If I had my way, I’d be oblivious to everything that happens in the world of the National Football League, including the announcement this week of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s four-game suspension for his alleged role in Deflategate and the Patriots’ subsequent appeal. But I have an 11-year-old son who every morning on rising checks the scores of whatever game was played the night prior, and there is no game he loves more than football.

It’s part of my parental responsibility to help him understand the importance of honesty and justice. Crimes and punishments are supposed to add up. I try to engage him in the news so that he understands that a man who runs from a traffic stop involving a broken taillight does not deserve to die in a rain of bullets fired by a police officer. But because my son undeniably cares most about sports, professional athletes offer the ultimate looking glass into crime and punishment for him. And the glass is so smeared with vengeance, denial and arrogance that I’m having trouble locating what justice is supposed to look like in all the murk – including the emphasis on shame as a form of punishment.

According to the parenting books I’ve dutifully read, youth sports are full of teachable moments, lessons about teamwork and sportsmanship and understanding the strength and power of his body and the joy of achievement. Otherwise I wouldn’t be driving him to Augusta as I did Thursday, to sit in a cold rink on a warm spring evening while three generations of the locally famous Rousseaus from Lewiston drilled him on how to get up off the ice quickly after a fall, or spending my Saturday night sitting on the sidelines of a Little League game.

I don’t want my son to be a cheater (allegedly Tom Brady) or a beater (Ray Rice). He’s sophisticated enough to understand the connection between Rice and Brady’s suspension. The outcry over Rice’s initial punishment for hitting his then-fiance Janay Palmer – a two-game suspension compared with Brady’s four – was an embarrassment to the NFL and has influenced Commissioner Roger Godell’s attempts to administer more meaningful punishments. But it still looks as though maybe, possibly, “probably” cheating (I’m in the probably camp) is worse than knocking a woman one presumably loves to the ground and then dragging her body out of an elevator. And that the people who are in charge of administering justice, in this case in the arena of national sports, but also elsewhere in America, have a strange and skewed value system.

Before the release of the Wells report, the New York Times asked four experts with NFL experience and/or legal qualifications what they thought the punishment for Brady would be. One said suspension was a “possibility,” another suggested he might be suspended for a “game or two,” but none expected a sentence of four games. It’s safe to say that there was widespread surprise, and not just in Boston, where the love of a local sports franchise is as passionate as any poetry ever penned.

My first reaction to the four-game ruling was a shrug. So Brady will lose $2 million. If I had the Brady family’s money – in 2014 Forbes estimated his model wife, Gisele Bundchen, made $47 million in a 12-month period – I’d put my No. 12 jersey in the closet and head off to Brazil for some beach time this fall. But the Super Bowl winner indicated with his appeal that this is not an option; he cares too much about his reputation to accept the punishment being meted out for a cheater.

As my boss reminded me, Brady faces the likelihood of being booed in every stadium he enters this coming football season, no matter what the outcome of the appeal is. That’s the court of public opinion, hissing shame on a great athlete. Shaming has long been a weapon of outrage. In the old days, we had stockades in village squares. Now we have Twitter hashtags (take your pick, #tombradycheats or #bradycheats). Regardless of whether you take the side of the Wells report or the Patriots’ rebuttal, each astonishing in their level of detail, we can agree that Brady is a great athlete, can’t we? That he didn’t need to cheat – if he did – in order to win, but that he does prefer his footballs to be inflated to a level of 12.5 psi?

The comedy contained within both report and rebuttal is highly entertaining – bless the Laurel and Hardy of sports equipment, Patriots locker room attendant Jim McNally and equipment assistant John Jastremski, for coining the evocative phrase “Dorito dink” and revealing that grown men use “OMG” in texts to each other and like to mock their almost absurdly blessed boss. None of it offers concrete proof of anything but Brady being fussy about the footballs he throws.

It definitely provides a distraction. Every time I looked up at the television at the Ice Vault in Augusta on Thursday night, the coverage was wall-to-wall Patriots and Tom Brady, the talking heads parsing those texts, debating the content of those unheard phone calls and the value of signed memorabilia.

But what of far more serious issues, including the NFL’s neglect of the concussion issue and the pervasive attitudes and culture that leads steroid use, domestic violence, rape and even murder to be part of the playbooks of athletes who have, seemingly, every advantage in the world offered to them? A partial list: Alex Rodriguez, Lance Armstrong, Adrian Peterson and Aaron Hernandez.

When we arrived home from the hockey clinic, I went to the shelf in the laundry room where I had stashed my son’s Ray Rice jersey. For a Mainer, my child is an outlier, a devout Baltimore Ravens fan (his father is from Charm City). He grudgingly acknowledges Brady’s greatness, but he’d never wear a Brady jersey. He’d been proudly wearing the purple No. 27 Rice shirt since he got it for Christmas the year the Ravens won the Super Bowl. In September, when TMZ released the videotape from the elevator of Rice and Palmer, now his wife, I made my son watch it. Not because I wanted him to witness an act of violence, but because I wanted him to understand how easily crimes can be hidden without cameras or eyewitnesses. How fan support can cloud judgment and impact justice. I wanted him to understand why his favorite running back did not deserve to be running for the Ravens anymore. Or to have his name on my innocent child’s back.

Not that my son is without fault. But his crimes mostly involve things like ignored homework, with no screen time as punishment. That one time he helped himself to $20 from my wallet and bought a stuffed animal, I marched him back to the store and made him return it. He wept as he said goodbye to a stuffed dog he’d felt entitled to. He was 7, it wasn’t exactly juvie, but that and reparations in the form of housework, seemed suitable punishment.

After watching the elevator tape, my son said he no longer wanted to wear the Rice jersey. It was blurry, but he was clear.

I could have tossed the Ravens jersey, but instead I put it on that shelf. Our individual and collective memories are short. By 2017, I wager more people will remember Brady as a cheater, unproven or not, than will remember the names of South Carolina police officer Michael Slager or Walter Scott, the unarmed black man he shot in that traffic stop. I might need that Rice jersey to remind my son that without strong voices on the side of good, punishments often don’t suit the crime. I’ll save the story of O.J. Simpson for later.

 

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