The Need For Improvement

By Kevin Schroeder
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Updated: December 21, 2015

June. Summer right around the corner. It looked to be another happy one. One spent celebrating a Blackhawks Stanley Cup Championship, the third in six years. The team was celebrated during a parade through the city’s streets followed by a rally at Soldier Field. The Cup made its way around Chicago. As time went on, the jubilation waned as it did the two previous times, but this time it would come to a screeching halt.

August. The dog days of summer. We knew going into this that it wouldn’t be all happy. Some familiar faces would be leaving Chicago. It was a safe bet that a popular one would be among them. But if that was the worst thing that was going to happen, then that was okay. I mean, we’ve been through it before and the team made it back to the top. It wouldn’t be the worst thing that happened, because one morning in August we awoke to news that Patrick Kane was being investigated for rape.

What followed was a circus rivaled in size only by Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. Kane’s attorney was seen arguing with people on Facebook. The grand jury hearing got pushed back because of settlement talks, and then it turned out there were no settlement talks, so who knows why they moved the hearing. Then the Blackhawks announced that Kane would be at training camp. Then at camp, Kane released a statement saying he did nothing wrong and would be cleared. He said nothing else about the case and the Hawks took a beating from the media for a) having Kane there and b) Kane not really saying anything. The attorney for the accuser held a press conference announcing that an evidence bag had been tampered with and then that turned out to be a hoax perpetrated by the accuser’s mother. That attorney left the case and the accuser’s new attorney introduced himself to the case by asking that we pray for the Pope. The season started and Kane got off to a great start, getting jeers from opposing fans in the process. In early November, it was announced that the accuser no longer wished to cooperate and Kane would not face any charges.

To borrow a phrase from Brian Cook of MGoBlog (who gets mentioned often here because I truly believe he is the best at what he does) I am not a journalist, that’s the point of this site. My college degree is not in journalism, nor is it in writing, nor anything to do with communications. I took a creative writing class my freshman year to fulfill an English requirement and had one class later on where we discussed sports media. That is the extent of anything that could be considered formal training that I have. I am just a guy who obsesses over sports and formulates opinions on them and writes those opinions here.

I criticize players and second-guess coaches all the time here, because IANAJTTP. If I thought someone didn’t play well, I’ll tell you that. If I didn’t like a coach’s decision, I’ll tell you that, too. One guy, though, who should not be second-guessed is John McDonough. He has shown time and time again that he is worthy of the benefit of the doubt, so I gave it to him when he decided that Patrick Kane would attend training camp and deliver a statement there. The media, of course, ripped him and the organization for the decision. Allen Muir of Sports Illustrated called the Blackhawks tone-deaf. Sean Gentille of Sporting News called it a “baffling display” and called the Blackhawks tone-deaf and stupid. Christine Brennan of USA Today called on the NHL to suspend Kane. SB Nation echoed the sentiment, quoting Jonathan Toews out of context in the process. In that article, the writers said that by not suspending Kane, the league was implicitly supporting him. If that’s true, then suspending him would be implicitly saying he’s guilty.

However, Eric Macramella of Forbes did point out that Kane had not been charged with anything, or even arrested, and should attend training camp, since, you know, this is still America and all.

The takes didn’t get a whole lot more enlightened once the season started. After some particularly tough jeering from opposing fans in Philadelphia, Greg Wyshynski, who should really know better, said it was okay for opposing fans to keep accusing Kane via chant of being a rapist as long as they did so creatively.

Tim Graham’s reporting on the case was blatantly one-sided. Julie DiCaro was similarly bad. However, she didn’t deserve the comments she got from the meatballs. Seriously, those people suck and ought to be ashamed of themselves. When Erie County District Attorney Frank Sedita announced that Kane would not face charges, the media still felt the need to slam him. Later, with Kane on a historic point streak, Craig Custance, in a video for ESPN, said “It was hard to enjoy the streak after the investigation”. I guess they felt that they had a few more shots at Kane to get in. After all, negativity sells, right? But if you’re going to write these articles that are essentially nothing more than print’s version of clickbait, or in Custance’s case, “Produce Straight Clickbait”, you cannot get indignant when people call you out for doing so. Tim Baffoe wrote at Sports Illustrated that no apology was owed for his writing during the case because he “never wrote a declarative sentence about Kane’s guilt or innocence,” which is only true if he believes that his readers are all slobbering idiots who don’t understand subtext. What these writers did was play that game where you stick your finger an inch away from someone’s face and when they get annoyed by it, say “I’m not touching you,” which while technically true, does not make what you are doing any less annoying.

(Please note that I am only linking to these articles because I need to cite my sources. Frankly, I don’t think they deserve the click, other than Macramella’s Forbes article. Here’s that link one more time.)

Rape is not something to be taken lightly. That goes both ways, though. Many in the media were quick to point out that only 2-8% of rape claims are false. Those numbers are not zero, though, and a false rape accusation can do tremendous damage to someone’s life (Ask Brian Banks). In 2002, Banks was accused of raping a high school classmate. He accepted a plea deal that put him in prison for over five years and required him to wear a tracking device on his ankle after his release. His dreams of playing D-I college football were shattered. It was ten years before the accuser admitted she had made the whole story up and even then, Banks’ conviction was only overturned because he recorded the conversation where she told him she had lied.

There was somebody in the media that handled this well, though: Dan Katz. You know, Big Cat from Barstool Sports. Yes, that Barstool Sports. He was just about the only one who said we should let the facts come out before passing judgment without taking an accusatory tone, riling up his readership, and then pretending like that wasn’t what he was trying to do. And his readership is easily riled. To the actual journalists in Chicago, you were greatly outclassed by Barstool. Do better.

I don’t have a whole lot of good things to say about Sarah Spain, but she deserves credit here, too. Her piece for ESPNW was pretty fair, even if it did entail a lot of hand-wringing.

For my part, I stayed silent on the matter until a conclusion was reached because there were plenty of places on the internet where you could go to read takes on which you could fry an egg that I felt this didn’t need to be one of them. We’re better than that here.

Not that some things written about Kane weren’t valid, though. He has had some real problems off the ice and he does need to grow up and quit putting himself in bad positions. Next time he’s at the United Center, he needs to take a look at the statues of Stan Mikita and Bobby Hull and ask himself if he wants one, too. Jonathan Toews will almost certainly have one there someday. He’ll go down as one of the all-time greats in the history of Chicago sports, too. That’s some pretty great company: Michael Jordan, Walter Payton, Ernie Banks, Scottie Pippen, the aforementioned Mikita and Hull, the list goes on. Patrick Kane needs to ask himself if he wants to be on that list, too. He needs to ask himself if he wants to go down in history as the greatest American hockey player ever, which is certainly realistic. If he wants that stuff, then it’s time to quit acting like a frat boy and really focus. Will he? Dunno. Hope so. Very few others can do the things he can do on the ice. Michael Sneed says he has so far. Hope he maintains that focus.

The meatballs that defended Kane from the start suck. Regardless of the outcome of the case, they should be ashamed of themselves, because they didn’t take the accusations as seriously as they should have. And now, with the outcome being what it is, the so-called journalists who continued to use an accusatory tone with Kane should be ashamed of themselves, because they’re not taking this as seriously as they should. Rape is a horrible thing. And it’s a horrible thing to be accused of. And this is the United States of America, where you are innocent until proven guilty and to prove someone guilty you need evidence. And when there’s not enough evidence to convict someone, let alone charge them, continuing to insinuate that that person may be a rapist is shameful and reprehensible and just flat-out wrong. And that’s not to say the feelings of the accuser shouldn’t matter, because they absolutely do. There are a lot of women afraid to come forward out of fear that they won’t be believed or will be ignored and that sucks. Rape claims should absolutely be taken seriously and then that’s where that part about evidence comes in and talking about situations like that often become a difficult line to walk, but if a smut blogger can figure out how to do it, columnists for serious publications ought to be able to do likewise.

But what do I know, right? After all, IANAJTTP.

Twitter: @KSchroeder2325

E-mail: schroeder.giig@gmail.com