Dez Bryant Shouldn't Have Picked Up the Tab: Why We Shouldn't Celebrate Hazing

The story seems innocent. The rookie doesn't carry the pads so he picks up a $55,000 tab. Ha ha ha! Very funny! That'll learn the rook! Maybe next time he won't think he's bigger than the team.

The problem with that portrayal of the story is that it is an endorsement of hazing, and hazing is not only dangerous, it's deadly. So deadly in fact that every year kids die in hazing incidents. Since 1970, there has been at least one death every year directly attributed to hazing. Not just one a year, but at least one each year. That tells me that it's not an isolated incident, it's systemic.

Hazing is a part of our culture, it's not just bound to sports. It's in colleges, high schools, the military, and variations of it are in many professions. Proponents state it's virtues: it helps build camaraderie, teaches the initiates, rookies, freshmen, and so on to respect those who have been there.

The arguments tend to the line that by suffering through tribulation together, the hazed earn respect for one another and the respect of the team, and thus the new and the old become a more cohesive whole. It seems to be a productive thing, a modern right of passage. It's precisely why most don't have a problem with it, as long as it stays within limits—it's not overly malicious and remains in good fun, and there's always the freedom to opt out. 

Matthew Carrington, a student at Chico State in 2005, was being hazed into a fraternity. He, along with another pledge, was led down to the basement, where he was stripped completely down and forced to do push-ups and calisthenics while drinking gallons of water until he urinated all over himself over and over again. High-powered fans blasted them with cold blasts of wind all the while.

It kept going until water intoxication caused his brain and lungs to swell, leading him to pass out. None of his fraternity "brothers," with whom this supposed camaraderie was being built, were with him at the hospital when he died. Those who hazed him to death probably thought they were staying within reasonable limits. 

There are literally hundreds of stories available on the Internet about hazing incidents. Googling "hazing horror stories" or "hazing deaths" will give you multiple hits. When you read them, it hardly sounds like "fun," but it's amazing how often the word is used.

People apparently have "fun" with other people by forcing them to drink lethal amounts of alcohol and water; body slamming and beating on them in "abuse stations;" stripping them down to their underwear and forcing them to walk or swim in freezing temperatures, piling them and suffocating them into cars.

Such "fun" has been the factor in deaths of young people in every one of those cases. In every case, the victims were begging their "brothers/sisters/teammates" to stop. In every case, the abuse continued

Consider this: When the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and the whole world was aghast, some conservative talk show hosts said something about it not being any worse than college hazing.

The comments were meant to reflect the relative nature of the "torture." The other side of the comparison went ignored. What does it say about hazing that it can be compared to torture at all?  In truth, if our military were to do many of the same things to a POW that students do to one another, they would be committing war crimes. The words "war crimes" and "fun" don't seem to mesh well with me. Malice is involved, and the initiates are not allowed to stop it. That's the reality.

Grant Wahl of Sports Illustrated writes compellingly about this incident in Pennsylvania at a football camp where freshmen were tortured in the evenings, the worst of it being when they were sodomized with a broom stick by one of the biggest players on the team. What's so compelling about it is not just the abuse itself, but the reaction of the town in response to it. While most agreed that the players "went to far," there was considerable backlash, by adults and children, against the children who eventually came forward and reported it.

This "reporting" only happened after one of the children (and at 14 years old, they are children) had been back home for several days and still bleeding persistently from the rectum, asked his mother to take him to the hospital. Eventually, his mother coaxed out of what happened. The mother tried addressing the issue at the school, who stonewalled her and suggested she call the police. They gave her the run-around, too. Then she finally got some help from the Nasau County SVU. An investigation was finally launched. 

The abusers were expelled from school, and brought up on criminal charges, and the football season was cancelled, but the horror wasn't over for the abused. They were called "broomsticks f___s" and other such insults routinely, as though they had forced the perpetrator to rape them. They were blamed for the season being cancelled. There was much sentiment that they should have been "team players" and kept the abuse to themselves. These incidents are illustrative of what the real problems are with hazing. 

It's easy to be shocked by the stories above and then think, "Yes, those are wrong, but this isn't what happened here. All that happened here is that a rookie got left with a $55,000K tab. True, but that's the first domino. When the media promotes this sort of thing, the inevitable chain of other dominoes follows until someone is raped or dead.

Consider the following "dominoes" that inevitably fall:

1. Hazing gets glorified. There is a vast cultural acceptance of hazing. When things go too far we then ask ourselves why, but when NFL players are taped to goal posts, or New York Yankees are made to parade the streets in costumes or women's clothes, we make light of it. Oh, look how much fun they're having! The problem is that we aren't the only ones seeing and noticing these things. There are high schoolers, as young as 15 years old, who are waiting their turn at hazing the next group of freshmen, and those guys are going to get it even worse than they did. And if they have thought that what they are doing is wrong, they have ESPN there to vindicate it for them.
2. Hazing is abusive. There's the abuse itself—verbal, physical, sexual or implied, but it's all still abuse. Joining a team just shouldn't open you up to abuse, period! When kids see this or someone being taped to a goal post, they aren't going to stop there. 
3. Hazing gets progressively worse. In the Pennsylvania case, the boys who carried out the most malicious attacks were hazed themselves during their freshmen year, not with broomsticks, but still quite horribly. They then resolved that they were going to make it worse for the next group of kids. It's a common theme in hazing stories. Each year the kids try to amp it up and make it worse for next group of kids. Eventually, things cross a line. 
4. Hazing is unrestricted and unsupervised. The innate nature of hazing is that it's not supervised. The human brain, particularly the frontal lobe, isn't fully developed until the mid-20s. The primary function of that is higher reasoning and the ability to understand consequences. This is important because even on a biological level, the kids don't know when things go too far. That's why when things do cross a line, they don't stop. The older end of the spectrum is 20 years old! That's still pretty young and foolish, especially when your youthful foolishness has caused a situation in which someone is potentially dying. The young people, rather than doing the responsible thing like call an ambulance, wish the problem away, and that doesn't happen. Instead, people die. 
5. Hazing is ignored. It is easy to think that as it's not overly malicious and the kids being hazed can stop it, it's fine. The adult population thinks, "kids are kids" and lets things pass. The problem is that what makes hazing hazing is essentially that it is malicious and the person being hazed is powerless. 
6. Hazing kills. No one sets out to kill someone, or to have things get out of control. What happens though is that we tell kids that abuse is OK as long as it's under the guise of hazing, then we turn them loose and let those least equipped to understand the ramification of what can happen do these things to one another. Bad becomes worse, and worse become lethal. We don't see the line from picking up a $55,000 tab to dying from drinking too much water, but it''s there. Things didn't start when the hazing started, it started when hazing became an acceptable part of our culture. 

Now, having said all that I want to address one more thing—the notion that somehow hazing builds team spirit and helps the team come together. On that I have two things to say. First, that's just perception, not reality. Numerous studies have shown that hazing produces less team cohesion, not more. You can read one such report here.

However, rather than go  into a lot of detail, I'd just like to site one simple fact: three of the four teams who reached the conference finals last year do not practice hazing, and neither of the teams in the Super Bowl do. It seems apparent, that whether you can build team cohesion through hazing or not, you don't need to practice hazing to do it. So why haze if you don't have to?

Someone is going to die this year from hazing. The kids who are gong to kill him have no intention of doing so. They are just going to be carrying out a tradition. When it happens, there will be some that wonder where things went wrong, but they'll isolate their views to that selected community, whether it's a team or a fraternity. They probably won't think twice about the summer story of Dez Bryant and how the media cajoled over the "time honored tradition of hazing."