By fining Stoudemire David Stern greased up the slope.
NBA Commish David Stern is setting himself up to fail if he thinks he can monitor players on Twitter.
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So Amare Stoudemire called a guy “fag”.
A random Twitter user with the handle @Bferrelll (be for real) attacked him on Twitter and Stoudemire responded irresponsibly. Big deal.
It was a big deal to the NBA, apparently. Stoudemire was fined $50,000.
Should he have been?
What if he has used the word “asshole”, instead? Would he have been fined for that? What if he had had used the word “homo” or called the guy “gay man”?
What classifies a slur as finable and, really, is it any of the NBA’s business what its players say on their own time – during the off-season – on Twitter?
The word “fag” was clearly the hot button in this instance. Stern and the NBA have made an admirable effort to stomp out homophobia amongst their ranks and to send a message of tolerance to the fans.
But Amare wasn’t gay bashing. He used the word “fag” in a casual way, not intended to infer that the Twitter user he aimed it at was into dudes.
He’s a basketball player. That’s how most of them talk.
Does the NBA think for a minute that they can disinfect the locker-room language that their players use on the internet? Is Sterns intention to keep tabs on everything every one of his celebrity athletes say? If not, who get fined and who doesn’t?
It’s the slipperiest of slopes.
Where social media is concerned, these guys should be free to say what they want to say, when they want to say it and to whom. It’s up to the fans to put pressure on them to keep their virtual noses clean.
The league has overstepped its bounds.
Players are not property of Stern, Inc. Their job is to work hard, show up for practice and win ball games. They are not ambassadors and, as Chuck Barkley pointed out, they aren’t role models, either.
Why should Stern be allowed to control them off the court and outside the NBA season?
Twitter is a whole new world. It’s the first environment where fans can actually elicit responses from their favorite players directly. The more the players are put on lock down by the leagues the less value Twitter will have for fans. It will become just another media outlet – another source for canned sound bites – if Stern has his way.
Twitter should not be a place only for controlled messages. It should be a place where everyone is free to speak their minds – even if that they say isn’t palatable.
