Colin Kaepernick, Tatted Up Freak

Oh no, dools, I've known it for a long time. It's just coming up again. Hadn't paid a whole lot of attention to Hall but I guess that's his new thing now.

 

I have one. It says, "I read War and Peace." It's a total panty-dropper.

 

Look, I don't want to pick a fight. You're easily one of my five favorite people here. But to say this is Hall's gimmick is silly, especially when you admit you've barely read him. The Wetzel thing was not very good, but I don't disagree with the sentiment. Moralizing is, at best, lazy, and at worst, hacky. I've said 100 times on this site that I think Wetzel is the best general columnist in the country, but that Spurrier piece was blah. Oh noes! Spurrier said something ungentlemanly!If Hall does have a gimmick, it's that haughty faux moralizing annoys him. When someone like Whitley writes about how "Golly, I sure don't like it when dudes kiss in public..." you've kind of lost the benefit of doubt with me. He's not a racist. Calling him one is almost as lazy as his own column. But Hall's exactly right in that the "Dutch Boy" quarterback thing is a total myth, one that should have died long before Joe Namath showed up on television trying to fondle Suzy Kolber because he was six whiskeys deep into his evening. (Kaepernick doesn't even drink, and there certainly isn't any evidence he was snorting mountains of cocaine like "Dutch Boy" Dan Marino was in college.) A much more intelligent take would have been something in the vein that Hall suggested. This is America now, folks. Time to embrace it. That's what Rick Reilly did with Iverson back when the whole world thought he was going to ruin the NBA with his scary tattoos and corn rows. But that would have required thinking outside the same tired box.

From my perspective, Hall's done more interesting work in the last 18 months than Whitley's done in the last 10 years. If your only exposure to him is these two columns, I can see why you think he makes a cheap living FISKing the sad, lazy columns of others, but that's hardly reality.

 

Fair enough. And likewise to you, I enjoy reading your takes. Maybe I will check out more of Hall, he has obviously built a following but I was only ever a casual reader of EDSBS.

I don't mean to defend Whitley's column. It was not good. But I do, like others, take issue with the racial angle here. Tattoos on white people are a thing now too.

 

Rick Reilly being used as an example of a columnist having an original take in a thread castigating a lazy, hackneyed column that reads like it was written in 5 minutes. Oh for the days of vintage Reilly.

And DD actually inspired me to look up that piece.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/inside_game/magazine/life_of_reilly/news/2001/05/22/life_of_reilly/

 

Are tattoos really that much more of a thing now than they were in 1995?

 

That's the kernel of truth in Whitley's column -- on NFL quarterbacks, I think they are, at least ones that are visible.

That was the first thing my wife noticed when Kaepernick started against the Bears. Not the 50-yard bomb to Kyle Williams, but the novella written on his left arm.

 

http://deadspin.com/5964564/who-is-this-david-whitley-the-racist-dicktroll-who-cant-stand-colin-kaepernicks-tattoos

 

I think we all noticed the tattoos right away. To pretend otherwise is to be disingenuous. It is a different look. Is it that different that RGIII's hair? Sub-in Griffin's braids and make the same prison references and the column would be essentially the same. What's lazy is trying to pretend playing quarterback represents some sort of moral place in our sports culture, and saying essentially "Dude looks like a thug from prison!" That doesn't have to be a reference to Kaepernick's blackness, because it's trying to allude to Kaepernick looking like a thug, white or black. Kaepernick is not a thug by any stretch. He was a great student, in fact, one who did not ever use drugs (supposedly) and decided to get Bible verses tattooed on his arms. If Tim Tebow had the entire book of Mathew on his arms, would Whitley make a bunch of prison references? Would he imply Tebow might appeal to thugs? I can't say so, but I very much doubt it. And the difference between Tebow and Kaepernick, as people you might want to admire personally, appears to be quite small.

Here is how we can boil that column down to a single sentence: Colin Kaepernick is different from my ideal of normal, and that kind of scares me.

 

Honestly the thing that bugs me most about the whole deal is finding out Whitley wrote that "icky men kissing icks me out" column. So I don't know if he's any kind of -ist, but he does seem like someone that the world has passed by.

 

I really didn't. And I really didn't notice other quarterbacks not having tattoos. I say this not to make myself sound superior; I'm pleading ignorance. I would have guessed 25 percent of NFL quarterbacks had tattoos visible while in their jerseys. I don't tend to pay attention to these things.

 

I don't think RG3's (or anyone else's) braids bother many, if any people. I've read many times that the "get off my lawn" crowd hates tattoos, cornrows, etc.

I don't know of any people who dislike an RG3's hair. I know many, including myself, who dislikes tats. I've tried to find someone who gives a shit about cornrows, and I've come up empty.