Tuesday, September 9, 2014

A Short Meditation on Ray Rice, or, Georgia on My Mind

There was a lot of blather out there today about TMZ's release of the elevator video showing Baltimore Ravens running back -- now, former Ravens running back -- Ray Rice beating his then-girlfriend-now-wife Janay, which has led to the Ravens cutting him from the team and the NFL suspending him indefinitely.  Lots of people outraged that the NFL was so soft on him initially, giving him only a two-game suspension, and just as many people outraged at the outrage, because people should have been outraged before ("why did they need to see the video?" goes the argument).  Lots of questions about whether or not the NFL actually saw that video before rendering its suspension, etc. etc. 

Somehow, amid the blather, a thought came to me: what would Georgia think? 

ESPN's Colin Cowherd made a point on his show today that the NFL is one of many big-money, Good-Ole-Boy clubs, and that, like a lot of such institutions, they are real blind when it comes to women.  They had no clue how badly they blew the Rice matter this summer.  Maybe it was thinking about those comments that the one female owner in NFL history popped into my head: Georgia Frontiere, the late owner of the Rams, who died in 2008. 

Frontiere inherited ownership of the Rams, who were in Los Angeles, when her sixth husband, Carroll Rosenbloom, died in a swimming accident in 1979.  (Side note: When she married Rosenbloom in 1966, he owned the Baltimore Colts; when Robert Irsay bought the Rams, the two men traded franchises.) She received a ton of criticism in her first few years as owner; she was fairly high-profile, and it was pretty clear that the Good Ole Boys didn't like her.  It didn't help that not too long after she attained control of the team, she fired Rosenbloom's son from his top position in the organization -- he'd been groomed to take over the team, even though the will gave it to Georgia -- and by the mid-nineties, moved the team from L.A.  to her home town of St. Louis.  (The team actually moved out of the L.A. Coliseum to Anaheim about 1980 or 81; that deal had been done by Rosenbloom before he died.)  She often could be found down on the field hugging her players, and took crap for it.  (When the cabbage patch kids craze hit, she bought a whole, um, batch of them for her players to give to their children. I'm having a hard time seeing Wellington Mara, the late co-owner of the Giants and a pretty well-loved and respected man, doing that.) 

She made an interesting statement in her first press conference as Rams owner:

"There are some who feel there are two different kinds of people -- humans and women." 

Frontiere was not a beloved owner, but like a lot of owners, especially those who move their teams -- like Irsay, who packed up his organization in the middle of the night to move from Baltimore to Indianapolis -- she had supporters as well as detractors.   She was familiar with the spotlight (she'd been a chorus girl a long time before owning the Rams), but she was not necessarily any more visible an owner as some of the wave of Good Ole Boys who joined the club after she was in. (Jerry Jones comes to mind.)  

But I keep thinking about the meetings the NFL had over the summer, and wondering what kinds of conversations NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was having with his bosses, the owners of the teams, about what to do.  Even before this video was released, we know Goodell felt like he and the league blew it, laying down a clear policy on domestic violence because they got so much grief for how they handled the Rice situation. 

And I wonder, just wonder: had Georgia Frontiere been alive, and if she were present in any of those meetings about what to do with Ray Rice, would she have offered a voice that might have helped the league get tougher immediately, be proactive instead of reactive?   We'll never know of course, and as of right now, there are no women who own a controlling interest in any of the four major North American sports franchises.  (Jeannie Buss and her brothers, through the Trust set up by their late father, control the L.A. Lakers. Three WNBA franchises are owned in partnerships that are headed by women.)  There's no guarantee either that having a female owner would have resulted in a stiffer punishment for Rice this summer. 

But it does make me wonder. 


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