Like him or don’t, Antonio Brown is not always to blame — and wasn’t in divorce from Bucs | Opinion
The most memorable, talked-about play of this NFL season — the one that didn’t happen on the field — lives on. It does so in the legal action being pursued. It does so in the wondering whether Tom Brady and Tampa Bay might be playing Sunday, still chasing a second straight Super Bowl win, if it hadn’t happened.
The spectacle resonates, too, because it dances on the periphery of the brain trauma football can cause, and the discussion of mental health becoming more and more open in sports. And in the altogether unsurprising idea that a head coach might sometimes place winning ahead of a player’s health on his list of priorities.
I know: Antonio Brown is easy to dislike, largely through his own actions through the years. No dispute.
But it doesn’t means he’s wrong here.
“The trigger was telling me I’m not allowed to feel pain,” he said. “I acknowledge my past. But that doesn’t make me a second-class citizen. My past does not forfeit my right to be heard when I am in pain.”
In a remarkable pro career that rose from the toughest streets in Miami’s Liberty City, Brown has not always been a player you like, and even more rarely been a man you understand.
The tumult of his career, now shopping for a fourth team, and with the number of off-field incidents, police run-ins and league suspensions and fines bigger than that, has labeled him a mercurial diva. Trouble.
But, oh, the reward for the risk!: 928 catches, 12,291, yards, 83 touchdowns (all top 25 all time) and seven Pro Bowls. Likely Hall of Fame numbers. In a span from 2013 to 2108 there was no receiver better, more feared or respected.
Today Brown is 33 and at least temporarily unemployed, turning 34 when training camps start this summer.
Today he is a man still trying to explain why, during a game few weeks ago, Bucs at Jets, Brown abruptly left the bench in anger, peeled off his jersey and pads, tossed them into the crowd, put up a peace sign with his fingers, and trotted off, turning his back on his team, profession and the NFL.
A million amateur psychiatrists watching had their instant diagnoses and put it in the “A.B. being A.B. bin.”
As Brown says: “’Aw, he’s crazy. Something’s wrong with his mental health.’ Some people put you in the pit just by the narrative they put around you.”
Brown told his side, in the plainest way yet, this week on the “I Am Athlete” podcast simulcast on YouTube and hosted by former receiver (and ex-Dolphin) Brandon Marshall.
“NFL Super Bowl coach told a guy playing hurt, ‘Get the [expletive] outta here! You’re done!’”
And so Brown did. And so he was.
But what if it’s the truth: That Tampa Bay coach Bruce Arians went unhinged for a couple of seconds on the sideline and said that to Brown after the player told him, “I can’t go no more,” because of an ankle injury?
Maybe Brown responded wrong by reacting so emotionally the way he did, but what if the head coach instigated it all by mishandling the situation and trying to goad an injured man to get back out there?
Before that exchange Brown and receiver Mike Evans had been in a heated exchange on the sideline, evidently with Brown complaining Brady wasn’t targeting him enough.
It might explain why his mood was wrong to then be questioned whether he was really hurt. To him what Arians said screamed disrespect.
“A situation where I’m hurt and you’re telling me [that]?” says Brown. “I’m not running no campaign for people to be sorry for me. But I didn’t respect this. You can’t play with me. I did what I did ‘cause that’s what my heart [told] me to do. At the end of the day I gotta look myself in the mirror and and be good with myself.”
He wants to play again: “I ain’t quit, I just said [expletive] ‘em. I’m willing to get shot up and do whatever it takes. But there’s principles in life. There’s no apology [for what happened]. I stand by what it is.”
The NFL needs guys like Antonio Brown, of whom there are few. The starpower. The talent. The personality. The risk of the bad because you know how good the good can be.
Marshall asked Brown how it is to be in the orbit of Kanye West, Madonna and Floyd Mayweather.
“They with me, too,” he says, with a smirk
This is a man who celebrated the night his former Bucs were eliminated by partying at South Beach Club XXIII, pulling up in a silver Rolls-Royce, swaggering in draped in a fur coat.
This also is a man who says, not smiling, “Football players will always have mental health problems.”
Maybe you attempt more understanding of a kid born in Liberty City to parents both 18 years of age. A kid out the house and on his own by 16. Homeless and living out of a car for much of his senior year at Miami Norland High.
He was said to be too small for the NFL at 5-10. He was judged the 37th-best receiver in the 2010 draft and was a sixth-round pick.
From that cauldron of doubt and disrespect he fashioned a Hall of Fame-worthy career, one as eventful as it was excellent. Wait, was?
This is a career that deserves to rise from this latest incident and be given one more chance. Sports needs his skills, as much his audacity.
A story more riveting than most needs a last chapter.
Talking about his future on the podcast Brown playfully shouted out Lamar Jackson of the Ravens:
“Just tell him hit my phone,” he said with a smile.
