Adrian Peterson, The NFL And Whippings, One of the things that came out of this Adrian Peterson story over the last few days is that most people outside the South don’t know what it means to get whipped with a switch.
No matter what Charles Barkley says, it’s not just a black thing. I’m white, and 50, and grew up in Georgia, and just about every kid I knew took a whipping now and then. Your mama or daddy (or whoever enforced the rules in your family) would find a green branch on a tree, or maybe some piece of shrub pulled out of the ground, a foot or two long and flexible. (In the house, sometimes a flyswatter did the job.) If you had been really bad, you’d have to cut your own switch.
The walk to get the switch was worse than the whipping itself. If you didn’t get one big enough, the grownup would go get one, and you didn’t want that. Richard Pryor had a great and painful bit about hearing the switch cut through the wind as you walked back, already bawling in dread of what was about to happen. The actual whipping was (in my experience) more of a sting. The point was the dread. I didn’t get whipped much, and the last time was at least 40 years ago, but the memory is still sharp and clear.
But I never got whipped, and no one I knew ever got whipped, the way Adrian Peterson brutalized his little boy.
The Vikings’ star running back, 6-1 and 217 pounds, beat his 4-year-old to the point where the marks were still on his legs days later when his mother took him to the doctor. (The boy lives in Minnesota with his mother and was visiting Peterson in Texas during the offseason.) He beat his child with such fury that he accidentally hit him in the scrotum. He beat his boy with such a clear conscience that he described it matter-of-factly to the police officers who came to speak to him about it. He gave that whipping to a child who is four years old. A grand jury in Texas indicted Peterson on a count of injury to a child with reckless or criminal negligence. He was deactivated for the Vikings’ game on Sunday against New England. The Patriots crushed the Vikings 30-7. As of Monday, Peterson was back on the roster in good standing.
Here is a question without a knowable answer: Would Adrian Peterson have become a star in the NFL if he hadn’t been whipped as a child? According to the statement he put out Monday, he clearly believes that he wouldn’t have made it. “I have always believed that the way my parents disciplined me has a great deal to do with the success I have enjoyed as a man,” he said. He has had to deal with terrible things his whole life. His older brother was killed by a drunk driver when Peterson was 7. His father was sent to prison for money laundering when Peterson was 13. His half-brother was murdered the day before Peterson had to run drills at the NFL combine in 2007. He blew out his knee near the end of the 2011 season, but rehabbed so hard and so fast that he was the NFL’s most valuable player in 2012.
Something in his life gave him the emotional strength to come back from those losses. He believes it was the whippings he took as a child. So in his mind, he is passing on an important family tradition.
Let me tell you what I believe.
I believe that whipping a child builds up one of two things in that child: fear or anger. No doubt a whipping — or hard spanking, or beating with a belt — will stop a child from doing something bad in the moment. But I believe it causes way more harm than good. The only thing I wanted to do after I got whipped was to whip something else. It was good we didn’t have a dog.
I suspect the tragedies in Adrian Peterson’s life led him to fight and succeed more than any whipping ever did. But I don’t know that, and he probably doesn’t either, and we all tend to forget that phrase from science, “correlation does not imply causation.” Just because Peterson was whipped as a child, and then succeeded as a man, it doesn’t mean he succeeded as man because he was whipped. It might be that he succeeded in spite of it.
My own fear and anger rises up when I see what happened to Peterson’s little boy, or see that elevator video of Ray Rice punching the woman who is now his wife, or read the police report of what Panthers defensive end Greg Hardy is accused of doing to his then-girlfriend. The whole drama of football is the tension between hitting and not getting hit. Controlled violence is the heart of the sport. But NFL commissioner Roger Goodell clearly doesn’t know how to handle violence when the league’s players leave the field. He gave Rice just a two-game suspension until TMZ posted the elevator video. He is letting the Vikings and Panthers deal with Peterson and Hardy on their own. In the meantime, some fans say the players shouldn’t be punished at all until due process has run its full course. I guess a player could argue a case to the Supreme Court and retire before it fully plays out.
I’m not sure what Adrian Peterson’s child got qualifies as due process.
There is one detail of this story I’m never going to forget. When Peterson talked to police, he said he had one regret. He didn’t realize how much damage he had done. Because his boy took the whipping and never cried.
Four years old, and he never cried.
That whipping is still inside him. You just wonder what it’s going to look like when it comes out.
The walk to get the switch was worse than the whipping itself. If you didn’t get one big enough, the grownup would go get one, and you didn’t want that. Richard Pryor had a great and painful bit about hearing the switch cut through the wind as you walked back, already bawling in dread of what was about to happen. The actual whipping was (in my experience) more of a sting. The point was the dread. I didn’t get whipped much, and the last time was at least 40 years ago, but the memory is still sharp and clear.
But I never got whipped, and no one I knew ever got whipped, the way Adrian Peterson brutalized his little boy.
The Vikings’ star running back, 6-1 and 217 pounds, beat his 4-year-old to the point where the marks were still on his legs days later when his mother took him to the doctor. (The boy lives in Minnesota with his mother and was visiting Peterson in Texas during the offseason.) He beat his child with such fury that he accidentally hit him in the scrotum. He beat his boy with such a clear conscience that he described it matter-of-factly to the police officers who came to speak to him about it. He gave that whipping to a child who is four years old. A grand jury in Texas indicted Peterson on a count of injury to a child with reckless or criminal negligence. He was deactivated for the Vikings’ game on Sunday against New England. The Patriots crushed the Vikings 30-7. As of Monday, Peterson was back on the roster in good standing.
Here is a question without a knowable answer: Would Adrian Peterson have become a star in the NFL if he hadn’t been whipped as a child? According to the statement he put out Monday, he clearly believes that he wouldn’t have made it. “I have always believed that the way my parents disciplined me has a great deal to do with the success I have enjoyed as a man,” he said. He has had to deal with terrible things his whole life. His older brother was killed by a drunk driver when Peterson was 7. His father was sent to prison for money laundering when Peterson was 13. His half-brother was murdered the day before Peterson had to run drills at the NFL combine in 2007. He blew out his knee near the end of the 2011 season, but rehabbed so hard and so fast that he was the NFL’s most valuable player in 2012.
Something in his life gave him the emotional strength to come back from those losses. He believes it was the whippings he took as a child. So in his mind, he is passing on an important family tradition.
Let me tell you what I believe.
I believe that whipping a child builds up one of two things in that child: fear or anger. No doubt a whipping — or hard spanking, or beating with a belt — will stop a child from doing something bad in the moment. But I believe it causes way more harm than good. The only thing I wanted to do after I got whipped was to whip something else. It was good we didn’t have a dog.
I suspect the tragedies in Adrian Peterson’s life led him to fight and succeed more than any whipping ever did. But I don’t know that, and he probably doesn’t either, and we all tend to forget that phrase from science, “correlation does not imply causation.” Just because Peterson was whipped as a child, and then succeeded as a man, it doesn’t mean he succeeded as man because he was whipped. It might be that he succeeded in spite of it.
My own fear and anger rises up when I see what happened to Peterson’s little boy, or see that elevator video of Ray Rice punching the woman who is now his wife, or read the police report of what Panthers defensive end Greg Hardy is accused of doing to his then-girlfriend. The whole drama of football is the tension between hitting and not getting hit. Controlled violence is the heart of the sport. But NFL commissioner Roger Goodell clearly doesn’t know how to handle violence when the league’s players leave the field. He gave Rice just a two-game suspension until TMZ posted the elevator video. He is letting the Vikings and Panthers deal with Peterson and Hardy on their own. In the meantime, some fans say the players shouldn’t be punished at all until due process has run its full course. I guess a player could argue a case to the Supreme Court and retire before it fully plays out.
I’m not sure what Adrian Peterson’s child got qualifies as due process.
There is one detail of this story I’m never going to forget. When Peterson talked to police, he said he had one regret. He didn’t realize how much damage he had done. Because his boy took the whipping and never cried.
Four years old, and he never cried.
That whipping is still inside him. You just wonder what it’s going to look like when it comes out.
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