by an equally shitty teammate.

It is more than possible to hate the player and hate the game.  And it’s due time our society starts doing so.

This entry was posted on April 1, 2016 at 10:38 am and is filed under Grumblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.