The ongoing Twitter feud between Seattle’s Robert Sherman and the Jets’ easily offended Darrelle Revis is in the words of the New York Post’s Phil Mushnick, “a pathetic boast and putdown-filled dialogue, one that reveals both to be stuck somewhere deep in both childhood and a dangerous neighborhood.” Though that summation is not completely out to lunch, Phil would have you believe that every Twitter entanglement (or at least those between highly paid athletes who in this instance, don’t happen to be white) is a prelude to murder.
Yep, someone dissed someone and now two all-pros are acting as if they’re auditioning for the leads in an updated, Glock-inclusive reprisal of West Side Story. Problem is, they’re both too self-smitten to be embarrassed.
“My season stats looking like Revis career stats,” Sherman, a Stanford man, posted on Twitter as part of a sustained self-promotional campaign loaded with conceit and gratuitous insults of Revis.“I never seen a man before run his mouth like [a] girl,” Revis, a University of Pittsburgh man counter-tweeted. “This dude just steady putting my name in his mouth to get notoriety.”
This is the kind of dirty-look, bad-ass challenge dialogue now commonly found in junior high lunchrooms, high school hallways, among gang-bangers, gangsta rappers and, increasingly, young professional athletes straight out of our colleges.
And increasingly such mindless garbage-talk and stare-downs are followed by the appearance of guns, from which is followed the appearance of blood and then body bags, followed by the explanation by the homicide detectives that the whole thing began with nothing more nefarious than perceived “disrespect.”
Curiously, while Phil seems to have it in for the Twitter medium, he neglected to mention that Sherman took his campaign to the NFL Network’s “NFL AM” show on Thursday morning. Though I’m not willing to embrace the Mushnick POV in this instance (ie. Guns Don’t Kill People, Twitter Kills People), if he wants to campaign for the abolition of all cable sports talk shows, I might finally find myself taking his side.