I personally like Richard Sherman, and I greatly respect his football abilities. But, man, from time to time he says some questionable things.
Our own night-shift supervisor Curtis Crabtree, while performing his day-job duties for KJR radio in Seattle, has put together an article picking apart Sherman’s effort to suggest that his controversial threat to “ruin the career” of a Seattle reporter is the latest example of the “fake news” phenomenon.
“Nobody ever knew what I said,” Sherman said in an interview with ESPN, via Crabtree. “Once again, ‘sources say.’ Who was there? Did anybody see it? Who was there? Who said it?”
Asked directly by Cari Champion of ESPN whether the quote was not correct, Sherman said, “Nobody knows. Nobody knows what was correct. All you hear is, ‘He said, she said.’”
In this case, there was no misunderstanding. Sherman said what he said, and people heard it. But, possibly taking his cue from the current political climate at the highest reaches of American government, Sherman has opted to dismiss anything that casts him in a negative light as not real.
“It gets to the point where nobody needs the truth anymore,” Sherman said. “Nobody cares to know what the truth is. You can just fabricate a story and go with it and then I got to defend a fabricated story. After a while you just get irritated of defending stories that don’t exist. So it’s like, why would I talk to you when I can write my own story?”
The man who plays football in Washington state had gone to the next level in his homage to certain recent residents of Washington, D.C. Sherman isn’t simply saying that other people are saying false things about him; he’s saying that words he actually uttered weren’t said.
And so a bizarre story that everyone presumed to be over has now sprouted a new chapter that somehow is even more bizarre than any of those already written. Maybe Sherman’s next move will be to claim that the reporter actually threatened to ruin Sherman’s career.