Whining Steelers back 'slave' to ignorance

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Steelers running back Rashard Mendenhall appeared to fumble Wednesday when he likened NFL players to slaves in a post to his Twitter account. Perhaps not as badly as he fumbled in the team's recent Super Bowl loss, but he seemed to clearly cough up the rhetorical flourish.Remarking on another player's comments regarding the ongoing NFL labor dispute, Mendenhall wrote: "Anyone with knowledge of the slave trade and the NFL could say that these two parallel each other."Likely upon realizing that Mas'r Art Rooney II probably wasn't pleased with that assertion, NFL Pittsburgh Steelers Jerseys Mendenhall insisted he hadn't meant the league was a slave industry."I said they parallel each other," he said in a follow-up Twitter posting. "They run the same course. These paths will never cross, but they mirror each other."My online dictionary defines "mirroring" as "accurately mimicking or imitating something." Seems Mendenhall was contending that football players are virtual slaves, and was hoping no one would look up "mirroring" in an online dictionary.
I posed that question to Rob Ruck, a University of Pittsburgh history professor and author of four books on sports-related topics. "In terms of things like wages and working conditions, it's a heck of a stretch," he said.I didn't doubt Ruck's expertise. NFL Jerseys But in fairness to the 'Hall, I decided to put on my referee cap and review the play.The review consisted of attempting to identify parallels between a reasonably productive professional football player, and the lives of the human chattel that helped drive the pre-Emancipation Proclamation agricultural economy of the South.Surprisingly,Gucci Sweaters, I discovered that their lifestyles are not nearly as dissimilar as one might think. The paths of Mendenhall and any 19th-century slaves obviously never will cross, but their lives do mirror each other in many areas.