San Francisco 49ers

As a San Francisco native and a long time 49er fan, I was appalled to read about the training vidoe that was leaked to the media yesterday. According to yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle article, "It was meant to be funny — but no one is laughing now in the San Francisco 49ers' front office over an in-house training film that featured off- color racial jokes, lesbian porn, a spoof of gay marriage and a trio of buxom, topless blondes frolicking with team public relations director Kirk Reynolds."

Now I am not saying that I am surprised that there is this type of material in the City or that some people find this to be extremely funny, I just believe that there should be a time and place for everything. And in a training video, which was intended as a primer on how players should handle the media in diverse San Francisco, is not the time nor the place for this type of humor.

Today in the San Francisco Chronicle as the 49ers' owners, John York and Denise DeBartolo York, apologized for the players' orientation video, players defended it. Players appeared more upset that the tape on how to deal with the media, which was shown to the team during training camp in August, reached the public. According to the article, "Reynolds started supplementing the NFL message a few years ago by addressing the team in person, but started augmenting that with a video. Players had told him that his presentation was too dry and that he needed to spice it up." Big surprise, huh?

Now everyone of us has sat through one of those "diversity" courses for work and school, but should the makers of a video be rewarded for making fun of the diversity that we are all suppose to be learning to embrace? I mean, shouldn't we (as a society and especially in training videos such as this one) be working at dispelling stereotypes instead of fueling them?