Justin Tugger
It’s amazing how much some new information can shift your perspective.
Before last week, DeShaun Watson felt like an outlier of sorts. A predator amongst predators. A horrible villain, a monster, a giant snake visible to all of us that we cannot do anything about. A uniquely terrible man who did uniquely terrible things. But during the entire Watson scandal, one thing always bothered me. It bothered a lot of other people too. Why didn’t any of his peers ever seem to really condemn him?
Watson got hate from us, the fans. He got hate from the media. He got hate from the justice system in certain ways. Most people seemed to agree: Watson Bad. But most of his fellow players and peers stayed quiet, and many even defended him. I think many of us took it as a sign that the league is full of people who simply don’t think he did anything bad, or that many feared talking about it and making a point would result in professional or peer backlash. For those of us with that fear, it feels confirmed now. Watson may still be a uniquely terrible case of offender, but it now seems clear that this abuse and harassment of massage industry workers is probably much worse, and far more commonplace, than expected. His peers defended him because, well, it’s part of a culture. If Watson did something wrong, then a lot of them likely have too.
Justin Tucker was a golden boy until this season. He was probably the second surefire hall-of-fame kicker, a legend who broke through by being the most accurate long-distance leg in NFL history. One of the few NFL kickers to become a household name for good reasons. But this year the tables turned on his old ass. Tucker started shanking kicks at an alarming rate, and other kickers seemed to catch up to his methods, bringing the average made field goal distance much higher. Well, the world caught up to Tucker as he fades away. A sad way to go, but that’s how it rolls. Then last week we find out he’s a pervert creep.
A small paper called the Baltimore Banner investigated what seemed to be one of those local rumors and possibly found fire in the smoke. Tucker is now facing 9 different allegations of improper conduct. Nothing as extreme as some of Watson’s behavior, but certainly within the realm of harassment. Many of these allegations are from some time ago, around 2012-16ish. I find the allegations easy to believe for many of the same reasons I found Watson’s easy to believe. A described pattern of similar behavior from multiple different independent sources. I have always found the fact that Watson used so many different masseuses as my personal smoking gun that he was a creep. People tend to be loyal to those who serve them well. We go to the same local restaurants and hope for the same servers. Women find hairdressers who do a good job on them and follow them to the ends of the earth. Athletes tend to be loyal too. Loyal to their trainers, their dieticians, their childhood friends in their entourage. Tom Brady found that snake oil doctor guy and made a whole business with him. That was Tom’s guy. In the Netflix Quarterback show, we met Kirk Cousin’s sports doctor who worked on him every week. When you find someone that gives you the treatment that you respond best to, you fucking stick with that guy. If you are going and using a lot of different people for the same service…that’s a red flag the size of the star-spangled banner.
There is also the matter of the old rumors. After the story dropped, some people found some old tweets and old reddit posts suggesting that Tucker had a local reputation in the Baltimore massage community. It makes you wonder about every rumor and hushed tones story you hear about people behind the scenes, from locals in an industry who somehow know a guy who says stuff. Tucker took a pretty hardline defense of himself in response, but I’m not inclined to believe him. All this has done was mostly convince me that this is not a Watson and Tucker problem. It’s probably much, much worse. Probably a constant issue in the massage community. It’s sickening too, because it’s clearly just about power and perversion. There are places you can get your rocks off by workers all over the place. Robert Kraft probably has a good list if you are in the market. If you need to get jacked off go to those! Being a creep who touches someone just trying to do a professional athletic job makes you a loser. These rich guys have the money to get creepy and that makes the clinics look the other way a lot of the time and it’s terrible. Just a terrible environment that leads to shit like this. Tucker sucks, and I have zero doubt he’s not the only athlete with a reputation from multiple massage clinics. We just don’t know the others.
So fuck Justin Tucker I guess. Justin Fucker? Justin Tugger? I wonder if he gets cut now. I also wonder how much the Ravens knew.
A lot of people in the Ravens fandom seemed to buy the whole “we care about character” thing hook, line, and sinker. I, for one, did not. They’re just like any other NFL org, if you suck or are unproven they’ll cut you for character concerns but if you’re good they’ll cover shit up. Would not surprise me to learn that they knew about this and had their fixers bury the story until it became convenient to leak it and use it to cut him because he sucks as a player now.
How the fuck can you have a team with Ray Lewis and Ray Rice as alumni and possibly believe this? (Not you, the fandom you’re mentioning).
That is some serious cognitive dissonance.
Some try to point to the Ray Rice thing as “We did the right thing and cut him!”, and yeah we did cut him, but only when the video got leaked to the press. The org knew who he was and was perfectly content to bury it because he was good at running a football. They just got caught with their pants down and had no choice.
Or you could find a spot with male masseuses.
[Tucker: Jokes on you! I’m into that shit, too!]
Annual return of the scumbag Kicker
Bosgod is the new NO. 1 kicker
“red flag the size of the star-spangled banner” appropriate Baltimore reference
There’s no way the Ravens were blind-sided by this. Much like the Texans with Watson, it would be impossible for none of the reports to make their way up to the front office. Now, I don’t necessarily think they went the “paid-off nda” route that the Texans did, at least I certainly hope not, but I also wouldn’t be surprised at all if the Ravens (like many teams, to be fair) have “a guy” who is in charge of interventions to keep stories from leaking out. (Remember, we’re talking about the organization who colluded with the NFL to keep the Ray Rice thing to rumors and unsubstantiated hear-say until someone leaked the video, and even then *still* tried to do nothing about it.)
The bigger problem, that you pointed out Dave, is: how much more widespread is this? Which players and stars have done this multiple times, and just how big of a culture is it behind the scenes?
You HAVE to imagine the Ravens….and any organization for that matter has a “clandestine PR department” that tracks what guys are doing and at the very least has some knowledge of it. Maybe they give them an undocumented slap on the wrist? Maybe they just give ownership and C-Suite advance warning of incoming trouble? Who knows?
It’s strange, or maybe it isn’t strange, that learning about Watson and Tucker makes Robert Kraft look less bad in comparison. He went to a massage parlor that he *knew* provided sexual acts (the workers were sex trafficked, but apparently he didn’t know about that part), and paid for those acts upfront, and got what he paid for. Watson and Tucker, and others like them, just went to regular-ass massage places that provide regular massage therapy, and then tried to coerce sexual stuff out of people. Some of Tucker’s accusers say he was trying to be subtle, but still pushing and crossing boundaries. He knew what he was doing wasn’t appropriate, he was trying to see what he could get away with, and with whom.
If we’re being real the only reason people judge Kraft is because he’s an old man. Otherwise it would just be a funny joke and not something people tried to moralize about.
Well, old and rich. He can afford all sorts of high class call girls, but instead went to a sketchy massage parlor.
“I wonder if he gets cut now.”
Man, I know it’s bad but forced castration seems like an inhumane punishm- Nevermind.
“Robert Kraft probably has a good list if you are in the market”
The place Robert Kraft went to had trafficked workers, so maybe don’t go there. I suspect most places that give these services are similarly staffed, too.
The last several months of sports news have just been a constant cycle of what feels like the craziest story ever dropping seemingly out of nowhere, leaving you thinking “Nothing’s gonna top this.” And then 2 weeks later an even crazier story drops that elicits the exact same response.
Like genuinely, who the hell could have seen this Tucker news coming–oh what’s that? The Mavericks traded Luka Doncic for scraps?????
Not just sports.
Ever crazier stories from Washington have made it difficult for me to care about crazy sports stories.
“Probably a constant issue in the massage community.”
my GF is an LMT, and this is very true. it comes down to management. a zero-tolerance policy is the ONLY way. one guy gets away with being a creep, and that establishment is going downhill fast.