On the stool in front of Antonio Cromartie’s locker sits his white laptop computer. When the Chargers’ 3rd-year cornerback turns it on, up pops his Twitter home page.
As of early Tuesday morning, he says he had just over 6,000 followers — fans one would presume who like to get a daily update or two from a rising, young NFL star.
By Tuesday evening, after the Chargers had fined Cromartie $2,500 for a derogatory “tweet” last Friday about the organization’s training camp food spread, his number of followers had grown to over 8,000.
Shocked. Surprised. Amazed. Cromartie was all of those things after a strong media throng followed him off the field after the Bolts’ afternoon workout.
Yep. Even the tweeters can’t believe all the hub-bub.
So the question is this: Is Cromartie a twit for tweeting?
Hardly. In case you’ve been on Mars the last several months or have never before seen a web page (if that’s the case, welcome to ours!), any bird brain can tell you that the world of Twitter has, well, taken over the world.
Cromartie's Tweet Raises Questions
And Cromartie is no different from hundreds of pro athletes who keep in touch with their posies by tapping a few harmless sentences of insight into their laptops throughout each day.
But the Chargers’ fine of Cromartie does raise some interesting issues. When is a tweet not sweet? As linebacker Shawne Merriman (who says he has around 40,000 followers) said Tuesday afternoon about his tweeting teammate: “That was one expensive tweet.”
Added Cromartie: “The message to me (along with the fine) was to not say anything bad about the organization. I don’t take back anything I said. To me, it was more of a joke than anything else. But some people didn’t take it that way. So I have to be careful.”
But why should he have to be careful? While it’s true that if Cromartie really did have a problem with the buffet he may have been better off just casually mentioning it to team personnel, it’s also true that the Chargers seem to have overreacted.
However, the Chargers — and the rest of the teams in the NFL — understand the power that the internet now possesses. Coach Norv Turner could have quietly scuttled the issue by bringing Cromartie in and reminding him to watch what he tweets. But a more powerful message needed to be sent to keep others from messaging.
In fact, the Bolts have already prohibited their players this summer from tweeting while at the team’s practice facility. (Not that they themselves and every other NFL team doesn’t tweet endlessly for self-promotion).
What Cromartie didn’t realize — and frankly, what most folks don’t realize yet — is that anything nowadays that makes it out into the viral world is going to spread, and spread quickly. One got the feeling that Cromartie was stunned that he somehow had created such a ruckus.
Here’s another question? Should NFL teams be able to put a lid on what their players say (or tweet)?
As part of his impromptu tweet press conference Cromartie, almost as an aside, said: “They’re taking away my right to free speech.” He wasn’t trying to channel Martin Luther King, Jr., but his statement nevertheless bears closer examination.
If I had a guess, I’d say that every single NFL team – heck, the league itself – would love to control everything that comes out of their players’ mouths and laptops. Think the Bengals wouldn’t mind Chad Johnson running everything past them before he holds court?
But that, of course, is not only nonsense, but it also goes against the very principles under which this country was created. Try as they may, sports teams are not going to be able to shut down (and shut up) their players.
Nor should they be allowed to. It’s never necessarily good for team morale when a player speaks out against a teammate, or coach, or even a food spread — but it would be far worse if players weren’t allowed to speak out.
Plus, one of our colleagues Tom Krasovic came up with the perfect solution to this tweet tizzy. When Cromartie was asked about what charity might receive the windfall from his $2,500 fine, Krasovic suggested: “how about giving it to the cook?”
– Ello
Craig Elsten -
Chainsaw -
