Jovan Belcher Murder-Suicide Takes Football Another Step Closer To Its Chris Benoit
Notre Dame Athletic Director’s Pants Smoking — Assertion of Attorney-Client Privilege With USA Swimming in Sex Abuse Doesn’t Hold Water
November 30, 2012Jovan Belcher Next-Day Notes: His Brain — Like the Debate, And Unlike Duerson’s and Seau’s — Is All Over the Place
December 2, 2012Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher, 25, murdered his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins, 22 (mother of their two-month-old daughter) this morning at home, in front of her mother, then drove to the team’s Arrowhead Stadium facility, scuffled with personnel there, and shot himself to death.
Even those who did not know Belcher as either a player or a person extend sympathy to the families and friends of the two dead, and the many traumatized.
In 2009 I wrote the book CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, about the 2007 incident in which WWE’s Chris Benoit murdered his wife and their seven-year-old son before taking his own life.
In my short ebook UPMC: Concussion Scandal Ground Zero, published earlier this year, I wrote: “Sure, we don’t know what the concussion tipping point will be. But I, for one, have a vision of what it could be: for example, a three-time champion quarterback murdering his supermodel wife on the 50-yard line at halftime of the Super Bowl – and taking out the intermission song-and-dance act along with her.”
In a little more than a month, the Notre Dame football team taking the field for the national college championship game will include a player who, two years ago, was cleared of criminal charges and campus discipline after the suicide of a woman who said he had raped her.
The athletic director at Notre Dame, Jack Swarwick, was previously a practicing lawyer and is a long-time business associate and friend of USA Swimming executive director Chuck Wielgus. In a deposition and to this blog, Swarwick refused to discuss his advice to Wielgus on how USA Swimming should handle its longstanding coach sexual abuse scandal, on the grounds that such conversations were attorney-client-privileged.
The malignancies of our sports system are metastasizing. The fanboys and girls can continue to make excuses, rationalize, deny this state of affairs. That is what they do best.
The rest of us will face it and do something about it.
Irv Muchnick