Baffoe: Deflategate Deflates Our Brains

By Tim Baffoe--

(CBS) "Only in a world this (crappy) could you even try to say these were innocent people and keep a straight face. But that's the point. We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every home, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it's common, it's trivial. We tolerate it morning, noon and night. Well, not anymore. I'm setting the example. What I've done is going to be puzzled over and studied and followed ... forever."

John Doe, cinema's greatest antagonist if in consideration of on-screen power against time actually on screen, hates the New England Patriots. Not just because he's a New Yorker who cleanses himself through religious masochism and is, thus, probably a Jets fan. He is mutated, cancerous morality metastasized in the brain, Helen Lovejoy hand-wringing taken Se7en steps further. He's the American sports fan's awful super-ego.

Deflategate is everything wrong with our sports culture, and not just because adding "-gate" to something automatically dissolves half the IQ points involved in discussing it. The cheating is bad, no doubt -- though let's not pretend some competitive advantage isn't angled for in every game of every sports league.

The cover-up is always worse than the crime. Had Tom Brady and Co. just mealy-mouthed a confession from the start, we'd never have begun the descent into this world of bunched talk show panelist undies. Something like this from Brady...

"Oh, heavens, had I known that was frowned upon, I would have never had the balls customized to a preferred comfortability that I practice with. We all like to be comfortable, don't we? (Bats lashes three times over sparkle in eyes.) The last thing I would ever want to do is compromise the sanctity of the NFL. But if you have to take a seventh-round draft pick that would have been a guy who dropped because he smokes jazz cigarettes that we'd turn into a Pro Bowler, I begrudgingly accept that."

And then the man-crushes would continue unfettered while some of us roll our eyes at "sanctity of the NFL" and rightly move on from the molehill.

But no, they just had to be the typical clandestine Patriots about this. They had to feed the Gremlins after midnight. Thus are born the fieriest of #hottakes.

"Asterisk that terrible man!" is one cry, even though, "It's not the most egregious of offenses, but it's still cheating."

Because nothing validates our nostalgia of a game "back in my day" when the cheating was limited to just injecting horse steroids and gouging out a man's eyes in a pile, right? It feels so good to instantly tear down a millionaire athlete for doing anything possible to win until it conflicts with our dream sequences. Thank goodness we have asterisks to bandage the wounds of feeling dumb for naively believing in sports purity.

But the majestic phoenix torch of a take always rises above all others when a story like this is allowed oxygen. Bursting into the conversation like a palm across his girlfriend's face is, of course, Jay Mariotti.

"Lance Armstrong deliberately broke the rules and was stripped of his seven Tour de France victories," Mariotti wrote. "A generation of prominent baseball juicers knowingly broke the rules and have been rejected for Hall of Fame induction. You cheat on Wall Street, you go to jail. You cheat in the music business, you lose millions in a lawsuit. You cheat in politics, you're run out of office."

That's some rich, thick unsolicited step-dad gibberish right there. When Mariotti's on your side, you should probably do some soul-searching and consider defecting.

Then comes the always useful consideration of the hometown fans. And Bostonians are certainly known for their tact and deft consideration of the entire situation.

Cheating is wrong -- unless you're not getting caught. And even then, is the appropriate consideration for what was accomplished with the cheating being given? Are we at all shouldering even a little bit of the blame for our obsessions creating this well-intentioned ideal-turned-monster run amok after it frightens the puritan public?

John Doe is a well-written character in Se7en because his method to his madness impresses us to the point where he makes us teeter on the brink of the oft-mocked Internet reply "Really makes ya think." But we still know he's mad.

And after Doe is dead, Detective Somerset's voice drops on us, "Ernest Hemingway once wrote, 'The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.' I agree with the second part."

That's not the case with what in reality is an innocuous sports cheating drama like Deflategate, as grossly misproportioned as the balls in question.

Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.

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