Louis Riddick calls for Myles Garrett to be suspended for the rest of the season for hitting Mason Rudolph with his helmet. (1:42)
BEREA, Ohio — In the span of two weeks, the Cleveland Browns have gone from inevitably undisciplined to unequivocally embarrassing.
Thursday night, that culminated with defensive end Myles Garrett ripping the helmet off Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Mason Rudolph and clubbing him in the head with it. The NFL responded rapidly, handing Garrett an unprecedented punishment for a single on-field act, suspending him for the rest of this season, playoffs included.
Even when the Browns win, they still seem to lose.
Garrett’s indefensible lapse amid one of the ugliest melees in NFL history overshadowed one of Cleveland’s biggest victories in recent years.
The Browns’ antics outside playing football this season have overshadowed everything.
Garrett’s infraction obviously stands alone. But it’s hardly isolated, either.
In just the past 11 days, the Bad News Browns have lost three starters for reasons other than injury.
That includes safety Jermaine Whitehead, who was waived after sending threatening Twitter messages from inside the visitors locker room two games ago in Denver. Whitehead’s tweets were so vicious, his account had been suspended before he even boarded the departing team bus.
Then just four hours before kickoff Thursday, the Browns announced they had cut wide receiver Antonio Callaway, too. In a game against Buffalo the week before, he was benched for showing up late to the stadium. Turned out Callaway, whose “growth” general manager John Dorsey had praised only a month ago, had also violated the NFL’s substance abuse policy for a second time and was slapped with a 10-game suspension, abruptly ending his troubled tenure in Cleveland.
“I think every time something bad or good happens, you try to evaluate and see what you could have done differently,” said coach Freddie Kitchens, who seemed visibly shaken and in disbelief by what transpired Thursday night. “I just know that we preach all of the time about maintaining our composure and it only comes up whenever you have the opportunity to maintain your composure. That is where we are sitting with that.”
Ultimately, a team’s composure — or lack thereof — falls back on the head coach. Counting the Pittsburgh game, the Browns have now been penalized 87 times this season, their most through 10 games since 1978, according to Elias Sports Bureau research.
Cleveland (4-6) also now leads the NFL in ejections, which includes left tackle Greg Robinson kicking a Tennessee Titans player in the head in Week 1. That same game, by the way, Garrett punched Titans tight end Delanie Walker in the face mask.
Max Kellerman says Mason Rudolph should be suspended at least a game for instigating the fight with Myles Garrett, while Garrett should get two to four games.
“I think we are always searching for ways to improve the way we are viewed, as an organization, as a coach, as a player,” Kitchens added. “Especially in times like this.”
Kitchens warrants much of the blame for the way these Browns are now being viewed, which is as the league’s dirtiest team. That dates back to a joint practice in Indianapolis in August, when the Browns instigated several skirmishes with the Colts, to the point the scrimmages almost had to be called off.
Defensive tackle Larry Ogunjobi added to that reputation when he drilled a helmetless Rudolph in the back Thursday after Garrett had already struck the quarterback in the head. Ogunjobi, whom the NFL suspended a game as well, curiously claimed he was coming to Garrett’s defense. But by that point, Rudolph was nowhere near Garrett, who was fighting off other Pittsburgh players, notably center Maurkice Pouncey. In reality, Ogunjobi delivered just another Cleveland cheap shot.
Kitchens might be culpable for that, the never-ending barrage of penalties and the uncanny knack the Browns have for self-sabotage.
But nobody can be blamed for what Garrett did other than Garrett, who severely damaged his team’s playoff chances with one inexplicable swing of a helmet.
All of which led to the surreal scene Thursday night. A team in victory, admitting to feeling like a team in defeat.
Credit to Author: Emma Garland| Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2019 22:02:58 +0000
A posthumous documentary about an artist tends to go one of two ways: The first is a broad overview of their career, as told by peers, collaborators, and music industry types, that follows an established and existing public narrative. Often specific to those who died young or tragically, the second is a deep dive into their personal lives in an effort to uncover the truth that raises questions of its own—like documentaries of the past few years chronicling the lives and untimely deaths of Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain and, now, Lil Peep.
Premiering in the U.S. this week, Everybody’s Everything is a predictably gutting watch. The two-hour documentary tracks Lil Peep’s life in full, tracing his rise to fame through home videos, tour footage, and interviews, before reaching the questionably included but inevitable 911 call from the tour bus where he died from an accidental drug overdose on November 15, 2017, at the age of 21.
Co-directed by Sebastian Jones and Ramez Silyan, and executive produced by Terrance Malick, Liza Womack (Peep’s mother) and Sarah Stennet (CEO of First Access Entertainment, Peep's management company), Everybody’s Everything is a fitting title. As a son, star, and an investment, Lil Peep had a lot riding on him when he died, and that becomes increasingly apparent throughout the documentary, which starts off as an act of remembrance but gives way to finger-pointing in terms of who’s responsible for his death. Blame games are understandable in a situation when someone’s death probably could have been avoided, but it’s debatable how much they matter to a documentary whose concluding point can only be that the whole thing is deeply sad.
This is all made more complicated by the fact that last month Womack filed a lawsuit against First Access Entertainment for negligence, breach of contract, and wrongful death, among other charges. First Access has since denied these allegations, but the suit certainly casts things in a different light. Now, we’re left with a documentary that sets up one thing and a lawsuit that alleges another.
The artist born Gustav Åhr died during a transitional phase, not even two years into his career. He was blowing up, relocating to London—away from most of his friends and collaborators in LA—and dealing with the questions that bubble up in a budding music career (how much creative control do you have? How much of your life is “yours” when it’s being bankrolled by someone else?). The documentary establishes that there were tensions between his collective Gothboiclique and First Access as they focused on building up Peep, but we hear about it mainly from the perspective of Sarah Stennet and Peep's manager Chase Ortega. Some GBC members are interviewed briefly for color, remarking on their time living together on Skid Row or refuting the bizarre conspiracy theory that various members had something to do with Peep’s death, but their presence in his life is framed in the documentary as largely negative.
Members of his former collective, Schemaposse, also speculate around the circumstances of his death, and Stennet, Ortega, and Makonnen—who is signed to First Access and formed a close friendship with Peep while collaborating in London—all talk about him being in with the "wrong crowd." But Lil Peep’s story is one of heavy drug use, struggle with the demands of fame, and pressure from all sides. "I don’t want to be lil peep g I’d rather work at Starbucks…" Peep said to Ortega on August 13, 2017, in texts obtained by Rolling Stone. "They’re all fucking dumb and suck at their jobs or they just aren’t from the new generation and don’t get it."
Everybody’s Everything seems to insinuate that the members of Gothboiclique are at least partially at fault in Peep’s death. It’s true that they weren’t supposed to be on that last tour. It's possible they were there because Peep was struggling and wanted his friends around, or because they were clinging on to his ascent to the top. But the fact is, they were his friends, and after Peep’s death, Gothboiclique found themselves navigating calls from major labels and legacy publications essentially because his obituaries performed well. "It was the end of November when we had people try to sign [the group]," GBC co-founder Wicca Phase said last year. "I had people offer me deals and offer me contracts, press, whatever—not because they knew who I was, and not because they knew who Gus was.” GBC member Mackned addresses in the documentary that he’s been hounded online for the last two years because he tweeted something about "his gut" telling him not to take Xanax on the tour bus.
All these details feel irrelevant now because nothing can change what happened. Towards the end of the film, Liza Womack says everything she’s been involved with—the documentary, the posthumous releases, the merchandise—has come from a desire to talk about her loss and deal with grief over the death of her son. Everybody’s Everything should be a remembrance, and it mostly is. But by the end, it’s hard to shake the sense that you’ve been pulled into an ongoing conflict that a feature-length film can only do so much to solve.
Posthumous documentaries often pose the questions of how soon is too soon, or how close is too close, regardless of how involved the artists’ estate is. Filmmakers put a "definitive" Mac Miller documentary on hold in June due to objections from his family; In Kurt Cobain doc Montage of Heck, the inclusion of home footage, supplied by his estate, was described by some critics as having "an uneasy voyeuristic charge"; and one of the biggest problems Asif Kapadia faced after being approached by Universal to make Amy is that "There was no go-to person who knew Amy’s story […] no one liked each other, they were all arguing, there was a lot of tension around her, always." There’s a documentary in the works about XXXTentacion, who was murdered just last June at the age of 20 while awaiting trial for domestic violence charges. His estate and his mother, Cleopatra Bernard, are involved, and the first trailer was released on the anniversary of his death. X and Peep’s stories are similar in some ways—they both acquired a remarkable level of attention very quickly, they both died young, and they both struggled very publicly with mental health issues.
It's worth noting that Lil Peep wasn’t actually that famous when he was alive. His rise was dizzyingly fast considering he only started uploading music in 2015, but while his streaming numbers were in the millions and his tours sold out, his was a cult following pretty much until the end. First Access signed a three-year deal with him in June 2016, and it was only in June 2017 that he walked at Fashion Week in Milan and Paris and entered the mainstream consciousness. His first album, Come Over When You’re Sober Pt 1, dropped in August 2017 and entered the Billboard 200 posthumously. Lil Peep’s fame transcended his legacy, and now it feels as though his career is still happening—he’s just not around to shape it.
At the same time, it's possible that we know more about Lil Peep than we’ve ever known about Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, or even Mac Miller. Born in 1996, Lil Peep’s life was documented on social media in real-time. His death was too—he was dropping Xanax on Instagram stories a few hours beforehand. It's difficult for a documentary to tell us what he was like, because he told us via photos and videos he posted of himself, using social media like any other teenager or 20-year-old, which created a sense among his fans that they knew him intimately, even if a degree of it was performative.
Anyone who had been following Lil Peep for more than a few months before his death will feel they know more about his career than we’re given here—which is why Everybody’s Everything is at its best when it focuses on his family and his fans. A posthumous documentary can make audiences feel closer to its subject, to learn what they didn’t get to learn while that person was still alive, which in this case is what came before Peep's career as a rapper. The film is punctuated by beautiful letters that John Womack Jr, Lil Peep’s grandfather, sent to him throughout his life, which is the most heartwarming and insightful part of the documentary.
It’s difficult to establish a coherent narrative about someone who shared so much directly during his time. Everybody’s Everything does not exactly avoid placing blame at anyone's feet, and the weight of its title is hard to ignore. Unfortunately, it's impossible for there to be a satisfying conclusion to the loss of a promising young talent and real person whose life had only just begun.
