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Rocker's fate rests with teammates
Posted: Wednesday January 19, 2000 12:15 PM
A month or so from now, on one bright morning at a training camp in Florida, a pitcher will walk into the locker room of the Atlanta Braves, and he will look around at the other players there and wonder: What will they say to me? Will they even acknowledge me? Can I stay here? And so will begin the very public, the very intriguing, the very excruciating season of John Rocker and his Atlanta Braves. Surely, the reality is that unless some of the Braves -- especially some of the blacks and Hispanics on the team -- dare choose to accept Rocker (if only on some slim, provisional level) then he must be finished as a ballplayer. For if he is ostracized, certainly he cannot remain on the team as a pariah. And if he cannot remain on the team, what other franchise would risk taking Rocker on? He can't go to Japan, either, can he now? Not with all those foreign players and those awful Asian women drivers. So the teammates of John Rocker hold his career in their hands -- or, one could say, in their hearts. The operative question is: Can they forgive a person who insulted them, who hurt them? We have, after all, countless examples of athletes who have acted in the most heinous fashion in the world at large, but who have still been accepted on their team. But the difference, of course, is that these offending players did not act against their teammates. They only beat up women or otherwise assaulted civilians. So we know that athletes can forgive their brethren when it is somebody else's ox who is gored. The Braves players have a more difficult choice. Presumably, Rocker will, in some fashion, try to construe the hateful remarks he made to Jeff Pearlman of Sports Illustrated. The words he spoke are themselves, of course, in no way defensible, nor can he repair the hurtful damage he has done. But it is possible that Rocker can at least seek to mitigate the sins of his tongue -- and his heart -- by pleading that he is not so racist, not so vile, not so hurtful, but instead that he is simply a showoff and a dimwit. This might be called the jackass defense. Rocker described to Pearlman, for example, about what it must be like to ride the subway to Shea Stadium. Obviously, he's never ridden a New York subway in his life. I'll bet he's never even walked through Times Square, where he purports to be so upset, hearing all those immigrants talk funny. Rocker simply sounds the same way he acted on the field -- like someone who enjoys being outrageous. He's either too dumb to know how to behave or too insensitive to know that words can hurt people. Or he is dumb and insensitive. That's my guess. But I don't know how cruel he truly is. I don't know the heart of John Rocker's darkness. I guarantee you, though, that his teammates do. They were with him all last season. They know whether John Rocker is foremost a jerk who blithely says racist things or a racist who truly believes monstrous things. I suppose that if the Braves decide that he's the lesser of those two evils they'll give him a chance. If John Rocker really believes what he said in that interview, though, it's unlikely that all the counseling and all the apologies will make any difference. Neither will it make any difference what the fans scream or what the writers write or what the politicians declare. John Rocker is never going to have it easy again -- and maybe he shouldn't. But it is his teammates on the Braves who will determine whether he gets that chance to pitch again and to be despised in public ... and I suspect they've already made up their minds. These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNN/SI.
The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
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