GRUDEN THE BIGOT IS GONE, BUT HOW MANY ARE STILL OUT THERE?
One prominent coaching career has been killed by racist, anti-gay and misogynistic e-mails, but it begs the question of how many other NFL front offices are littered with Animal House cavemen
He only was playing a psycho on TV, we always assumed. Who knew Jon Gruden actually was unhinged as a human being, filled with so much hatred that you wonder how he survived as long as he did as a National Football League head coach and ESPN analyst?
This is one twisted, tortured puppy — Chucky meets Andrew Dice Clay meets Dave Chappelle — and once a fresh batch of anti-gay and misogynistic e-mails were piled atop his racist trope against players’ union leader DeMaurice Smith, the Las Vegas Raiders had no choice but to remove Gruden from his own personal Sin City.
The NFL, long racist itself, has been anxious to show players that the league finally is ready to evolve from its caveman past. Gruden provided a feast for the mission, exposing pro football’s front-office culture at its ugliest. For several years, starting in 2011, he was part of a hostile e-mail chain that bounced from Gruden to Bruce Allen, then the president of what now is known as the Washington Football Team, and actually was shared among some of their business friends. It’s unconscionable to think one of the sport’s most visible figures, the intense sideline leader who coached the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to a Super Bowl championship in 2003, could ride his inner contempt to a lucrative TV career — then to a record 10-year, $100 million deal with the Raiders, whose patriarch, Al Davis, prided himself on diversity.
His son, Mark, pushed the delete button on Gruden’s filthy diatribes Monday night after they were published by the New York Times. It was an easy decision for Davis, having welcomed Carl Nassib to his franchise as the league’s first publicly gay active player, only to read Gruden go off on NFL commissioner Roger Goodell as “a faggot’’ and “a clueless anti football pussy’’ for pressuring Jeff Fisher, then the coach of the St. Louis Rams, to draft “queers’’ — after the Rams selected a gay player, Michael Sam, in 2014. Continuing a series of rants usually associated with a social-media troll, Gruden asked Allen to tell Bryan Glazer, part of the family triumvirate that owns the Buccaneers and English football club Manchester United, to perform oral sex on him. Allen, reported the Times, said Glazer would “take you up on that offer.’’
Who wasn’t targeted by Gruden? In 2012, he went after President Obama and called Joe Biden, then vice president, “a nervous clueless pussy.’’ The same description was used in references to Goodell and Smith, executive director of the NFL Players Association. Gruden and Allen weren’t happy when Congress launched a movement to purge the Redskins nickname from the Washington franchise, which led Gruden to pepper Goodell with another slur. NFL owners, coaches and journalists were pummeled. Gruden said Eric Reid, who kneeled alongside San Francisco teammate Colin Kaepernick in national-anthem protests, should be cut by the 49ers. The overgrown frat boys sent pornographic images and photos of topless women, including two cheerleaders from the Washington team. Gruden and Allen ridiculed Caitlyn Jenner when she came out as a trans woman, as Gruden’s employer at ESPN was honoring Jenner with a prestigious award. When the NFL hired a female referee, Gruden wrote, “Nice job Roger.’’ When Goodell emphasized safety procedures amid the league’s concussion crisis, Gruden wrote, “He needs to hide in his concussion protocol tent.’’
In defending his slur of Smith — of whom he wrote, “Dumborris Smith has lips the size of michellin (sic) tires’’ — Gruden claimed he uses “rubber lips’’ to “refer to a guy I catch as lying … he can’t spit it out.’’ Well, we definitively can state today that Gruden has rubber lips. And his claim that he doesn’t have “a blade of racism’’ in him?
Turns out he is stuffed with a 100-yard field of bigotry. And a costly one at that: a potential giveback of $60 million.
The lies continued when he issued a statement after his forced resignation: “I love the Raiders and do not want to be a distraction. Thank you to all the players, coaches, staff, and fans of Raider Nation. I'm sorry, I never meant to hurt anyone."
He … never … meant … to … hurt … anyone?
“The comments are clearly repugnant under any circumstance," ESPN said in a statement.
We’re still waiting for a comment from Davis, who reportedly believes the league was conducting a witch hunt against Gruden and the Raiders. Witch hunt or not, this man had to go away, hopefully to a room where he can stroke the furry wall and take up knitting.
Gruden also had explained he was angry in the early 2010s because the league was torn by labor turmoil, telling ESPN last Friday, “They were keeping players and coaches from doing what they love with a lockout. There also were a lot of things being reported publicly about the safety of the sport that I love. I was on a mission with high school football (in the Tampa area) during that time, and there were a lot of parents who were scared about letting their kids play football. It just didn't sit well with me."
Did those parents realize they were dealing with a monster?
Obviously, Gruden no longer can coach in a league in which more than 70 percent of players are Black. Some will ask why his e-mails are being leaked now — and whether Gruden’s privacy has been violated when his missives were sent from his personal e-mail account, while Allen’s were from a Washington team account.
And, there will be legitimate questions about why Goodell and the league hasn’t forced WFT owner Daniel Snyder to sell his team when, after all, the league uncovered the Gruden-Allen correspondence in its investigation of workplace misconduct within that franchise. How does Snyder slide?
Yet, Jon Gruden’s stupidity and intolerance are so outrageous — his audacity and recklessness so off the charts — that the league’s scheme against him rightfully will be lost in the national discussion. If he is a scapegoat, he is solely responsible for his demise.
The Raiders will move on. The league will move on, more popular and prosperous than ever, and now can point to Gruden’s quick departure as evidence of its societal progress. What will remain in the stench of the manure pile is this disturbing thought:
How many other high-profile football men are similarly hateful, just smart enough not to air their vile bile and push send?
Jay Mariotti, called “the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he has gravitated by osmosis to film projects.