(R.I.P Geico Gecko. May your free soul never again be confused with a half-rate car insurance plan.)
You gotta love being a world famous sports figure, amirite? Every move examined under a magnifying glass, a legion of people claiming to hate you despite having never come within 100 miles of you before — it sounds fucking wonderful. Just ask Jon Jones. After he got a little tipsy behind the wheel with a couple of friends and wrecked his Bentley in the process, he no more than could check his pants for a bowl of chocolate pudding before said legions of the blind were ready and waiting to bash him anonymously or throw him their undying support.
Don’t be mistaken, Jones had some of the hate coming. The fact that he stated just one month before his brush up with the law that he would never, you know, have a brush up with the law or anything, made his fall from that high horse all the more painful. But so heavy lies the crown, in fact, that the guys over at Sportsnet called upon such UFC stars as Dominick Cruz, Junior dos Santos, and Frank Mir among other to help us cope with this devastating situation.
If you can’t tell by the sarcasm plastered across the last sentence, we are more willing to forgive Jones for his actions than most. The case seems to be the same with Mir, who was content to give the “we all make mistakes” response when questioned on the issue:
I get mad at people that are quick to judge him, you know, ‘How could you ever drink and drive?!’ And I’m not ever going to say it’s right; it’s wrong to drink and drive. But if you’re a person who drinks, and you’re going to tell me that you’ve never gotten behind the wheel when you’ve had more than one beer an hour, or one shot, or one glass of wine; you’ve drove when you shouldn’t have, and you made a mistake.
The difference is, is that he got bit on his bad mistake. The good thing that now, maybe he can learn from it now, and not continue to do that on, but we all fall down. The point is that you get back up and march forward, you acknowledge what you did…I want to meet the person that’s never screwed up.
Oh, Frank. Only you can have us questioning the legitimacy of your claims one day and in your corner the next.
I don’t know about you, Potato Nation, but I side with Mir on this issue. We’re all human, and we like to treat celebrities as if they are something more than that. The television, the internet — they are like our rear windows into the rest of the world, the strip of land that prevents our peninsulas from breaking away from the motherland, if you will. And as Alfred Hitchcock already showed us, viewing someone’s life through one of these rear windows can truly warp one’s perception in regards to forming an opinion of another person. Granted, Jimmy Stewart’s character happened to be correct in his assumptions in that movie, but what I’m trying to say is that until you truly know the man, don’t be so quick to label him as a terrible person for making a couple of mistakes. We all have.
Then again, Jones could always go with dos Santos’ advice and never drink again, a bit of information that my brain can simply not compute.