Your call: What’s your take on hazing rituals in sports?
Cowboys first round draft pick Dez Bryant has refused to carry veteran teammate Roy Williams’ pads to the locker room, defying a time-honored NFL tradition in which rookies carry senior players’ equipment during training camp.
“I’m not doing it,” said Bryant. “I feel like I was drafted to play football, not carry another player’s pads.”
“If I was a free agent, it would still be the same thing. I just feel like I’m here to play football,” said the 24th overall pick. “I’m here to try to help win a championship, not carry someone’s pads. I’m saying that out of no disrespect to [anyone].”
Rookie hazing in sports in hardly a new phenomenon, and it takes part on all levels of athletics, from 14-year-olds playing amateur hockey to, in this case, elite-level professionals.
Chargers linebacker Shawne Merriman, who isn’t even a teammate of Bryant’s, weighed in about the situation via twitter with this gem of wisdom: “Dump his ass in the COLD TUB”.
As for Williams, now 28, he may very well have been forced to do the same thing when he broke into the league with the Detroit Lions back in 2004-05. But either way, the 21-year-old Bryant’s rejection of this age-old ritual has the NFL community buzzing today and, perhaps more significantly, it has jump-started the debate on the merits or pitfalls of rookie initation, or at least how far it should be taken.
There’s a long, fabled history of hazing in the sports world.
Some classic examples:
- NHL teams often go out for an absurdly expensive dinner and then leave the rookie to pay the entire bill (hopefully he goes on to have a long, prosperous career!)
Prime case study: In January of 2006, the Lightning went out for a steak dinner in Los Angeles; the total attendance that night was 21 players and five trainers. The final bill came to $24,000 (yes, many working people’s yearly salary), which was about $900 a person. Then-rookies Paul Ranger, Ryan Craig, Evgeny Artyukhin and Norm Milley were left with the tab and had to pay $6,000 EACH (thanks to the St. Petersburg Times for that tale).
- Often in baseball, when a rookie player hits his first major league home run, all of his teammates will ignore him completely when he gets back to the dugout, offering no high-fives or words of congratulations and instead greeting him with icy, stone-cold silence intended to degrade him for the worthless rookie garbage that he is (the second home run will be given wicked mad props, though)
More instances of hazing:
- duct-taping football players to the uprights (sometimes overnight)
- shaving off all body hair (and doing far worse things that can’t be mentioned in an article on this family-friendly website)
- forced excessive alcohol consumption, spanking, streaking, and general acts of utter and complete (albeit temporary) servitude, and one many of us may be familiar with: yes, I’m speaking of the Atomic wedgie (other suggestions or stories of personal and painful past experiences are welcome in the comments section below)
But while hazing rituals may come as a laugh to some, who consider them rites of passage that everyone has to go through, they are indeed serious business for others; in fact, there are numerous organizations and websites devoted strictly to eliminating initiation rituals from sport.
Critics want to rid athletics of the frat-boy mentality, arguing that it takes away from the enjoyment of the game, and that some more predatorial types tend to prey on weaker or less-athletically-inclined individuals, especially in youth sports where all types of body types and personalities are involved in the process.
The presence of initiation rituals is not just felt in sport; they are used frequently in high schools, sororities, fraternities and the military. They’ve been around forever – the question is whether they still belong in 2010.
Of course, it depends on the degree of the initiation. Making somebody eat seven soda crackers in a minute or consume a teaspoon or cinnamon is inarguably less traumatizing than anything involving a pair of handcuffs, a live goat and a spatula (I honestly don’t even know what that means). Clearly, there are innocent ways of going about this and there are not-so-innocent ways, so clearly it depends on the circumstances. Perhaps a full-on ban of initiation would be too far over-the-top and an unnecessary buzz-kill, while on the other end of the spectrum, an anything-goes approach could be dangerous.
Hazing rituals can be anything from name-calling to building sky-high man-pyramids to forced exposure to ridiculously cold temperatures. So what do you think? Is this simply harmless fun that everyone has to experience at some point, or is it an outdated, antiquated idea for which the time has passed? Is it silly or sadistic? It’s Your! Call; let us hear it, and please kindly refrain from any virtual-hazing of your online counterparts.
Matt Field
TenYards.com Sports Editor
