Lee Geiger

Two things make men stupid; beautiful women and sports.

Colin Cowherd

Question:  What do NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and my mom have in common?

Answer: They got me thinking about a very important life lesson I learned almost forty years ago.

Last week, Ray Rice, a 27-year old Baltimore Ravens running back considered one of the premier players in the NFL, received from Commissioner Goodell a two-game suspension (and the loss of game checks totaling $529,000) for his February 2014 domestic violence arrest at an Atlantic City casino. Video later surfaced that showed Rice dragging fiancé Janay Palmer, apparently unconscious, out of an elevator. Immediate reaction was that Rice got off light, but according to Peter King, a widely-respected writer of all matters related to the NFL, Rice avoided a much harsher four-game suspension due to the following:

• Rice’s wife (they were married months after the incident), a source said, made a moving and apparently convincing case to Goodell.
• This was Rice’s first violation of any NFL policy in his six-year NFL career.
• Rice was not convicted of a crime in conjunction with the incident, and the New Jersey prosecutor chose not to pursue a case against him last spring after he entered a pre-trial counseling program.
• Rice has been the Ravens’ leading play in volunteer work in the community. At the time of the assault, he led a Maryland anti-bullying campaign.

So what does this have to do with my dear old departed mother? Read on.

It was a fog-shrouded Saturday afternoon in October 1976, the fall semester of my junior year of high school. I had just staggered through the door of our Carmel, CA condo after playing a football game. Our butts had been kicked across our home turf by Seaside High, and I played the worst game of my life. I was our team’s middle linebacker, and the Pirate offense ran around, past, and over me. It was a tough day.

Mom was on the sofa, smoking a cigarette and drinking a high-ball (it was after noon, after all. It was also the Seventies). Her mouth was covered by a doctor’s surgical mask, a fashion accessory she wore to hide the fact she couldn’t wear her dentures for six months (her jaw had just been rebuilt–another story for another time). When she asked how I played, I said in a tired, cranky voice, “Terribly.” Then, in a moment of whiny rage, I decided to add a few more choice words…”AND IT”S YOUR F-ING FAULT!”

The logic calculator in my spoiled, teenaged head said I had played a poor game because Mom and I had had an argument that morning. I have no memory of what it was about, but I’m sure it must have been important. That’s probably why I swore at her, even though I knew swearing in her presence was a verboten rule, punishable by being force-fed liver for dinner. I didn’t care, though. Our team had lost a football game, I played like crap, and I was laying the blame at her size six feet.

Mom narrowed her brown eyes, sipped from her drink and took drag off her Salem. Then she went upstairs to her bedroom, only to return with a thick black leather belt fashioned with a hockey puck-sized belt buckle. I knew why she had dug this from her dungeon, but I hadn’t seen it in years, not since the time she caught me throwing the liver into the garbage when I was nine. I used to cover my eyes and cower in fear whenever I saw that weapon of massive destruction, but that was then. I was now a rough and tough football stud, and she was a fifty-something wisp of a woman who didn’t scare me anymore. Or so I thought.

She raised her arm and began to take a mighty swing at my legs. But unlike my previous punishments, where I took my medicine and prayed for mercy, I caught her off at the pass and grabbed her by her wrist. I took on an aura of casual nonchalance, like Clint Eastwood in a bar fight looking down the barrel of a .357 Magnum. Mom, on the other hand, looked up at me from her dainty 4’11” frame and shot a bolt of lightning through the back of my head. “Get your hands off of me, right now” she said in a soft yet firm whisper. My loving mother had never looked at me this way, not in all my seventeen years of roaming the planet. I could tell she was serious, so I let go. Then she removed her doctor’s mask. Now I knew I was REALLY in trouble.

“If you ever, in your life Mr. Lee Wilson Geiger, place your hands in anger upon a woman again, so help me God I’ll replace this leather belt with a steel machete, and I don’t care if I ever see a single grandchild out of you.”  Mom grabbed the belt again, only this time she wrapped it around her hand, leveraging the entire massive girth of that gold belt buckle. “Now turnaround and pull down your pants.”

Memo to Mr. Goddell—You’re no Marcine Geiger.