By Alan Snel
LVSportsBiz.com
Antonio Brown, 31-year-old Miami native, father of four, ex-professional football player and video maker, no longer is employed by the Oakland Raiders and won’t be coming to Las Vegas and the new stadium after all.
The NFL team released the video maker and former touchdown maker Saturday morning, according to a Raiders announcement posted 8:56 a.m. on the club’s website.
By Saturday afternoon, the man who never played a game for the Raiders was signed by the New England Patriots.
News of Brown’s release from the Raiders came the morning after Brown’s latest social media creation and sensation, a one-minute, 56-second video published on YouTube Friday, using a recorded phone “conversation” he had with his now ex-coach, Jon Gruden. The coach is Brown’s foil in a narrative for a mini-documentary that would have made Mr. Documentary Ken Burns blush.
Gruden (or was it comedian/Gruden voice imitator Frank Caliendo?) was brilliant in his apparently unwitting video role, too, as phone caller: “What the hell is going on man?”
I couldn’t stop laughing. Everyone goofs on Gruden for using, “man,” as his go-to oratory device and there it was to open the conversation with the gifted football player who simply goes by “AB.”
The black-and-white footage and the phone convo that ensued was knitted together with lovely editing into a polished video that was even more entertaining than a Nike commercial. See for yourself.
Brown matched Gruden’s “man” with his own utterance of “man” in the mini-film: “I’m more than just a football player, man” Brown told Gruden.
Take that, man!
Brown explained the motivation behind the YouTube creation: “With all these false narratives antagonizing me, it’s time for me to control my own narrative. Show the world I’m not the bad guy. Show the world you can free yourself from the lies and become your own person. I am not just AB the football player, I am Antonio Brown, the person, who paved a way for himself to be in charge of his own life. Free me! ”
The reactions were predictable. Read the comments on YouTube.
The YouTube production was the climax of a day’s worth of drama Friday that was built with a Brown apology to his teammates earlier in the day after the talented wide receiver got into a tiff with Raiders General Manager Mike Mayock the day before.
There was talk of a Brown suspension. But in the end, Brown wanted his release after he was fined for his behavior.
And the Raiders obliged. The gifted and troubled receiver will not be catching footballs from Raiders quarterback Derek Carr Monday evening when the Oakland team hosts the Denver Broncos in what will be the first game of the last season in the Bay area for the Raiders.
The Raiders are coming to Las Vegas in 2020 thanks to a juicy $750 million public subsidy that is helping the Raiders pay for a $1.9 billion stadium project near the Strip and Mandalay Bay hotel-casino. Brown will not be among the Raiders players. The franchise was hoping Brown would help create more wins and excitement as the Raiders leave Oakland and move to Las Vegas.
“He’s a fun guy to be around,” Gruden was quoted as saying after Oakland acquired the wide receiver from Pittsburgh in March.
Fun is one way, I suppose, of putting it when it came to Brown and the soap opera that ensued.
First, he suffered frostbitten feet because he failed to wear proper foot protection during a cryotherapy chamber in July. Then, there was Brown’s insistence in August that he wear his longtime helmet that the NFL said was outdated and unapproved.
It’s been a mere six months since the Pittsburgh Steelers traded Brown to the Raiders.
But it seems like the four-time first-team All-Pro wide receiver who signed a three-year, $50 million deal including $30 million of guaranteed dollars has been an Oakland Raider longer than ex-quarterback Daryle Lamonica.
The most fascinating part of Brown’s video was the message that his life was more than just football. It’s a message that athletes have been trying to get across to the general public for decades, yet so many fans want these gifted athletes to be compartmentalized as sports performers.
So many athletes don’t want their lives to be defined by their sport. So many athletes have spoken out on a variety of issues — and yet so many fans and pundits just want these athletes to “shut up and dribble the ball.”
In Brown’s case, so many want him to just catch the ball. Like Gruden, who conveniently said this line in the Brown video.
And Brown had this different message in the video. “It’s ain’t about the football, I know I can do that,” he told Gruden. “This is my life. Ain’t no more games.”
Don’t forget, Gruden has some entertainer in him, too, after his TV analyst stint on Monday Night Football. Case in point:
I don’t know Brown. Never met him. Never asked him a question as a journalist. I don’t know whether the YouTube video was an inside job with Gruden (or Caliendo) and a professional video maker or whether Brown recorded the phone conversation with Gruden without his coach’s permission with the NFL player using a video program to create the content. It’s hardly the first documentary maker Brown has documented his coach. Let’s go to the videotape of Brown live streaming his former Steelers coach, Mike Tomlin, during Tomlin’s post game speech in January 2017 after the Steelers beat the Chiefs in a playoff game. In the Facebook Live stream, Tomlin was heard calling the Steelers’ next playoff opponent — the Patriots in the AFC Championship game — “assholes” and advising his team to keep a low profile during the week leading up to the big Patriots contest. Here’s a look at that piece of Brown’s published work.
In Friday’s YouTube video, Brown wanted to get across a message that he was misunderstood.
And he used Gruden’s words to illustrate that literal point right here in the video:
I don’t truly know everything about my friends let alone professional athletes. So, I’m not going to pretend I know what’s in Brown’s heart and head.
But he’s welcome to contribute his videos to LVSportsBiz.com now that he’s unemployed.
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