This is where I'm supposed to write something about Plaxico Burress. I just know it.
I'm supposed to say that he's a clown, an idiot, a moron, a knucklehead; that I hope Mr. "23-17" shot that s--t-eating, Super Bowl-winning grin right off of his own smug little face. I'm supposed to declare, right here, right now, that I'll be laughing when he watches from prison as his Giants choke away their dominant season in the first week of January.
I'm not going to say any of that. I can't bring myself to do it.
Here's what we know. We know that at some point on Friday night, Burress shot himself in the thigh with his own gun. The bullet, reportedly, went through the skin and muscle tissue of his right thigh, but it was later discovered at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center that no arteries were ruptured and no bones broken. Burress spent the night in the hospital; he was treated and released by 2 p.m. the following day.
This is what we know. We don't know much else, and we shouldn't pretend that we do.
What I mean by that is that likely no one reading this column understands the burden of being a professional athlete. This goes much deeper than the tired, trite, beaten-to-death "athletes are not role models" argument -- there's more to it than that. Sometimes there's more than just the public eye hovering over the star athlete. Sometimes there's a bull's eye.
As the media scrambles this week to dig to the bottom of the Plaxico Burress story, there's no man under closer scrutiny than Burress' teammate Antonio Pierce, the Giants linebacker who was out with Burress on Friday night and started in the Giants' win in Washington on Sunday. And yet for some reason, the one Pierce I can't get out of my mind is named Paul.
Paul Pierce, the face of the Boston Celtics franchise and the MVP of the 2008 NBA Finals, has a tattoo on his arm of a basketball with a dagger through it. Pierce, who has called his career in basketball "both my gift and my curse," got the tattoo to remind himself of Sept. 25, 2000, a night he's lucky to have survived. Pierce was attacked in a nightclub by an angry mob -- 20 assailants at once, it's been estimated -- and was stabbed eight times and had a bottle shattered over his face.
To this day, he maintains that he was attacked just for being popular.
Of course, the examples don't end there. Two years ago, the Broncos' Darrent Williams was shot and killed outside a nightclub in Denver. Just one year ago, the Redskins' Sean Taylor was gunned down by an intruder in his own home in Palmetto Bay, Fla. Ivan Calderon, a former National League All-Star, died instantly in 2003 when he was shot five to seven times in the head at a bar in his native Puerto Rico.
I could go on, but no one really wants me to do that. The point is that athletes, constantly under the public eye and always unable to find the privacy they deserve, have become targets. We're talking about people who have made careers out of their physical prowess -- to some people, just being a 6-foot-6 forward or a 232-pound wide receiver means asking for a fight. Some people actually believe this sick, twisted logic, and to me that says there's something seriously wrong with our culture.
I can't say that if I were Plaxico Burress -- if I were signed to a $25 million contract and I wore a Super Bowl ring -- I wouldn't carry a gun too. It's a scary concept to even try to grasp, but that's because none of us know what it's like to live under that public eye. It's far, far too easy to judge someone like Burress from the comfort of our privileged little campus.
So I just won't bother. I don't know what happened on Friday night. You don't either. You probably couldn't even imagine.
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Evans Clinchy is a senior majoring in English. He can be reached at Evans.Clinchy@tufts.edu.
