Eagles' Ryans stresses players' personal responsibility

DeMeco Ryans was born and raised in Bessemer, Ala., a small industrial town in the center of the state. Its namesake invented a process to mass-produce steel, but it's perhaps best known now as the birthplace of Bo Jackson.

When people talk about the child-abuse charges filed in Texas against Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson, about a culture that could empower a father to strike the inside of his 4-year-old son's legs with a tree branch until they bled, Bessemer is the kind of place they mean, where a boy's roughest justice could come at the hands of a parent.

After the Eagles had finished practice Thursday, their final workout before their game Sunday against the Washington Redskins, Ryans nodded in agreement at that description of his hometown. His mother, Martha, raised four children there, DeMeco the youngest of them. He is 30, a starting linebacker in the NFL for nine years, the Eagles' leader on defense, and the team's representative to the league's players union. By all accounts he is an upstanding and respected ambassador for professional football at a time when too few such men seem to exist, and he spoke about a world he had both known and moved beyond.

"Coming from the South, it is a thing where your mom or grandmom will tell you, 'Go get a switch,' and you've got to go pick your switch off of the tree," said Ryans, himself a husband and a father. "If you're acting up and out of line, they straighten you out. But I think the biggest thing to come from that, once you see the pictures of the bruises on the kid and how young the kid was, it was kind of over the top from that standpoint.

"But most guys from the South, you got a whuppin' with a switch before. That's why when everybody first heard about it, they were like: 'What do you mean? He whupped his son! I got beat all the time!' That's just how it was."

Did it happen to him?

"I was a good kid. I probably got whupped one time," he said. "It wasn't a big deal for me, but I understand the culture. I understand what it was. But you can't go over the top. Our parents went over the top sometimes. Now, everybody views that differently. It's a different age we live in, a different time. You've got to discipline kids in a new way."

The Peterson story, of course, is only one of a recent spate of incidents that have cast a harsh light on the NFL and the off-the-field actions of its players. Never mind that data from varying sources, particularly a useful study published by Andrew Healy of FootballPerspective.com, show that arrests of NFL players for violent offenses generally have fallen within the last decade. Never mind that it's mostly the arbitrariness, the arrogance, and the incompetence of commissioner Roger Goodell and the rest of the league's leadership that created this chaos.

From Peterson to Ray Rice, from Greg Hardy to Jonathan Dwyer, the narrative now is that all of these athletes are out of control.

So the league scurries about now, carrying out damage control, finally making Goodell available to answer questions Friday, implementing half-measure solutions - as if hiring or promoting more women to powerful positions would give someone like Rice pause before he punched his fiancée in the face, as if it would erase an upbringing that taught Peterson it was OK to take a stick to a toddler's scrotum. Yes, Goodell, the Baltimore Ravens, the Vikings, and the league as a whole have failed miserably in their reactions to these incidents, and they've deserved all the criticism they've gotten over the last several weeks. But those issues are separate from the question of whether the NFL actually does have a player-malfeasance problem and, if so, what ought to be done about it.

It's easy to talk about the need to be proactive, to try to stop this behavior before it starts, but there's only so much a commissioner or a league can do in that regard. At some point, an athlete has to take responsibility for himself, has to change or mature on his own, has to recognize what he stands to gain and lose.

"It comes back to personally, what type of man are you going to be? What type of man do you represent?" Ryans said. "Every time you step out, you're representing your name. What guys do in their personal lives, it is going to affect themselves more so than the league. The league will always stand, but those guys' reputations can be hurt. I always tell guys, 'How are you portraying yourself? What do you want your name to mean?' "

Once, the name Adrian Peterson meant that someone was talking about the best running back in the National Football League. Now it means something else. Now it means something sinister. Now it stands for certain aspects of a way of life that DeMeco Ryans knew well, and that he had the intelligence and character to leave behind long ago.