Appreciate the Beauty of Gray

I’m going to start this piece off right now by doing something I normally don’t like to do. I’m going to make a blanket statement about people.

When it comes to sports, people prefer things to be black and white.

(I’m not talking about race, because based on the vitriol that Bomani Jones and Michael Silver were dealing with in re: NFL coaching hires, people can’t stand talking about black and white. But that’s another column.)

Dualities are simple: there is a right and a wrong. A hero and a villain. A winner and a loser. It’s clean and easy.

I look at my five year old, and that’s how he views the games that we (I) watch. I’ll have a game on between two teams that I really have no rooting interest in. He comes over and the first question he asks is, “Who are we rooting for, Daddy?”

He will then pick a team if it’s not one I root for, and that team becomes his favorite team. He will cheer for them every time they score (“They win, Daddy!”) or boo lustily if the other team scores (“They cheated!”).

It’s easier for him to have a rooting interest than to simply watch. He needs a hero and a villain to make it palatable.

I think, more often than not, that that is what we need as a society. In sports, in politics, in anything.

The fact of the matter is, it’s harder to wrap our brains around the idea of gray. Shades of gray complicate matters and make things difficult. It makes things complex. It muddies the water, and doesn’t necessarily provide the nice, neat happy endings that we want. It also doesn’t give us the big, evil bogeyman to root against.

What happens, though, especially in this web 2.0 era that we now live in, is when it turns out our white hats aren’t necessarily as pristine and clean as we want them to be/were led to believe that they are.

Sometimes the white hat truly does turn out to be a bad person—they were a cheating bully and thug who showed no remorse about his actions when he finally, after years of denial, admit to being a cheater. In that instance, we all saw and felt the hat go from white to gray to black.

But even if there was a selfish motive at its core…even that guy used his fame to raise millions of dollars to help eradicate a drug that has had an impact on millions of people. Yeah, he was an ass, a lout, a thug of the worst order who deceived many, many people. He’s a bad guy.

Can’t a bad guy, though, commit acts of goodwill?

An All-America linebacker loses his grandmother and his girlfriend a couple of days before a rivalry game early in his final season at his college. He goes out and plays an amazing game, setting in motion a string of feature stories talking about his love for this girl and how he feels her spirit with him during the game. It’s a wonderful love story, including letters that she wrote to him before she passed on being shared with him by her family before and after each successive game after she is gone.

Only it turns out that she’s not real, or at least may not be the person as she was presented to him. And he is either the victim of a very elaborate, long con hoax that was to eventually lead to extorition, or he was the victim of a prank that went very wrong. Or he and his family or friends masterminded the whole hoax to raise his national profile. Or he’s gay. Or he was coerced into being part of the hoax, and RAWR! WE NEED ANSWERS!

Look, I readily admit that I am one screaming for answers in the second scenario, as I just find the information out there right now too contradictory for any plausible scenario to be laid out where the football player was not complicit in the hoax. The story, if you look at all of the evidence that is available to us outsiders, has more holes than your average kitchen colander.

And yet …is it possible that he did fall in love with this figment AND that he was duped AND that he was not involved?

Those pesky shades of gray interfere with an either/or narrative, doesn’t it.

Life is much more complex than the simple way we try to look at it.. If we spent more time thinking about that, and less time trying to infer and assume and paint people into these neat little boxes, then maybe—maybe!—we could have rational, logical discussion and discourse about these events.