What a mess

I'm really not sure what to make of this Kellen Winslow Jr. situation. The sequence of events went something like this:

• Winslow spent a few days in the hospital with a staph infection.
• The Browns didn't want anybody to know what it was because they were gaining a reputation for spreading staph infections.
• The team didn't tell anybody and asked him not to tell anybody either.
• Everybody wondered what was wrong with Winslow, and people were filling in the blanks on their own. I actually heard someone speculate that he'd contracted a social disease.
• Winslow missed a game, which incidentally was the best game the Browns have played in years.
• Winslow got out of the hospital and played in the next game, which incidentally didn't go well at all for the Browns.
• Winslow complained after the game that he felt like a piece of meat, because Phil Savage never called him while he was in the hospital with a staph infection.
• Savage suspended Winslow for a game, without pay, for making comments that were "unwarranted, inappropriate, and unnecessarily disparaging to our organisation."
• Winslow appealed his suspension.

There seems to be a lot of blame to go around here. It's the ugly truth that professional athletes basically are pieces of meat. The teams really don't care about them as people; they only care about what they can do for them on the field of play. Winslow should know that. On the other hand, I can understand that it would be a bit frustrating to have people speculating about what's put you in the hospital, and to top it off, nobody from the team bothers to check in on you while you're in there. If LeBron James or Zydrunas Ilgauskas were in the hospital, I have to believe Danny Ferry would call to see how they were doing; ditto with Grady Sizemore and Mark Shapiro.

But there's a right way to do things, and there's a wrong way. Popping off publicly about how your GM behaved while you were in the hospital is the wrong way. Then again, suspending a player for popping off is probably not productive either.

What a mess.