Jon Gruden isn’t sorry — he’s just sorry he got caught. He’ll get publicly chastised and he’ll privately hide for a few months and then he’ll slowly start to resurface, here and there. And round and round we go in sports — a few months go by and then a new jerk is exposed for saying something terrible, publicly chastised, the whole bit, and round and round we go yet again ... but nothing changes at the core.
The core of the matter is that sports has 1,000 Jon Grudens. Athletes, coaches, owners, there are Grudens everywhere — people who are homophobic or racist or misogynistic or a disgusting combination of the three.
There is a range of jerks, from the worst of the worst to even some good-intentioned people who just aren’t educated properly about compassion or sensitivity or race relations (and they slip up and say something offensive without truly understanding the weight of it). In the NFL, you can be everything from an All-Pro level jerk to a taxi squad jerk (and taxi squad jerks can be actual All-Pro players, and vice versa). As a reporter, I've spent many years around the NFL, first in New Orleans, then Denver and, finally, St. Louis.
