My Take: Heisman Trophy Winner Kyler Murray Apologizes for Offensive Tweets
- Jack Frantz
- Dec 10, 2018
- 2 min read
Only a few hours after being named the 2018-19 Heisman Trophy winner, Oklahoma quarterback Kyler Murray publicly apologizes for some offensive tweets that had just surfaced. I'm going to explain the situation and give my opinion on the matter.
Apparently someone did some digging, and some serious digging I must say, into Murray's twitter account and found some tweets from when he was about 14 or 15 years old using the word "queers" in conversation with what appear to be friends. Now of course thankfully nowadays these kind of statements are assumed unacceptable and morally wrong as they are potentially offensive to the LGBTQ community. Murray did the right thing in immediately apologizing publicly in what seems to be a well-mannered apology. My only question though is this: is it acceptable for the media to flat-out attack the reputation of a genuine talented athlete for some old tweets from high school, right after winning one of the most well known awards in sports? This is becoming more and more common for the sake of a headline story, and it's starting to get on my nerves.
We can all agree that the tweets (shown below) are unacceptable, and there's no questioning that. However, those words were tweeted as an adolescent still learning what and what not to say in today's world. Putting this young man on blast for the sake of headline news is just as immoral to me. The tweets could be worse. They are not directly attacking anyone in any way, just more of a poor choice of words which a lot of us have done at some point in our life. Other professional athletes have had old racist/offensive tweets surface recently, and I think in comparison with Murray's - the others were more worthy of public scrutiny.
What is hopefully taken out of this is of course Murray regrets what he did, learns from it, and continues to resemble the kind of role model that condones things like this. As for the timing of whoever dug and found these looking for some publicity, that is also something I don't like. From what I know of Kyler Murray his is a good intentioned human being with a gift in multiple sports. Immediately issuing a heart-felt apology was the right thing to do, and I will continue to support this guy and his career as an athlete.
Written by Jack Frantz
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