Richard Sherman has gone mainstream.
The Seahawks star and now controversial figure held a press conference to address his post game rant this past Sunday and his strong disdain for the word “thug.”
“The only reason it bothers me is because it seems like it’s the accepted way of calling somebody the N-word nowadays. Because they know.”
Sherman made reference to a Vancouver Canucks hockey game he took in this weekend, and how all the participants were involved in a brawl.
Sherman hinted to the point that no one on that hockey rink was referenced to as a “thug.”
“There was a hockey game where they didn’t even play hockey, they just threw the puck aside and started fighting. I saw that, and said, ‘Oh man, I’m the thug? What’s going on here?'”
The Compton native really made his point when he made reference to the actual thugs he got to see growing up on a daily basis in one of the roughest neighborhoods in this fine country of ours.
“I know some ‘thugs,’ and they know I’m the furthest thing from a thug. I’ve fought that my whole life, just coming from where I’m coming from. Just because you hear Compton, you hear Watts, you hear cities like that, you just think ‘thug, he’s a gangster, he’s this, that, and the other,’ and then you hear Stanford, and they’re like, ‘oh man, that doesn’t even make sense, that’s an oxymoron.’
“You fight it for so long, and to have it come back up and people start to use it again, it’s frustrating.”
We as media memeber may want to take a look at the words and phrases we use to describe an action by an athlete that we simply may dislike.
Richard Sherman is no more of a thug for talking trash to Michael Crabtree, then the great Brett Favre was for this interaction with Warren Sapp.
The players aren’t the problem this time. Crabtree is going on with his off-season. The next time he see’s Sherman on the field, the trash talk will again commence.
It’s the media that might want to try and work on how we articulate our feelings and emotions during the excitement.