The Draw Play

It’s amazing how much some new information can shift your perspective.

Before last week, DeShaun Watson felt like an outlier of sorts. A predator amongst predators. A horrible villain, a monster, a giant snake visible to all of us that we cannot do anything about. A uniquely terrible man who did uniquely terrible things. But during the entire Watson scandal, one thing always bothered me. It bothered a lot of other people too. Why didn’t any of his peers ever seem to really condemn him?

Watson got hate from us, the fans. He got hate from the media. He got hate from the justice system in certain ways. Most people seemed to agree: Watson Bad. But most of his fellow players and peers stayed quiet, and many even defended him. I think many of us took it as a sign that the league is full of people who simply don’t think he did anything bad, or that many feared talking about it and making a point would result in professional or peer backlash. For those of us with that fear, it feels confirmed now. Watson may still be a uniquely terrible case of offender, but it now seems clear that this abuse and harassment of massage industry workers is probably much worse, and far more commonplace, than expected. His peers defended him because, well, it’s part of a culture. If Watson did something wrong, then a lot of them likely have too.

Justin Tucker was a golden boy until this season. He was probably the second surefire hall-of-fame kicker, a legend who broke through by being the most accurate long-distance leg in NFL history. One of the few NFL kickers to become a household name for good reasons. But this year the tables turned on his old ass. Tucker started shanking kicks at an alarming rate, and other kickers seemed to catch up to his methods, bringing the average made field goal distance much higher. Well, the world caught up to Tucker as he fades away. A sad way to go, but that’s how it rolls. Then last week we find out he’s a pervert creep.

A small paper called the Baltimore Banner investigated what seemed to be one of those local rumors and possibly found fire in the smoke. Tucker is now facing 9 different allegations of improper conduct. Nothing as extreme as some of Watson’s behavior, but certainly within the realm of harassment. Many of these allegations are from some time ago, around 2012-16ish. I find the allegations easy to believe for many of the same reasons I found Watson’s easy to believe. A described pattern of similar behavior from multiple different independent sources. I have always found the fact that Watson used so many different masseuses as my personal smoking gun that he was a creep. People tend to be loyal to those who serve them well. We go to the same local restaurants and hope for the same servers. Women find hairdressers who do a good job on them and follow them to the ends of the earth. Athletes tend to be loyal too. Loyal to their trainers, their dieticians, their childhood friends in their entourage. Tom Brady found that snake oil doctor guy and made a whole business with him. That was Tom’s guy. In the Netflix Quarterback show, we met Kirk Cousin’s sports doctor who worked on him every week. When you find someone that gives you the treatment that you respond best to, you fucking stick with that guy. If you are going and using a lot of different people for the same service…that’s a red flag the size of the star-spangled banner.

There is also the matter of the old rumors. After the story dropped, some people found some old tweets and old reddit posts suggesting that Tucker had a local reputation in the Baltimore massage community. It makes you wonder about every rumor and hushed tones story you hear about people behind the scenes, from locals in an industry who somehow know a guy who says stuff. Tucker took a pretty hardline defense of himself in response, but I’m not inclined to believe him. All this has done was mostly convince me that this is not a Watson and Tucker problem. It’s probably much, much worse. Probably a constant issue in the massage community. It’s sickening too, because it’s clearly just about power and perversion. There are places you can get your rocks off by workers all over the place. Robert Kraft probably has a good list if you are in the market. If you need to get jacked off go to those! Being a creep who touches someone just trying to do a professional athletic job makes you a loser. These rich guys have the money to get creepy and that makes the clinics look the other way a lot of the time and it’s terrible. Just a terrible environment that leads to shit like this. Tucker sucks, and I have zero doubt he’s not the only athlete with a reputation from multiple massage clinics. We just don’t know the others.

So fuck Justin Tucker I guess. Justin Fucker? Justin Tugger? I wonder if he gets cut now. I also wonder how much the Ravens knew.