My heart bleeded, girl

I've been thinking about the Superbowl.

The Superbowl this Sunday is pitting two of the oldest, most respected franchises in the NFL against each other. We are all so nice, and "working class", and all that blah, blah, that Packers fans and Steelers fans are having a hard time hating each other, or the opposing team. The two teams are very much alike, and both have a storied history. We can be united in our contempt for Jerry Jones and his icy stadium, which is always fun.

(If the Steelers win, they will be the first team to have won seven Superbowls. Most of the country seems to think that's greedy and excessive, but at least the Steelers don't call themselves "America's Team" or anything ridiculous like that.)

Green Bay's quarterback, Aaron Rogers, is widely thought to be highly skilled in the mold of Tom Brady and Peyton Manning. Pittsburgh's quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, is big, hard to bring down, very dangerous out of the pocket, and when he's in the game, you can never count the Steelers out.

It should be an awesome game and I'm very excited. And when I went to the grocery store yesterday, holy crap, it's like Christmas and Thanksgiving put together, people buying tons of food while decked out in their black and gold.

What I've been thinking about though, is how to reconcile all that with the fact that that same quarterback, who does so many astounding things on the field, who is so much fun to watch, spent the first four games of the season suspended because of two allegations of sexual assault.

There was a Sports Illustrated article this week that implied that Pittsburgh is divided along gender lines in its opinion of Ben. That the menfolk have forgiven him and the women have not. (They also made it sound as if your typical Pittsburgher has a pot belly and wears a dirty ball cap. We do not.) That's not true in the least. I know men - Larry and Adam, for example, who think Ben is a reprehensible human being, and I know women who are all "Ben is awesome, let's blame the victim."

There was actually surprisingly little victim-blaming this past autumn. I say surprisingly, because when a team or an athlete is winning, sometimes people don't care what they do off the field. Here in the 'Burgh, though, it was obvious that a majority of folks would have been willing to give up a potential winning season to see Ben go. Hell, the team didn't even make the playoffs the previous season, so what was there to lose? Also, one time can be written off as a flaky woman trying to get money out of a famous athlete. Twice shows a pattern of, at the very least, Ben putting himself in a position to make bad choices.

And then the Steelers won 3 out of 4 games without Ben, and people were even more inclined to write him off.

Then they kept winning when Ben came back, and he played like Ben, which is pretty amazing, and the sentiment changed. Winning does that. Lots of folks still have their doubts about how he's "turned his life around" and of course, only time will tell if he realized what a dick he was and decided not to be one anymore.

The two cases of alleged sexual assault are very different, and my semi-informed opinion is that in the first case, the woman in question has some real issues with reality, and in the second case, a drunk college girl was corralled into the men's bathroom at a bar and forced to perform oral sex in spite of saying no, while Ben's bodyguard(s), off-duty cop(s) from Pittsburgh, prevented her friends from coming to her aid. She ended up going to the ER because she bumped her head and the Georgia cops at the scene were not particularly helpful, and in fact gave her a hard time because it was Ben Roethlisberger and she really didn't want to press charges, did she?

In neither case were criminal charges filed, for a variety of reasons.

The first impulse of some people is to say the girl in Reno is crazy and the girl in Georgia was drunk, therefore none of it was Ben's fault, besides, look how well he's playing, plus he's been talking about how he's a Christian now.

We can talk about professional athletes and how they spend their whole lives being able to do whatever they want, as long as they continue to win.

We can rank various NFL players and their different crimes. Is obstruction of justice in a double murder (Ray Lewis) better or worse than vehicular homicide? (Dante Stallworth) Than dog-fighting and the torturing and killing of dogs? (Michael Vick) Than sexual assault?

Do people deserve second chances, do they deserve a chance at redemption? How would I feel if Philadelphia was playing this weekend? By all accounts, Michael Vick is working really hard to make up for what he did, and he played fabulously this year. Would I want to see him do well?

Does the fact that Ben has also been amazing this season, that the Steelers made it to the Superbowl, mean that Ben's a good person now, the way the sports radio guys would have you believe?

Am I supposed to be swayed because Ben talks about being "blessed" and points at the sky every time he throws a touchdown pass?

Everybody in Pittsburgh knew Ben was an asshole before this all happened. Will I be impressed if all of a sudden he contacts Larry or the trauma unit where he was a patient after his motorcycle accident and says, hey, you guys were awesome, you saved my life, you took care of me, you dealt with the media without self-aggrandizement or violating my privacy, you protected me from the media when my own security was leaking information, I'm sorry I blew you off when you tried to contact me about maybe visiting some of the kids in the unit once in a while, and I'm sorry I left it to my father to bother to say any kind of thank you?

(And ha, if that happens I'll be pretty damned surprised.)

Adam knows a guy who works locally as a bouncer and he says wherever Ben goes, women and girls are all over him, so none of this is his fault. Lois was at the AFC Championship game and she said for the first time she understood what it must be like to have 65,000 people screaming your name. Imagine if they've been doing it, to some degree or another, since you were 12. But when people are drunk, consent becomes a moot point and a decent human being doesn't take advantage of that. If you can't behave yourself, stay out of small town college bars.

So. My point.

I don't even know how to watch this game. Okay, the way I watched them all this season, I guess. It'll be exciting, and I want them to win, and Ben is not the only player on the field, and he's exciting to watch, and I've been compartmentalizing all along, and I wish him well in the sense that I hope he becomes a decent human being, no matter how that relates to his performance on the field.

And I'll feel just a little bit guilty for rooting for this guy.

The best quote I've seen on the whole thing is from Gary Shelton at the St. Petersburg Times: "Accusations don't mean guilt, but celebrity doesn't mean innocence and success doesn't mean redemption."

His performance on the field doesn't automatically make him a better person. We'll see if the guys in the locker room vote him team captain next year, because they sure didn't this year.