Cole Beasley, a wide receiver for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, just quit football at age 33 in the middle of the season. Why?
So he could be a father and a husband.
“He is ready to be with his family after playing 11 seasons, and it’s time to be a full-time dad and husband,” Beasley’s agent, Joel Turner, said. “His wife and kids are still back home in Texas.”
ONCE AGAIN, THERE IS NO ‘TAMPON TAX’
Beasley is from Texas. He played at Southern Methodist University and went undrafted, but he was eventually signed by the Cowboys. Later, he ended up in Buffalo, and this year, he landed a job on the Buccaneers. But he’s done with all that now. (And he just sold his old Buffalo home.)
A Buc retiring from football in order to “be a full-time dad and husband” is particularly newsworthy considering that his quarterback, Tom Brady, retired and later unretired, extending his career well into his 40s and possibly even endangering his marriage over it.
While neither celebrity gossip nor unproven rumors about people’s marriages should take up too much of our time, the stories of Beasley and Brady are worth thinking about these days.
Specifically, Beasley should be held up as a role model because he’s demonstrating that family is more important than work. Our culture increasingly demeans family, and in particular, it demeans those who choose to devote their time to family over work.
Making it possible for women to stay at home is turning women into “handmaidens,” according to the Pima County Democratic Party — not liberating them (or their husbands, for that matter) from the traditional corporate servitude that Arizona Democrats seem to think is a more noble aspiration.
America’s media and academia believe that the path to gender equality is getting more women into the workforce and away from their children. This is very convenient for employers. But what if the path to equality runs the other way? Rather than turning working women into “company men,” what if we turned company men into family guys?
This is how working men, particularly bosses, can be allies to women and help close what remains of the pay gap: by making it clear that family comes first.
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Rather than just subsidizing daycare or offering generous maternity leave, men in positions of seniority can help women by leaving work at 5 p.m. and telling everyone, “I gotta go, my family needs me.” This wouldn’t merely help men and their families — it would help the women who feel they get frowned upon for paying so much attention to family.
In short, working Americans could use a few more Beasleys and perhaps fewer Bradys.
