Ex-NFL Player Charlie Rogers Showed Up to a Kid's Basketball Game with a Sword
Source – Former NFL player Charlie Rogers was arrested by the Aberdeen (N.J.) Police Department on Monday for wielding a sword and making terroristic threats at a youth basketball event, six weeks after leaving a voicemail threatening a youth football player.
Rogers, who played five seasons in the NFL with the Seattle Seahawks, Miami Dolphins and Buffalo Bills after starring at Georgia Tech, brandished the sword during an Oct. 5 incident at the Matawan-Aberdeen Middle School, during an event for parents of a local youth basketball travel team. …
It’s just the latest incident involving Rogers, who played and coached at Matawan Regional High School and also coached at St. John Vianney High School.
The arrest comes 11 weeks after Rogers, who at the time was coaching with Matawan American Youth Football, left a profanity-laden voicemail for the parent of an 11-year-old player on another team, threatening to send his players after the child until he came out of an upcoming game.
In case you’re not familiar, here are a few of the highlights of the voicemail Rogers left for that 11-year-old’s parents:
“Hey Chris, this is coach Charlie, dog. I’m telling you right now, today in the summertime before we’ve even started a game yet, right, we are going to blitz every fucking play until your guy comes out the game. So don’t bring him to the game.
“You know I’m pissed off about this shit right here. And I’m telling you, I swear to God, we are going to blitz, we don’t care if we give up a badge or not, we’re blitzing everybody. We are blitzing every single fucking play. And (inaudible) that it’s a bad fucking move, and I don’t like it, and it’s a stupid move and we are going to blitz every single fucking play. Hang that shit up, Hill … every play!”
Say what you want about Charlie Rogers. Say you have to be all kinds of deranged to leave a recording of yourself threatening to target a preteen. Say you have to be next level psycho to carry a sword to a basketball game. Say this guy is a raving lunatic who needs to be locked up and have the key broken off in the lock. Say any of these things and you’ll get no argument from me.
Just don’t say Charlie Rogers isn’t fit to be involved in youth sports. Because believe me, he fits right in.
Show me a coach who’s not willing to make terroristic threats against some other man’s 5th grade son and I’ll show you a loser. Find me that parent who’s ready to draw a blade from his scabbard whenever it’s necessary, and I’ll show you a kid whose basketball career is never going to make it past JV.
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It’s a war out there. And to survive, you’ve got to be willing to clash steel every now and again. Sometimes the only way to settle differences is to draw swords. Typically, that’s just a metaphor. But if former Coach Rogers is guilty of anything, it’s just taking it literally. And you can’t blame him for that.
True story: When my brother was 16, he had an after school job working the scoreboard at the local hockey rink. One time, one of the teams had three men in the penalty box and he explained to the guy who was coming out first that he had to wait for a stoppage in play before he returned to his bench. The kid reacted as if my brother was talking to him like he’s an idiot. And then, once his penalty was up, went right over the boards and got whistled for too many men on the ice. And proceeded to bang on the scorer’s cage like his stupidity was my brother’s fault and scream that he was going to kill him after the game. Along with his father. The two of them, threatening to straight up murder a high school kid who was 100 percent in the right. That player ended up making it to the NHL.
Another story: In the youth football program I coached, we had a guy coaching a younger level. He was a total hardo, made the parents shell out for matching uniforms for practices, wasn’t shy about not playing kids who weren’t up to his standards, was belligerent to everybody. Just the worst. Anyway he got suspended by the league for some indiscretion or other. And the next year, when the kids from the town all showed up for league-wide weigh-ins that are absolutely necessary in order to play the season, the names of all the players – from six different grades, probably 200 in all – had been deleted. An investigation found the hacker’s URL, traced it back and found out it was this guy I’m telling you about.
The point being that youth sports isn’t about fun and games for kids. It’s about adults pursuing their dreams. It’s about hyper-competitive lunatics proving they can out-coach and out-parent everybody else. Whether that takes threatening another parent’s kid, acts of cyber-terror or good, old fashioned Trial by Combat is inconsequential. So say what you will about Charlie Rogers. Just don’t act surprised by what he’s doing.