By Paul Schmidt
So the continued assault on Vontae Davis’ character continues. Now he was arrested in Champaign for driving with his music playing too loud and without a valid license. So says the Daily Illini, the University of Illinois student newspaper, so it must be 100% true.
Well, perhaps he wasn’t arrested, but merely cited to appear – in other words given a ticket. Maybe this isn’t that big of a deal after all.
Wait, maybe it wasn’t even Vontae at all. Now you’ve got something interesting!
And that’s how something that probably should have never even made the papers turns into one of the stranger sports stories in 2009 – an athlete being accused of being arrested when not only was he not in the town at the time, he was a 4-hour flight away.
Welcome to the new instantaneous news cycle, where we’re not as concerned with facts as we are about getting the story printed as quickly as possible.
This isn’t a case of people overreacting to someone doing a statistical analysis of a player’s improvement late in his career (a la the Jerod Morris hubbub, which should have never been an issue). This is a case of awful reporting, an inability or unwillingness to fact check, and the continued unnecessary assassination of a young man’s character.
The story is as follows: Police pulled over a vehicle on June 9th at 6:47 P.M in Champaign from which extremely loud music was emanating. The driver of that vehicle produced an ID saying he was Vontae Davis (the address on the ID matched the home address of Davis’ grandmother in Maryland). The driver was cited for unnecessary vehicular noise and driving without a valid driver’s license (presumably the license bearing Davis’ name was expired).
Miami Dolphins cornerback Vontae Davis (24) stretches during football minicamp
The Daily Illini, using a police report filed on June 11th, reported in the Tuesday edition of the paper that Davis had been arrested.
That’s where the confusion started to spread.
When the story was presented to them, the Miami Dolphins were immediately confused, because Davis was in Miami on June 9th. The morning was wrapped up in OTAs, and the afternoon in a rookie behavior symposium, which lasted until 3:30 PM.
If you’re doing that math, that would make it impossible to get to Champaign to get ticketed by 6:47 P.M. And that’s even with the benefit of an hour time difference.
So now we have a situation where someone was posing as Davis, and we have no comments from the police on the matter – though not without good reason.
The Champaign Police Department was unable to immediately react to the story when South Florida news outlets jumped on the story, because they were dealing with two shootings that day and were taxed for man-power. In an interview with Palm Beach Post reporter Brian Biggane, as he reported in his blog The Daily Dolphin, Rene Dunn, a community affairs officer for the Champaign PD said had she been available during the day on Tuesday, much of the confusion could have been avoided.
Dunn said that one of the bigger mistakes that the Daily Illini made was in saying that Davis – or more correctly, the person posing as Davis – was arrested when in fact he was merely just cited to appear, which is essentially being given a traffic ticket.
Dunn did say that the next step is reviewing the tape of the stop to see if they can identify the person posing as Davis. Should they be able to make the ID, further charges may be pending against the individual.
Today in his blog, Vontae Davis made the obvious step of denying it was him, because it obviously wasn’t. Apparently his wallet was stolen prior to leaving Champaign, and he went about canceling all of his credit cards, but thought nothing of the license.
So that sums up the incident. And there’s lots of questions and blame to go around. Obviously the police officer deserves some kind of citation. We live in a time where it would and should be considered politically incorrect to say things like, “All black people look alike,” and yet it seems as though this is what happened in this case. Unless Vontae has a doppelganger in Champaign-Urbana area, the mistake this police officer made is inexcusable. It isn’t that he should have recognized who Vontae Davis is – It’s certainly that, with Davis’ picture in front of him, that he should have realized the driver of the vehicle was not Davis.
The Daily Illini is certainly not blameless in this story either. It was shoddy reporting and poor fact-checking, yes, but it was also horrible that they couldn’t tell the difference on the police report between a ticket being issued and someone being arrested.
It is symptomatic of a larger problem with Vontae Davis, however, as his name gets dragged through the mud one more time. And everyone can apologize and retract stories as much as they want to, but it’s a bell that can’t be unrung, so to speak.
Davis was much-maligned at Illinois for focusing too much on his impending draft status (an unfounded accusation) and his commitment to the team.
I saw him get grilled for five solid minutes by a Chicago newspaper beat reporter (who shall remain nameless) about his brother Vernon’s run-in with then-interim 49’ers coach Mike Singletary. The reporter, hereafter referred to as Dill Hole, continually tried to bait Vontae into saying something inflammatory, while Vontae continued to smile and say that he loved his brother and knew that all his brother wanted to do was win, and that he didn’t really have much else to say on the matter.
Considering I wanted to punch Mr. Dill Hole in the face after the five minutes, I can’t imagine how mad Davis was and he deserves a ton of credit for not losing his composure.
But that’s been the problem with Davis and the press. For whatever reason (his brother? Because he’s an easy target?), his character has been repeatedly impugned without much proof. He was reportedly one of the players who tested positive for marijuana at the combine – though no proof was ever laid forth about that. His character has been slammed again and again, and by all accounts there hasn’t been any real reason for it.
So let me be the first to apologize to you, Vontae, from all the members of the press. I’ll speak for all of us, whether they want me to or not.
You deserved better in our hands.
I can’t say I’m surprised the DI missed the mark so badly on this one – they’ve never exactly been an award-winning press institution.
This sucks for Vontae that he has to spend time clearing his name when he should be focusing on his future. Hopefully this will blow over quickly.
we had some traffic issues with our players recently…you might remember rich mcbride and his dui s or jamar smith who got wasted off tequila and drove himself and a teammate into a tree, and thought he left him for dead. so did dr. frazier and dr. pruitt
Wow! look at the slams at my Daily Illini here….no, I’m actually cool with that. There was this total douchebag and talentless asshat named Chris Neubauer that I had to answer to when I was there, and they really should put Will Leitch and I in the Illini Media Hall of Fame…until they rectify those things, slam away at the DI- cuz they kinda do suck
When it comes to his game, Vontae still strikes me as Christian Morton part 2 sometimes….what’s a doppelganger? is that like a diddleybopper?
OTAs are the most boring thing ever!
doppelganger – a ghostly double or counterpart of a living person.
So perhaps it was Zombie Vontae Davis. And you should never cross a zombie…