Julie Kendall
Kyle Williams’ name was trending on Twitter following the NFC Championship game on Jan. 22, after the San Francisco 49ers kick returner made two critical errors in the fourth quarter and in overtime, which led to two turnovers and ten points scored by the opposing Giants. Most of the tweets directed at Williams were death threats, presumably from 49ers fans, who immediately posited all their sorrows and frustrations about missing out on a trip to Super Bowl XLVI on this one man. One tweet suggested he jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, while another proclaimed “@KyleWilliams_10 HOPE U RUN n2 A BULLET DA WAY U RAN INTO DAT BALL…”
Did Williams lose the game for the 49ers? You could argue that. Are death threats warranted? Absolutely not. The cruelty of these sub-140-character virtual messages reveals an ugly side to passionate sports fandom.
Last week a Huffington Post blogger shared with the internet a hand-written letter by his godson, seven-year old Owen Shure, sent to Kyle Williams to make him feel better about losing the game. According to the writer, the child was inconsolable following the devastating loss. In between his sobs, Owen asked with heartbroken anguish and a childlike innocence, “Why…did he…have…to…fumble?” To Owen, Williams’ mistakes were not a result of stupidity or lack of effort. He presumed the influence of an external force, an unexplained power that decides the outcomes of plays and games, that arbitrarily determines which fans will be celebrating and which will be mourning. Adults like to believe in this power too, as evidenced by the typical fan’s tendency to bite their lips nervously and mumble prayers to a higher power on third-and-goal. But many would rather appear rational; when something goes wrong, it makes more sense to identify a scapegoat than to say, “It just wasn’t in the cards.”
In an effort to get Owen to stop crying, his father asked, “If you feel this way, how sad do you think Kyle Williams is?” Reminded of the mysterious game-changing powers kids believe in, he challenged his son to change his conception of the game and its players. Behind those face-obscuring, impersonal, corporate logoed helmets, it is easy to forget that those players are men who dedicate an extraordinary amount of physical and emotional energy to a competition. Their self-worth is inextricably linked to their performance on the field. Anyone who’s ever been an athlete can attest to these feelings, which we as spectators become removed from.
The disconnect between player and fan is immense, facilitated by our culture of corporatizing athletics, hero worship and anonymous virtual social interaction. It is in such a context that Kyle Williams was demonized and threatened over the Internet because of a rather innocuous human error.
That’s why Owen’s actions are so heartwarming. Recognizing human affliction in a pro athlete, he picked up a pen and paper to tell “Mr. Williams” that he “had a great season” and “should be very proud, so I wanted to say thank you..”
Julie,
While you said many reasonable things in your editorial, the best of them were overshadowed by the too weak claim you made in the headline.
To claim that death threats are “unwarranted” in this case might tempt the reader to imagine that you believe that in some circumstances they might, in fact, be warranted. I’m going to go ahead and make the not very bold moral claim that death threats are *always* unwarranted and that death threats related to sports loses are a special sort of unredeemable silliness that can’t be remedied by an editorial or, for that matter, a letter to the editor.