Have you ever met a person that really needed a good punch in the face? Andre Johnson has.
We have all met those people. They run their mouths and get in your face, and all you can do is try your hardest to keep your cool.
On an everyday basis, it's easy to block these people out. You grit your teeth and move on with your life, but imagine that it is this person's job to hit you repeatedly for three hours.
The fight between Houston Texans wide receiver Andre Johnson and Tennessee Titans cornerback Cortland Finnegan has sparked controversy in the National Football League about how such altercations should be viewed and dealt with.
In the aftermath of Sunday's game, many analysts denounced the event as appalling and were in shock at what they had watched.
Why?
Sure, fights in the NFL are a rarity. The worst that we usually see is two groups of players being separated by referees during pregame, as words are shouted back and forth. Recently, it seems that spitting has become popular as a means of expressing dissatisfaction with an opponent.
But is it really that hard to understand why two players would come to blows during a game?
Fighting may be unheard of in the NFL, but it has its place in other major sports. All sports fans are familiar with baseball's bench-clearing brawls. Yes, these occurrences are frowned upon by the league, but when they happen, there is usually nothing more than a couple of ejections for the instigators and the world keeps turning.
The most obvious example of fighting in sports is hockey. Fighting is so prevalent in hockey that it is actually considered part of the game. There has been talk recently of the National Hockey League banning fighting, but there has never been any large-scale support for the rule change.
Hockey players, just like football players, are paid to hit each other for the entirety of play. There is already animosity between opponents merely because they are competing against each other. Adding physical contact to this can only lead to emotions boiling over.
Players that pride themselves on pushing their opponents over the edge make this even worse. In real life, we have four-letter words for these people but in the sports world, we call them Cortland Finnegan.
Finnegan is infamous around the league for being a dirty player. He has been accused of everything from run-of-the-mill trash talk to eye gouging. Sunday's game against the Texans was no different.
The battle throughout the game between Finnegan and Johnson was decidedly physical. The two had been getting at each other every time they lined up to play. Both players were guilty of late hits and not-so-legal contact, and it eventually broke down to Johnson taking off Finnegan's helmet and punching him repeatedly in the head.
Good for him. Analysts can talk all they want about how players should hold their standards higher than the average person, and fans can jabber all they please about what a disgrace fighting in football is. But the fact is that it's a game based on hitting.
Would we feel different if Johnson threw a Hines Ward-style block that broke Finnegan's jaw just because it was "within the rules?"
Probably, but it was still pretty great to see Finnegan get put in his place.
E-mail: ccbeyer@buffalo.edu
