(ThyBlackMan.com) There was a stretch of years where laughing at Russell Wilson turned into something close to a national pastime. Dude could barely finish a sentence before an account grabbed the audio and chopped it into a joke for the timeline. The talk about drinking water and staying separated from bad energy became a running joke. His morning routine went up online for the world to study. He married Ciara and acted as if she hung the moon in front of anybody willing to watch. For all that, the internet decided he was soft. Fake. Manufactured. A guy running some long con on the public, selling hope the way other folks sell used cars.
I watched the whole circus with a different set of eyes.
Some of that comes with age. Once you have lived long enough to see how grown men come apart, you stop finding the earnest ones so hilarious. I have buried friends who were cooler than Russ ever tried to be. And I have watched slick talkers with all the right one liners lose their families, their money, and eventually themselves. Nobody clipped their bad decisions and set them to funny music. The quiet ruin of a so called real one rarely trends.
So let me say the thing plainly. The corniness people mocked was never the flaw they pretended it was.
Think about what the ridicule was actually built on. Peel it back and you find a television routine, a slogan or two, a husband who bragged on his wife instead of stepping out on her, and a father figure who embraced his stepson and treated him like his own. Somewhere along the way we got these categories twisted. We started treating polish like weakness and treating chaos as authenticity. This culture will crown a brother who cusses out reporters and picks up DUIs while his marriage quietly falls apart. Then the guy who spends his time supporting families and sitting with sick kids at the hospital, him we decide is lame.
That math has bugged me for a long time.
Look at the actual record, not the memes. Across 14 NFL seasons, there were no publicly reported arrests attached to his name. Nobody leaked footage of him swinging on somebody in an elevator. There was no baby mama drama splashed across the blogs, no sideline meltdown that torched a career. He weathered the end of his Seattle run, getting benched and released in Denver, Pittsburgh moving on after one season, and the Giants turning to a rookie after three starts. Through all of it he stayed professional. In the press he kept his mouth clean. He did not go scorched earth on his old teammates on the way out. Knock the throws however you want. Off the field he was not a locker room problem, and he did not hand anybody an off-field reason to regret his signature.
We ought to sit with how rare that truly is.
I coach a little on weekends, youth ball, nothing serious. Those boys hear the same thing out of me every season. The world will hand you a hundred reasons to be angry and only a few reasons to stay steady. Anger is the easier road. It gets the laughs, draws the followers, and reads to everybody like it is keeping things a hundred. Steady looks boring from the outside. It reads as corny. Yet steady is what keeps a household together when the money gets tight and the phone stops ringing.
Here is what the jokes always missed. It takes real backbone to keep showing up as the same person after the crowd turns on you. When his time in Seattle ended, Russ could have gotten bitter and loud. Once things collapsed in Denver, he could have leaked his frustrations and played the victim on any podcast that would book him. Plenty of former stars have taken exactly that route. He chose to keep his family intact, keep his charity work going, and hold his composure while grown professionals openly mocked his contract. Say what you want. That is discipline most of us could not muster with cameras in our faces.
I return again to the family piece because that is where the double standard gets loudest. When a certain kind of athlete flexes his relationship, we swoon and call it love. Let Wilson do the exact same thing and we roll our eyes and call it performance. Why? What did all that scrutiny of that man’s marriage reveal except a husband who genuinely enjoys being a husband? He stepped into a ready made family and treated his stepson like his own blood. In a community that spends a whole lot of breath talking about absent fathers, we sure did give a hard time to a brother who volunteered to be present.
Somewhere our compass got demagnetized.
I am not here to canonize anybody. He fumbled real football moments. On the field he made choices that fans had every right to critique, and the money he was paid invited scrutiny. Criticize the play. Debate the deep ball and the sacks and the price tag. That is the fair game part. What I refuse to accept is the idea that his decency itself was a defect, that his refusal to self destruct made him less of a man than the wreckers we love to celebrate.
Let me tell you who my father was. A quiet cat who went to work, came home, kept his word, and not once put my mother in the position to explain his mess to the neighbors. Nobody made a viral clip out of him either. No one ever will. That kind of steadiness does not go viral, and that is precisely the sickness in how we measure worth now. We reward the spectacle and yawn at the substance.
Young brothers are watching this closely. They are learning, from the way we hand out our respect, that loud dysfunction earns more love than quiet reliability. The lesson sinking in is that a wild man is interesting and a faithful one is a joke. We are raising a whole generation to believe that being good is the same as being weak, and I promise you the bill for that lesson comes due.
More of us need to move like number three moved, and I say that without a trace of irony. Forget the slogans and the branding for a second. I mean the core of it. Handle your business. Protect your household. Serve the folks around you. Lose without becoming a bitter, blaming mess about it. Stay clear of the kind of trouble that follows a name around for years. If that reads as corny in this era, then maybe corny is exactly the medicine we have been avoiding.
I would rather my son grow up dull and dependable than exciting and gone. Better he be the punchline in some comedian’s bit than the cautionary tale at somebody’s funeral. Give me the water metaphors and the goofy optimism all day long over the smooth operator who leaves a trail of wreckage behind his charisma.
The people who laughed were never really laughing at a flaw. They were laughing at a mirror, at a standard most of them will never meet. Russell Wilson kept his family, his dignity, and his integrity through the public unraveling of the final stretch of his playing career. Go ahead and call that corny. Some of us just call it a whole man.
Staff Writer; J.G. Lacour
Covering the NBA, NFL, college basketball, college football, and Major League Baseball from a Black man’s perspective. He loves the full world of sports, but the NFL remains his favorite.
Need to contact this bro, feel free to use this email address; JGLacour@ThyBlackMan.com.
