Eagles’ Bradberry owns up to the Super Bowl hold and becomes a sports rarity: an honourable man

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Of the many storylines going into Sunday’s Super Bowl, the most anticipated was “When will the refs ruin it?”

Everybody wants a good game and a fun halftime show, but those things are fleeting. Outrage over a stolen result will keep you warm for decades.

Things were going perfectly. Too perfectly, to be honest. It was shaping up as a great, albeit forgettable, contest.

The game was tied in the late going. Kansas City was marching. The usual media suspects had already congratulated the officials on their good work. Then we got The Call we’d all been hoping for - a soft holding infraction on Philadelphia defensive back James Bradberry.

On replay, it didn’t look like there was much to it. Bradberry’s right hand caught spinning Kansas City wideout Juju Smith-Schuster on the front of the jersey and did something you couldn’t see. His left slipped around Smith-Schuster’s waist and briefly held him by the hip.

These days, you can’t find much agreement on holding or pass interference unless the guy gets karate kicked in the head while the quarterback is still holding the ball. This was not that.

Even if he is karate kicked, plenty of people will argue that those sorts of calls should not be made in the last five minutes of an important game.

But the refs made this one. It didn’t win the game for Kansas City, but put it away. A fourth down became a first. By the time Philadelphia got the ball back, they were in a praying Hail Mary (rather than a throwing Hail Mary) situation.

Already primed for action, the outrage machine spun up immediately. You could feel the vibrations as the media hive mind began composing the same “Whither officiating?” piece, and the fan hive mind rushed to get in their “Is this whole thing fixed?” tweets.

This sort of thing is part of why the NFL is such a big deal. It is incredibly violent and mind-bogglingly bureaucratic - the two hallmarks of American greatness. Bad calls in big games do more to amplify the NFL’s brand than a dozen Tom Bradys.

But then something strange and - a word that doesn’t often apply in sports any more - shocking happened. Bradberry volunteered that he’d done it.

Standing at his locker post-game, there are a couple of ways the not-so-famous Philadelphia man could have gone.

Door No. 1 - Rend his garments. Accept all the blame. “Sure, we allowed the other guys to score on every possession in the second half, but this is 100-per-cent my fault.” Shed a tear, maybe. Ask forgiveness. People would have loved that. Not everyone. But most people love a meaningless catharsis. The more meaningless it is, the more cathartic.

Door No. 2 - Rage against the officials. Stomp up and down. Shake your head in disbelief. Wonder rhetorically about what’s going on in this league and how do we fix it. If you’re really feeling yourself, cast aspersions on Kansas City’s victory and suggest darkly that it was stolen. This is a riskier strategy than the first - putting aggro out into the world invites aggro back - but it would probably work in Philadelphia. They love a grudge.

Bradberry took the hard way, instead. He got dressed in a funereal black suit. He came out and took questions until people ran out of them.

“I was hoping [the official] would let it go, but, of course, he’s a ref,” Bradberry said. “It’s a big game. It was a hold. So they called it.”

It’s been a while since we’ve seen much of it in a professional sporting context, but I think this is what honour looks like.

I wasn’t sure you were allowed to be honourable in sports any more. Honour means you might not win as much as you’d like. It’s definitely going to lose you a few bucks. In Bradberry’s case, it may end up costing him his job.

And it wasn’t like he was falling on a grenade to save a teammate, or another member of the football playing tribe. He did it to rescue the reputation of a referee we can assume he doesn’t know.

The only reason he can have done it is because it was the right thing to do.

The “right thing to do” has changed over the years. It used to be telling the truth in all instances. No culture in history has ever hit that mark, but some have held it out as a goal.

Sports used to be the main promoter of the truth-telling ethos. Play the game the right way, and all that.

But performance-enhancing drugs, fixed Olympics, domestic tumult and the occasional murder charge put the lie to that idea. Pretty soon after that, you started to see some slippage in sports’ moral code. You got one guy over here who killed someone, and another guy over there who acts like you’ve lost your mind when you accuse him of diving after he has very plainly dived, and the second thing no longer looks so bad.

Eventually, slippage becomes a landslide. One can only clutch one’s pearls at this sort of behaviour for so long. Eventually, it infects the entire culture, and then it becomes commonplace.

It’s not that sports has lost its way. It’s that we’ve accepted that athletes are like the rest of us - people whose morals vary highly depending on the seriousness of the infraction, the identity of the offender, and how much it’s likely to cost us. Mostly the last thing.

We’ve gone so far down this road that we have begun to curve back around to the point where cheating is seen as a virtue, as long as its done to promote the team’s interest. In the unlikely event that you are caught, there’s the universal escape hatch - blame the refs. Nobody knows who they are and they’re in a union. It’s a victimless crime.

But it’s not honourable.

Patrick Mahomes was the best player in Sunday’s Super Bowl, but Bradberry is the one I’ll remember. However briefly, he showed us there is still a higher, harder road in sports. The rest of us don’t take it any more because the low one is easier and - let’s face it - more fun.