Who Cares About John Rocker Anyway?

Watching the 11 o’clock sports news the past month was enough to convince me that the world had gone mad. I saw a wide receiver in handcuffs charged with murder. I saw a middle linebacker in handcuffs charged with murder. I saw a sport utility vehicle that had been speeding on ice, the vehicle now a wreck, a linebacker paralyzed and later dying. I saw a Porsche cut in two, a basketball player dead. I saw all this, and I heard about wife beatings and DWIs and drug trafficking, and I kept seeing John Rocker this, John Rocker that, and John Rocker, John Rocker, John Rocker. And I thought of a dead mother and dead young men and the world gone mad, and I thought, “Who cares about John Rocker?”

I know rednecks. During deer season this winter, within a half-mile of my home, I could have walked up to a 25-year-old redneck hanging off a tree. He’d have been wearing camouflage thermals and a NASCAR ballcap. He’d have been peering down into a forest clearing, his rifle at the ready in case Bambi came by foraging for breakfast.

Had I been desperate for conversation, I could have talked to the great white hunter about good ol’ dogs and campfires and loading your own ammo. But I promise you, I would not have asked what he thought of women, homosexuals, AIDS, African Americans and the efficacy of immigration as it relates to the American dream.

I’m sorry, and maybe it’s unfair, but a 25-year-old redneck deer hunter’s world view doesn’t carry much weight with me.

So why, with the world flying apart, should I care about John Rocker’s adolescent World Wrestling Federation rantings in Sports Illustrated? Let me say it again. In the wake of Commissioner Bud Selig’s suspension and fine of Rocker, the question begging to be asked is: Who cares?

I made that judgment after reading the SI piece, but, really, wasn’t the picture enough? Rocker allowed the magazine to take a photograph of him there in his deer stand, wearing the camos and NASCAR cap, hefting the rifle, his narrowed eyes looking for a mean ol’ deer. Let me ask you, dear reader, if you saw a man in such a picture, would you think he had graduated summa cum laude with a Ph.D. in sociology? Or would you think, “Where’s a saber-toothed tiger when you need one?”

The only reason anyone knows what John Rocker said is because today’s insatiable media monster must be fed, and in the absence of substance we hurl into its maw a daily, even hourly, ration of uncensored half-thoughts uttered by celebrities. And so diminished is the coin of celebrity these days that a good left-handed relief pitcher can qualify if he persists in making a public fool of himself as Rocker did by taunting Mets fans during the National League Championship Series.

Turns out that he’d been a private fool all along, reportedly the least popular man in the Braves’ clubhouse, a reputation burnished the day his catcher, Eddie Perez, threw a ball into right field because first baseman Randall Simon was slow to cover the base on a dropped third strike. Rocker came to the clubhouse screaming--not because the Braves lost but because he, personally, had lost a personal reward, that day’s save.

Simon, an African American, later would be identified as the “fat monkey” of Rocker’s rant. And when Rocker used an ESPN interview to pass off the slur as harmless clubhouse repartee, Simon responded angrily: “I swear to you if he said that to my face I’d tear him up. . . . When I joke, I don’t try to make somebody feel bad. He knows, too. We don’t joke like that. He has no relationship with the black guys or the Latin guys on the team. He’s lying to try and cover himself. He has a lot of guts to say that.”

So in John Rocker we have a 25-year-old self-described redneck who is accused by a teammate of lying to cover a racist slur. And we’re paying attention to Rocker? The sad truth is, by suspending and fining him, baseball has legitimized Rocker, even made him an important figure. His childish outburst has been elevated to the level of thought. He has been punished as if he were a politically incorrect devil when he’s just a politically stupid redneck.

He constituted no threat to the game’s integrity; clubhouses are full of his bigoted likes. It can be argued that Major League Baseball itself is more guilty of racism than Rocker is. Two teams, the Indians and Braves, have institutionalized their racism by using names, symbols and rituals offensive to Native Americans.

Here’s how it should have gone down: Bud Selig reads the Sports Illustrated story and calls a news conference at which he says, “John Rocker is an adolescent punk and everyone who knows him knows it. We’ll ask him to stay after school three days next week. End of statement.”

Meanwhile, in Atlanta, the Braves players take Rocker into their clubhouse, set up a Kangaroo Court, hear the case and then call a news conference at which Randall Simon says, “As judge of this Kangaroo Court, I want America to know 1) John Rocker has been fined $50,000, to be divided equally among five Atlanta diversity-training offices; 2) Rocker has apologized individually to each of his teammates, 3) he will memorize Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” and 4) he now has a statement to make.”

Whereupon John Rocker comes to the microphone and says, “What a stupid $$& I am.”