This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2014, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Did you hear the one about the million-dollar flipping of the bird?
It happened during the halftime show at Super Bowl XLVI back in 2012, when the Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A. — appearing onstage with the headliner, Madonna — extended a middle finger and mouthed the S-word.
Word got out last year that the National Football League demanded, via arbitration, a $1.5 million claim against M.I.A. (real name Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam) for breach of contract and "flagrant disregard for the values that form the cornerstone of the NFL brand and the Super Bowl." The claim was later raised to $16.6 million, with the added $15 million representing the value, in ad dollars, of the 2 minutes M.I.A. shared the stage with Madonna and Nicki Minaj.
As The Hollywood Reporter wrote in March, M.I.A. and her lawyers fought back, and hard. They accused the league of bullying the rapper "for daring to challenge NFL."
M.I.A.'s response to the NFL included a laundry list of past instances of less-than-wholesome behavior at Super Bowl halftime shows, starting with Michael Jackson's crotch-grabbing in 1993.
The league and the rapper reached a settlement, with terms not disclosed, last month.
The battle made it clear that the NFL would stop at nothing to protect the "values" of the league — when those "values" are challenged by a slightly famous rap star.
When the NFL's "values" take a hit — literally — from within its ranks, as a year of headlines have demonstrated, the league's response is far more timid.
There's the case of Ray Rice, the former Baltimore Ravens star who was caught on videotape hitting his fiancée (now his wife) — and how NFL discipline was at first ridiculously light (a two-game suspension) and only grew to an indefinite suspension after the tape was made public.
There's the case of Adrian Peterson, the Minnesota Vikings running back accused in Texas of child abuse for taking a "switch" (a quaint euphemism for a thin tree branch) to his 4-year-old son. Vikings owners asked the NFL to put Peterson on its "exempt" list, meaning he will be barred from team activities, after first dithering by removing him from last week's game but planning to let him play this week.
There are the cases of San Francisco 49ers defensive end Ray McDonald (out on bail pending trial in a domestic violence case) and Carolina Panthers defensive end Greg Hardy (awaiting a jury trial after a judge found him guilty of assaulting his ex-girlfriend). The Niners are letting McDonald play, while the Panthers, according to reports, may send Hardy to join Peterson on the "exempt" list.
There's the case of the NFL denying years of research into the damage done to players' brains after years of concussions. And the case of the underpaid NFL cheerleaders. And the case of the owner who continues to defend a blatantly racist team name. And so on, and so on.
Through all of these scandals, we've heard all the clichés — that football has replaced baseball as America's pastime and that the NFL is a cultural behemoth that transcends sports.
I'll throw in one more cliché: Sports is our escape from the nastiness of the daily news, uniting people who are otherwise divided by political or cultural conflicts.
So what do we do when the sports news — in this instance, the NFL — produces headlines as harsh and divisive as the rest of the world?
One thing we can do is not watch.
I was already halfway toward not watching the NFL, because I couldn't justify sitting idle for three-plus hours on a Sunday afternoon to watch a boring game. (Boring? Consider the Wall Street Journal's 2010 study that found the average NFL broadcast features 11 minutes of people actually playing football.)
With all the recent problems, I'm ready to give it up altogether.
How about you? Can you still watch the NFL? Ask yourself these questions, and if the answer to any of them is "no," you might consider your own boycott:
• Can you watch men rev themselves up to be violent to each other on the field without thinking about whether that violence carries over into their personal lives?
• Can you be entertained as men weaponize their bodies, with pads and helmets, without considering what the wear and tear of that sport is doing to their brains and bodies?
• Can you support a league that continues to defend a racist slur as "tradition" and "an honor"?
• Can you give money — whether through NFL licensed merchandise or buying products that advertise on NFL games — to a league that's obscenely wealthy yet still claims federal tax-exempt status?
• Can you condone a league that, before public opinion turned on it, coddled players who hurt women — a league that next month will start a cynical marketing campaign to women by wrapping every available surface in breast-cancer pink?
• Can you sit idle, knowing the NFL is counting on you to sit idle so it can ride out this storm before going back to its usual arrogance?
Sean P. Means writes The Cricket in daily blog form at http://www.sltrib.com/blogs/moviecricket. Follow him on Twitter @moviecricket, or on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/seanpmeans. Email him at spmeans@sltrib.com.