Leinart a party animal ... so what?
Posted: Wednesday, April 02, 2008 2:32 PM
Matt Leinart went to a party and did beer bongs with women. What’s the big deal?
NBC Sports’ Tom Curran assures me this is an embarrassment to Leinart, to the Arizona Cardinals, to the National Football League and maybe to the Republic, a horrible breach of contractual faith on the part of the quarterback that has his coach’s knickers in a sheepshank.
Tom’s a great reporter and a genuinely decent guy, and I’ll take his word for it. But the fact that a quarterback – or even a punter – went to a party and drank beer with young women doesn’t strike me as a scandal. It strikes me as normal.
Have we reached such a state of knee-jerk Puritanism that nobody is allowed to do anything? Joe Namath went to the Super Bowl with a blond on one arm, a brunette on the other and a redhead as an emergency backup, and he was a hero. Leinart goes to a party and he’s a disgusting creep.
Pictures from the party have surfaced on a Web site with the upstanding name of thedirty.com, which is reporting with undisguised delight that some of the women with whom Leinart was partying are not of legal drinking age, although they are of legal age for all other pursuits.
If that’s true, then Leinart is guilty of bad judgment and could be guilty of the crime of providing beer to minors. That’s a serious offense, and shows a lack of judgment. In today’s society, he ought to know that he’s got to card his party companions and not take their word when they say they’re of legal age.
There’s no indication he did anything but hang out and drink beer and get photographed on cell phone cams with young women who still had clothing covering their essential body parts. Even thedirty.com didn’t say he was drunk, which, as far as I know, is not yet a crime.
The Cardinals say that Leinart is a hard worker who doesn’t miss weight sessions and does overtime in the film room. His sin as a football player is that he wasn’t an All Pro from his first snap, but if I remember correctly, that was the rap on Eli Manning for 3½ of his first four years in the game.
We’re such hypocrites on all of this, and thedirty.com is a leading example of it. The site is loaded with ads for such products as stripper poles and makes its living with leering reports of celebrities behaving like normal humans. If it weren’t for cameras on cell phones and the Internet, the site wouldn’t exist. But because there are such things and because we’re a nation of people who can’t stand the thought that someone, somewhere is having fun, it’s a big deal.
It doesn’t matter if a crime was committed or not. It doesn’t matter if the guy is an exemplary teammate and a hard worker. It doesn’t matter if he visits sick kids in hospitals and is good to his mother. He drank beer and got photographed. He’s evil.
Give it up, people. Get over your obsession with celebrities and what they do in their free time. If you find that other people’s lives are more fascinating than your own, maybe it’s you that has the problem and not them.
Oh, yeah, and judge not lest ye be judged.
