"If that happened on a football field, everyone would laugh and say, '15-yard penalty" and move on. You move forward and try to take it in stride. At the end of the day, you see everybody, you like everybody and you want to be friends and friendly with everybody, but everybody out here I compete against, even the ones I like, they are the ones trying to take away my livelihood. I have to do what I can to get through, and I was proud of myself for doing that." - Ryan Harrison (h/t ShreveportTimes) ----- I'm not sure whether or not the words exchanged between Ryan Harrison and Donald Young Jr. were inappropriate in nature, nor am I going to make any guesses as to what they might have been. I wouldn't know either player if they walked up to me in the middle of the street and began beating me over the head with their personalized racquets, so I'm most certainly not qualified to blindly judge the content of their character. That's why I'll leave it at this. If the best defense of the accused is "it would only be worthy of a 15-yard penalty on a football field" then the accused better tighten his grip on the proverbial soap, because that will quickly have him receiving the broad end of the gavel in the court of public opinion. In fairness to Ryan Harrison, a snowball would probably stand a better in hell then he would on the gridiron, but has he even watched the barbaric game he just used for cross-sport comparison? I can't help but think he's severely undervaluing what it might take to talk yourself into a 15 yard penalty during an NFL game, because 'punishably depraved' by the standards of those that combat each other in competitive assault belongs no where near a tennis court unless said tennis court is being used to host an organized purge. Granted, most are exchanged between members on the same race, but I feel pretty confident in saying that slurs (of varying degrees) fly far more frequently than flags throughout a football game. Therefore, deeming his trash talk during a gentleman's game to be fitting of the type of infraction one receives when they take a decade off the lifespan of a defenseless wide receiver probably isn't in his best interest. To his own point, it's all relative. However, contrary to his point, 15 yards on a football field roughly equates to 5-to-10 years of imprisonment in society, which roughly equates to approximately 25-to-community service (pending appeal and under-the-table pay off, of course) in the high society where professional tennis functions. Again, I'm not saying whether or not he's guilty of racist rhetoric, but - unless he was out there chanting the mission statement of the KKK - he's definitely guilty of having an elementary understanding of the type of unforgivable things that are said between the whistles during contact sports.
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