When the Cincinnati Bengals trashed the Cleveland Browns on Thursday Night Football , the Queen City went wild. The Bengals defeated a division rival under the lights and all was good. Everything was wonderful until Vontaze Burfict was accused of being a thug and trashing an $80,000 camera. Since then, Burfict has apologized for the incident. But it seems as though Burfict is supposed to be perfect.
Television coverage of NFL games has gotten better since the days of stationary cameras and fuzzy long angle shots. The coverage is in your face with dazzling HD clarity. But in order to get those shots, there has to be a ton of equipment all around. When Vontaze Burfict ran into the end zone camera at Paul Brown Stadium, he was avoiding a collision with the equipment and the man operating the machinery.
Jim Strickler, the camera operator in question, has said he didn’t think Burfict pushed the camera on purpose. He said he was thinking the action was coming his way and wanted to do his job. Getting a good shot means following the player to the end of the play.
The incident occurred when Burfict was covering on a play. Running alongside Burfict was teammate Reggie Nelson. After the play was over, both were trying to slow down to avoid injury. The camera that injured Jim Strickler was in the way. Nelson could have been subjected to serious harm, as he was forced to jump over the platform and use the padded wall to stop his forward progress. Burfict slowed himself and seemed to push the camera over. Footage of the action has been slowed down to make the effect more dramatic than it was.
Vontaze Burfict has no further interest in being on TV pic.twitter.com/oLfm8WNLba
— The Cauldron (@TheCauldron) November 6, 2015
Strickler commented on the incident , during an interview with Cincinnati’s WLWT News 5 . He has no hard feelings towards Burfict and didn’t implicate him as being malicious.
“I don’t want to say he did anything on purpose, because I don’t think he did. I know he wasn’t out to hurt me. But in the moment, it looked like he might have been able to avoid it.”
There are collisions and bumps that go unreported each year. But because the Cincinnati Bengals are a team competing for national attention, the media is looking for anything negative. The Bengals organization checked Strickler over and deemed he was just fine. In fact, he’ll be covering Burfict again when the Bengals play Houston on Monday Night Football .
Accidents are a part of the game. The potential for injury on assignment has been a hardball fact of sports photography ever since print photographers, and later television crews, were first granted press credentials. Yet regulations designed to protect sports photographers from becoming part of the action they cover are sparse. Perhaps it’s just as well that there are so few rules, as they rarely succeed in preventing what seem to be inevitable accidents.
Green Bay superstar Aaron Rodgers doesn’t like the cameras . He was quoted, per a 2014 CBS Sports report, as saying the media has become too invasive.
“I hate it. I don’t like it all.”
“It’s too much access. A couple games ago I got bumped in the back of the head by the camera guy trying to get into a pregame huddle,” Rodgers said. “I’m just like, ‘What, what are you doing?’ None of the stuff that Josh Sitton or T.J. Lang is going to say in this pregame huddle is going to be for TV. So get out of my way. Don’t bump me in the back of my head with your camera. Nothing you’re filming here is going to be used for consumption on TV because you’d have to bleep out every single word.”
If Rodgers can get upset, why can’t Burfict? Did the cameraman apologize to Rodgers for invading his territory for a shot?
Strickler said during the interview that he doesn’t know what was going on inside Burfict’s head. But somehow, every crack journalist with internet access wants to call Burfict a thug with an attitude problem.
It’s football. You’re supposed to have an attitude, or you’ll get the other team’s attitude thrust upon you in the form of a loss.
Burfict isn’t perfect, but he’s one talented football player. He’s also not the monster that some people paint him to be. Strickler was surprised when he got a personal call from the linebacker to apologize.
[Feature Photo by George Gojkovich / Getty Images]