Family matters

 I wouldn't know sports columnist Marcus Hayes of the Philadelphia Inquirer if he smacked me in the gob with a dangling participle. But I like to think I know a thing or two about sports columnizing, having done it for the better part of 38 years.

What I know is it's your job to occasionally criticize athletes, coaches, administrators and front-office knuckleheads in print. Especially if they've got it coming.

But dragging their family members into it?

Not the job at all. 

This is true no matter how glancing is the mention, especially when one of the family members is no longer with us. It's the surest way to get shoved around by an athlete/coach/administrator/front-office knucklehead, which is apparently what happened to Hayes the other night.

See, Hayes wrote a column, not for the first time, taking 76ers center Joel Embiid to task for his seemingly endless stints on the injury list. And that's OK. It's absolutely in-bounds for a columnist to do that, and it's up to everyone else to decide if he's being fair or not.

Problem is, Hayes mentioned Embiid's brother, who's deceased, and Embiid's son. And that is not OK. 

Now, I don't know in what context Hayes mentioned Embiid's brother and son. But, again, it doesn't matter. You inject a man's (or woman's) family into a piece, you're going to lose the point you're trying to make. And you're going to lose, period.

In Embiid's case, you make him the injured party. You give him carte blanche to ream you out in the locker room (which Embiid did), and you make him a hero for doing so. And if you don't believe me, check out the public reaction when the Sixers duly punish Embiid for putting his hands on Hayes.

Guarantee Embiid gets all the love. And not just because it was one of those bleepity-bleep sportswriters he shoved, speaking as a bleepity-bleep sportswriter myself.

It'll be because Hayes touched that third rail.

Look. I've written about my subjects' family members before. There is a time and place for it. But the time and place is when they're the story in some form or fashion, and when the subject of your piece acknowledges that and willingly talks about them.

But to inject them into a column willy-nilly? Especially one that's expressing a critical point of view?

Bad form. And bad judgment, too, because, again, you make the story about something other than what it was supposed be about. In Hayes' case, about a locker room confrontation with Joel Embiid, and about Embiid's righteous anger.

And the column itself?

Sorry, man. What were you saying again?