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| The owners Kraft, Bill Belicheat & Tom Shady gloat (Photo Credit: AP/NFL) |
Tom Brady just acquiesced to a modicum of martyrdom. Earlier today, the New England quarterback finally ended his prolonged appeal of a league suspension. Brady continues to maintain his innocence, but will accept the consequences for rigging game balls during his team’s defeat of Indianapolis in the 2014 NFC Championship. That victory enabled the ethically incorrigible Patriots to advance to Super Bowl XLIX, which they also won.
During his suspension, Brady will sit out the first four weeks of the 16-game regular season. For missing one-fourth of the regular season, he will lose nearly a quarter of his salary. Originally, forfeiting those game checks would have cost him more than $2 million, but New England kindly reworked Tom Shady’s contract to defeat league discipline. By shifting funds from game checks to untouchable bonus money, the team cut the cheater’s losses to just $235,000 of the $13 million he will earn this year.
Patriots owner Robert Kraft denounced the league’s punishment of his multi-millionaire employee as “unprecedented, unjust and unreasonable.” In a statement, the billionaire businessman put Brady’s struggle in perspective: “What Tom has had to endure throughout this 18-month ordeal has been, in my opinion, as far removed from due process as you could ever expect in this country.”
Evidently, Kraft doesn’t watch the news. Last week, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile endured actual ordeals much farther removed from due process, and infinitely more damaging to the fabric of this country.
Perhaps their astonishing lack of ethical perspective helps explain Kraft and Brady’s affection for Donald Trump, who promises, if elected, to perpetrate even more extreme violations of our constitutional liberties.
