Antonio Cromartie expects to play despite his rib injury and it's a good thing since fans expect the same

“If I am all that you desire, then why are you never, ever satisfied. I could give you the world and you’d still cry your refrain again and again.”

Lyric from: This Lullabye from the album We R In Need of a Musical Revolution

Written By: Esthero, Sean Lennon

Performed by: Esthero

A few days ago I was watching ESPN and noticed an NFL injury update scrolling across the bottom of the screen in the ticker. Apparently, Antonio Cromartie was suffering from a rib injury and a punctured lung and, I wondered to myself if he was going to play this week.

Today, during my Sunday morning ritual of reviewing my fantasy team lineup, adjusting my roster and checking it twice, news updates revealed that in spite of ankle and groin injuries respectively, two of my top performers, Calvin Johnson and Steve Johnson, would be playing today. Curiosity moved me to get an update on Cromartie as well. According to this article http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/sports/football/cromarties-ribs-hurt-but-his-pride-is-fine.html  from the New York Times a couple of days ago, aside from wearing some additional “stuff” to protect his torso and a few adjustments in his coverage style to keep penalties down, all was well. Cromartie would be on the field for the Jets' Sunday night matchup against the Ravens. I was relieved to have my suspicions confirmed about the type of player Cromartie is, he’s tough, just like I like NFL players to be.

And then a strange thing happened. I had a crazy thought. That thought being that if my mother called me and said that she had just come home from her doctor’s appointment where she learned that she had a broken rib and a punctured lung there is NO WAY I would let her go to work tomorrow. It wouldn’t even be an option. In fact, I would be upset that she had driven herself home from the appointment instead of calling me to pick her up. I would berate her for trying to be “tough” in the face of such a serious health matter. And for those of you that are saying but come on, that’s your mom, a double standard check in revealed that I would in fact have a similar reaction to this situation if that phone call came from my brother.

You know, the lungs are not a non-essential part of our anatomy. In fact, bless my heart for quoting Wikipedia here but according to the site, “The lung is the essential respiration organ in many air-breathing animals.” Could it be that I think less of Cromartie’s body’s need to “transport oxygen from the atmosphere into the bloodstream, and to release carbon dioxide from the bloodstream into the atmosphere” (more from Wikipedia) than I think of my mother and brother’s needs to do the same. No, that can’t be true. But here I am expecting this man to perform a function today far more violent than driving a car.

Now I am considering something else. Much is made of athletes’ screw ups-the bar fights, the drunk driving and so forth-and the fact that these happen likely as a result of their sense of entitlement. We shower them with so much praise that they think they can get away with anything. Overpaid, spoiled brats we often call them. I would like to offer an alternate theory. Maybe, just maybe their outsized, egoistic perception of themselves is more of a reflection of our outsized super human expectations of them and not of our praise.

The last time I had to talk myself into doing something challenging, I drew on the courage I had exhibited in a past challenging experience to help me make the decision to pull through. At times we have all used this technique to train ourselves to explore past our presumed limitations. We get to do this amid people’s normal expectations of our abilities. In making his decision to play this week my guess is that Cromartie implored a similar thought process but under the guise of our highly inflated expectations of him. Now consider this, Cromartie goes out after the game tonight with a few of his buddies and has a few beers. He feels a bit buzzed as he prepares to drive home. Then he remembers that just a few hours earlier he played aggressive, shut down coverage against the Ravens with a punctured lung. He says to himself if I did that then surely I can stay focused enough to get myself home without incident.

DISCLAIMER: As a victim of a car accident in which I sustained a broken collarbone and facial lacerations requiring 32 stitches because an idiot decided to drive drunk, I am not making excuses for someone foolishly deciding to get behind the wheel after having too much to drink. And I was lucky. Many of us have lost loved ones because of drunk driving. Also, I am using Cromartie as an example in this hypothetical scenario. This is not a true story.

But it could be the story of how these guys arrive at some of their poorest decision making. We give our “praise” too much credit. Our praise is very fleeting. Brett Farve played in a Monday Night Football game the day after his father died. My father died on December 26, 2005 and I didn’t go to work the day after or the day after that and no one expected me to. But we all expected Farve to play. I admired him for living up to that expectation. But that admiration has been a distant memory during my incessant criticism of the saga of his retired/not retired drama. In last year’s NFL playoffs, Bears fans praised Cutler for his part as a responsible game manager in getting the Bears to the NFC Division Championship. That was before the game. After the game, Bears fans called Cutler weak and soft for leaving the game with a knee injury. They expected him to return to the action. I gave him a hard time as well. Me, the same person who has been babying a “tweaked” knee for the past month, being careful not to push it too hard in yoga. Yoga, where there is absolutely zero possibility of being flattened by a blitz or a sack.

In sports we expect super human feats and despise ordinary human response. By the time an NFL player makes it to the league he has endured a lifetime of those expectations. Guys start to expect the super human stuff of themselves as well. And so maybe, just maybe in this complex world we live in it is our great expectations that beget their dumb decision making and not our praise. Our praise doesn’t hold a candle to our expectations…