The NFL is a Mass Entertainment business. Mass Enternainment businesses carefully craft and then guard the public "personas" of their "stars" or "entertainers." There's a reason for this. Many of us might not like our entertainers too much if we knew their true characters or were privy to their private behavior.
In this thread, we see an example of what happens when the veneer is broken and the audience gets an insight into who the stars or entertainers "are," even if they haven't committed a crime or done anything reprehensible themselves.
In the cases of Portis and Samuels, based on their ill-informed and stunningly ignorant comments on dog fighting, we apparently have men with severely underdeveloped social consciences and senses of propriety. In other words, as much as we might be entertained by (or even enjoy) watching them perform on Sunday afternoon, as persons, they're not folks we would want to know or with whom we would choose to associate.
How much do we want or need to know about who our stars "really are?" Should each of us limit our viewing to those players whose character or world-view meets some self-generated standard of acceptance? If we did, my guess is that most of us would end up taking a lot of long walks on Sunday afternoons in the Fall and Winter.
There are, of course, many examples of players who are indeed examples of what we would like to be ourselves or, more importantly, of what we would like our kids to become. But, even here, the lines become gray quickly. I proudly hold Tom Brady up as a role model to my little boys, but I know more than one person whose personal sense of morality is upset that he has publicly fathered a child out of marriage while equally publicly "carrying on" with another woman. It doesn't bother me, but others draw different lines than I do. (Before anyone fires off a knee-jerk "How dare you compare Brady to Portis!" comment, please note that I am not doing that. But, it is a slippery slope when we start to moralize about the private lives or life-styles of our "stars," when they haven't broken any laws or directly harmed another person.)
Are Clinton Portis and his ilk people we should disdain or avoid, or are they just people we really don't want to know too much about? Our Sunday Afternoon version of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell?"
My own resolution of this dilemma is to draw the line at illegal behavior or at physical behavior that directly harms others (as an example of the latter, NFL Players who abuse their wives or smack women around outside of bars, as happened the other day in New York, don't get my support, even if they aren't "charged.") I don't want any team that earns my allegiance to be associated with people like that--as if I needed any more reasons to dislike the Jests.
Portis hasn't broken any laws, but I'd just rather that he keep to himself his opinions about those who have. I don't want to know what he thinks or who he is. Just shut up and play football! Back behind the image, Clinton!
I'll pick and choose players that I think are worthy of being models for my sons and hope that I haven't misjudged to the extent that I wake up one day to find them plastered all over the papers.