Wiedmer: Goodell doesn't deserve his job

photo NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell answers questions during a news conference in Orlando, Fla., in this March 26, 2014, file photo.

My mother has always said that the best way for any young man to learn how to treat a woman is for his father to treat the son's mother well.

That was easy for Mom. Until my dad died a few years ago, he loved, honored and respected her for every hour of every day of the 56 years they were married. He was a saint and while I won't say I've always lived up to his ridiculously high standards, it has always been my goal.

Ray Rice didn't have such a father to emulate, however. He grew up with a single mom. He grew up playing a sport built on violence. He grew up surrounded by far too many athletes in that sport who -- to repeat a quote I used earlier this week from Nashville YWCA CEO Pat Shea -- view women as "property, that they're something less than human"

So when Rice got mad at his future wife on Feb. 15 at an Atlantic City casino, he did what far too many of these Neanderthal thugs do: He turned to violence, knocking his then-fiancee out with a single left-handed punch to the face, as sickening an act of indefensible aggression as one could imagine against someone he swears to love, someone whom reportedly asked him later that evening when she regained consciousness: "How could you do this to me? I'm the mother of your kid."

Given that, if Rice is never allowed to play professional football again at the NFL level, he'll have a hard time arguing that punishment. You just don't hit women. Ever. At least not for any other reason than life-saving self-defense.

photo Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice has been cut by the team over a domestic dispute.

But we also love second chances in this country. Odds are that Rice will get one more opportunity to earn an outrageous living playing a brutal sport. Fair or not, that's the nation we've become, one increasingly and disturbingly desensitized to both violence and all forms of abuse, be they verbal, psychological or physical.

But NFL commissioner Roger Goodell didn't grow up in a single-parent home. He grew up the son of the late U.S. Senator Charles Ellsworth Goodell, a New York Republican, and the late Jean (Rice) Goodell. His stepmother, Patricia Goldman, remains a nationally known women's rights advocate.

Two facts to appreciate the 55-year-old Goodell's background: His father opposed the Vietnam War, a very un-Republican thing to do in the late 1960s. It cost him his Senate seat and led the commish to tell Time Magazine in 2012: "My personal view is, he never got over that. But he did what was right. He knew the consequences. He knew it was going to end his career. You can't buy a lesson like that."

Second fact: His younger brother, Michael, was a victim of bullying who later admitted he was gay. Big brother apparently beat up every kid who ever bullied his sibling, leading Michael to tell Time: "I was the type who would have been beat up a lot. It would have been humiliating. Would I have done drugs? There are all sorts of things you can turn to because of self-hatred and loathing. But none of that was even a possibility, because I had this support around me."

So Goodell has clearly, at some point in his life, been a man of sensitivity and morality. By all accounts, he is also a wonderful husband and father to his twin daughters.

But everything about this Ray Rice saga -- from Goodell's initial and pathetic two-game suspension, to his later mea culpa that, "I didn't get it right," to Wednesday's news that the NFL was originally sent a copy of the nauseating tape of Rice punching Janay Palmer Rice in April -- sounds more like cover-up than compassion.

Goodell can say, as he told CBS this week that Rice, "Was ambiguous about what actually happened (in the elevator)," but there was nothing ambiguous about Rice dragging his unconscious future wife out of the elevator as if she were a duffle bag. Watch that tape and he can't even be bothered with clearing her completely clear of the elevator doors, leaving her half in and half out.

And because of that, no man should struggle to understand the horror of what happened in that elevator, whether actually seen or not. Certainly no man of Goodell's background should struggle to deliver swift justice for both Rice and his wife.

You punch your future wife, the mother of your child, and you're finished being a role model, however unjustified and inadvertent that label, for the foreseeable future. The privilege of being paid to play football in the NFL is over until you prove you're a truly changed man, and those changes must be a year or more in the making.

If Roger Goodell's dad could do what he felt was right more than 40 years ago, why couldn't the son? To return to the commish's words: If you can't buy the lesson his father showed him, why couldn't the commish sell dismissing a sewer rat such as Rice?

Maybe Goodell survives this and maybe he doesn't. After all, one of the NFL's most powerful owners, Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys, is suddenly mired in a mess in which a former exotic dancer is accusing him of sexual assault. Think Jones is leading the crusade for Goodell's ouster?

But that doesn't mean he should hold onto his job. Rice may have thrown the punch, but it's the commish's handling of that awful act that is the ultimate slap in the face to all women everywhere.

Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com

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