The NFL Tries to Push Protest Out of Sight
The world of sports has two essential settings: the playing field and the locker room. The former, with its high-wattage triumph and failure, draws its narrative power from the existence of the latter, where athletic archetypes are sometimes revealed to be imperfect humans after all. Almost every sports story is concerned with this distinction. “On the field they won and lost before a nation;” Roger Kahn wrote in The Boys of Summer, his classic 1972 survey of the Brooklyn Dodgers, “the clubhouse was a sanctuary, and once inside you tried to relate public performance with private role.”
Wednesday afternoon, following what he called an “unusually productive and busy meeting,” the NFL commissioner Roger Goodell concerning the league’s response to player protests. “This season, all league and team personnel shall stand and show respect for the flag and the anthem,” Goodell’s statement read. “Personnel who choose not to stand for the anthem may stay in the locker room until after the anthem has been performed.” Teams whose employees do not abide by the rules will incur fines, and those employees will face “appropriate discipline” from Goodell himself.
