Atlanta Falcons wide receiver and master of social discourse Roddy White had the same lament as millions of people who were forced to deal with the incongruity of working on Labor Day. But instead of complaining to a friend, significant other or co-worker, White had Twitter as his forum and 170,000 followers as a sounding board.
Anytime a professional athlete complains about anything, people are all too eager to point out that they play a game for a living and, thus, should never have any negative feelings whatsoever. The lives of athletes are all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows, of course!
In one way, White had that coming. In another way, when a Twitter user who has that egg shell as his avatar tells you that football is a kids game, it’s hard to stay silent. Connect Four is a kid’s game. Playing football is a man’s game. White agrees.
Okay, he took it up a notch. You know that story, perhaps apocryphal, of how Abraham Lincoln would write an angry letter, then put it in his desk for a few hours so he could simmer down before eventually throwing it away? White must have not have heard it. I’d like to condemn him for putting down someone he doesn’t know and thinking anyone who doesn’t play football is a peasant, but I can’t, because, a) he spelled peasant correctly and that’s not easy, and b) when you anonymously go after someone on the Internet, you shouldn’t expect the Lincoln-Douglas debates to follow. But some other followers rightfully called out White for the peasant line. The wideout clarified his words.
Okay, that makes some sense, though I don’t know if peasant was the right word to use in this circumstance. Roddy?
Fair enough. White may get paid a lot, but he gets paid a lot because he’s one of the best in his field, a field that happens to provides high salaries for people of White’s caliber. Don’t hate the player, hate the game, as the bard once said.
And so, in the end, Roddy White apologized for poor word choice and clarified that he respects everyone, except those who don’t disrespect him. In doing so, he learned a valuable lesson of never using rash, overreactive terms on Twitter and we all lived happily ever after.
Correction: The most important thing we’ve learned is that Roddy White hasn’t learned a thing.
