Saw*Kick Media

Official DreamBoat Brady Quinn got rocked at sea for the first time in his pro career this past week when a story broke that on New Year’s Eve he and some friends were caught in the middle of a shouting match where slurs were let loose at a gay man.

In the days that followed there was much public discourse – including stories on several national media outlets – about the DreamBoat’s choices that night. And, even though my first reaction is to protect a Browns player at all costs, I appreciate that this was a valuable learning opportunity for Quinn.

While the situation was unfortunate, it doesn’t seem to be completely detrimental. Quinn and the Browns eventually stepped forward and denied all the allegations and the man who made the original claims did so while handcuffed for certain inequities in his ability to follow the law. That doesn’t mean we should take the allegations lightly: If Quinn is hurling insults at people because of their sexuality then he should be reprimanded. On the other hand, he might love gay culture and have his own set of “Will and Grace” DVDs. I am not absolving Quinn for this whole thing and I’m certainly not condemning him. On the probability scale the story seems to slant 53 percent toward the story being false, but most statistics, even ones that I just make up for column fodder, have a five percent margin of error. Still, there are three solid lessons that Quinn and any high profile athlete can take from this mess.

Lesson 1: Brady needs to protect himself

Maybe Quinn was out having a nice dinner with his family on New Year’s. Maybe he was out doing his best John Rocker impression. Either way, he shouldn’t have been out on New Year’s.

I know, I know, it doesn’t seem fair, right? The guy is making more money than me (can you believe that?) and is my 2007 pick and 2008 favorite for DreamBoat of the year, yet I don’t think he should go out on New Year’s. Still, I won’t back down on that one. When I played high school football we had a couple of games a year that were on Saturdays, so our coach would give us a 10:00 p.m. curfew on Friday. Did that suck – well, no, because it’s not like I had a date or anything – but the point he made remains: Nothing good happens when people with a public profile go out at night.

If Quinn wants to make commercials and throw himself into the national spotlight then he has to make certain sacrifices. Even though he played only one game this season, an argument can be made that he is one of the five best-known athletes in Ohio. In fact, he passes the Clare test (asking my Resident Lady Friend if she recognizes an athlete) with flying colors while she asked who that doofy looking quarterback with Browns helmet was at the Pro Bowl.

I’m not saying Quinn needs to hide away, I’m just saying that we all learned a valuable lesson about what will happen to a famous athlete in today’s world: He will draw attention and it’s not necessarily going to be all signing breasts and high-fiving frat guys.

Lesson 2: Sensationalist journalism has overtaken the teacher-principal-mom-dad chain of discipline

Before the Browns or Quinn got a chance to respond to the allegations of a drunken man who was essentially arrested for disorderly conduct the story came out nationally under a headline saying something along the lines of, Browns Quinn Probably Called Someone a Dirty Word. This essentially skips right from the teacher to the dad.

Here’s what I mean. When I was growing up there were different levels of punishment when you acted a fool. Let’s take the example of disruptive behavior in the classroom – the childhood level equal to Brady acting silly at a bar. When I acted up in class the fist level was the teacher, who could essentially cut me off by threatening less recess time or to take the step to the next disciplinary level, the principal. Once at the principal’s office the chain continued. He could either continue my school discipline or elect to tell my mother – the first real level of threat. After all, school was going to be boring no matter what, but the threat of messing with my home life was serious. If and when my transgressions escalated to the point where my mother heard about them, the final threat loomed overhead: The backhand of God that my father carried on his person. This final threat was used very rarely, but its one-time use was so effective that its threat remains locked into my mind two decades later.

What does all this have to do with Brady Quinn? Well, with the sensationalism around this story the proper checks and balances were never done. Pulling Heather’s hair on the playground wasn’t worth telling my father about because he only needed to know about the big things (the time Nick and I got caught pulling down all the girls’ skirts at our Christian school is a good example of a ‘big thing’). With the school-to-home system of checks and balances there was some level of checking off how big of a deal we were dealing with before the backhand of God came into play.

Quinn never got that chance. This story came up as pure allegation and before he could react the backhand of society hand come down across him. While the story wasn’t firm enough to hold on forever, go find it in some national publications and see the message boards. Quinn is already fighting a public battle over this at the level of national scrutiny, but there were no stops in the principal’s office or talking tos from his mother.

This is the problem with what I have recently dubbed the ESPN Generation: the stories come flying out and go to print with notes like, ‘Quinn was unavailable for comment’ and someone’s name catches a backhand before there is any real sense of what happened.
I’m not saying Brady is innocent or guilty. The fact of the matter is I don’t know him and I don’t know the situation. But when a story is filled with allegations from a man who was arrested it seems hard to justify running it.

Lesson 3: The Browns need to do a background check on the people around Quinn

Have you read the new book on LeBron James and the Cavs by Terry Pluto and Brian Windhorst? I won’t mention its name here because I cannot in good faith commend you to read it (it is rife with spelling and grammatical errors as well as a repetitious nature that really made me lose respect for these two writers), but they did a fine job showing how the Cavs checked the people around LeBron early in owner Dan Gilbert’s tenure. The fact of the matter is LeBron is allowed to travel with a posse – and some of those guys have official jobs with the team. They are kept around to keep LeBron centered and happy. But they are also guys who understand the team’s agenda. Gilbert and Co. didn’t just grab five of LeBron’s friends, hand them some cash and welcome them aboard. They checked into their character and ensured that these guys understood that LeBron’s job No. 1 was to be the world’s best basketball player and whatever they could do to facilitate that would be appreciated.

Again, I’m not sure what type of people were around Quinn on NYE – he says family and close friends – but the Browns should know. If he is there future – and if you saw the Pro Bowl you might think that more now than ever – they need to have a good beat on the people around him so when they release a statement saying they believe in his character it’s because they actually believe in his character. Just a thought.

-MoneyMike will retract all nice things said about The DreamBoat if he finds out that he regularly hurls slurs at gays and lesbians. The gays and lesbians have long been friends to MoneyMike, and he would side with them over anyone except the donut baker’s union (because he’s still a fat kid at heart).

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