In a what could be a watershed Red Pill moment in sports media, ESPN Radio and TV hosts Max Kellerman and Marcellus Wiley turned down a ticket on the “Crucify Ray Rice Express.” Instead, they called for caution and patience for the facts to unfurl, and patently rejected the concept of male self-defense as a moral failing.
Ray Rice is a star running back for the 2013 Super Bowl champion Baltimore Ravens, with a sterling reputation for character, work ethic, and is well known for his infectious and ebullient personality.
That all took a major hit Valentine’s Day weekend after a fateful night at a New Jersey casino. On February 14, Rice and his fiance, Janay Palmer, went to dinner at Revel Casino. Details are still sketchy, but witnesses say that a verbal altercation ensued at some point during the evening, and that at some point it became physical, with Palmer striking Rice a few times. Both parties were arrested for the disturbance.
Within days, a video surfaced that showed Rice exiting an elevator, dragging a limp Palmer in front of him. Based on this, many were ready to make Rice into Ike Turner or Jim Brown, without regard to circumstance.
On the other hand, WIley & Kellerman, who host “SportsNation” on ESPNU, took a nuanced view. If Palmer was beating on Rice as some reports allege, then she was partially responsible for the end result.
Neither man took sides, which is victory for fairness and a bold position in this social and political climate. Kellerman took a firm stance for treating women as, well, fully sentient human beings and moral agents, stating emphatically, “if an adult strikes another adult, you are at their mercy.”
Wiley, a former NFL Defensive Tackle, relates a story where his live-in girlfriend began to strike him about the face. He was able to maneuver himself out of the house, and get to a neighbor’s, but recognizes that had he been in the house when arrested, HE would have been the one in the headlines (and the mugshot).
Kudos to Kellerman and Wiley, both fathers of daughters, for taking a stand for due process and against the entitlement to hit with impunity that drives many women to write checks they can’t possibly cash. At the very least, we know two households where both boys AND girls are being taught the message, “keep your hands to yourselves.” With what we know about gender parity in domestic violence, if more folks similarly raised their daughters the same way, the rate of intimate partner violence would plummet.
