Mark Sanchez Receives Death Threats on Twitter; Fans Burn His Jersey
By Josh Hill
When LeBron James left town, one of the most iconic images of that event were various Cavaliers fans joint together to burn their LeBron James apparel; from bobble-heads to posters and most infamously, jerseys. But it’s usually when a players spurns a city that fans revolt and begin cleansing themselves of said player’s existence.
For Mark Sanchez, all it took was two terrible seasons for Jets fans to turn on him and not only burn his jersey but take it a step further and send him death threats via Twitter.
Back when Hank Aaron was chasing Babe Ruth’s career home run record, fans would hand write and send the Hall of Famer death threats. Today those threats aren’t being sent through the post office, they’re being sent at the touch of a phone screen in a split second. Sanchez isn’t the first player to receive death threats through Twitter, and with the chumbolones we have in our society today, he’s not going to be the last.
Chumbolone Jets Fan Exhibit A: a fan calling himself @BraveGrancu sent Sanchez a barrage of tweets saying should the quarterback show up at practice, he’ll be met with bullets.
The fan later bragged about how “5 newspapers just hit me up” about his tweet and said he was joking.
First and foremost, give the recent events of the last three weeks, specifically last Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary, now is probably not the best time to be “joking” about promising to spray bullets in a public place. You when a good time to joke about brining a gun to a public place to kill someone is: never.
In one of his interviews, the fan told USA Today that he never actually intended to harm Sanchez.
“I do not want to harm Sanchez or do intend to,” he told USA Today’s Mike Garafolo in one direct message. “I’m just a Die hard Jets fan that was mad & got carried away.”
Other tweets from the fan included messages about how he can’t make love to his girlfriend because of Sanchez and another following up his tweet about killing Sanchez at practice. In the follow up tweet, the fan said Sanchez had better have armed security at practice to protect him.
While the fan may have been joking about killing Sanchez — because you know, that sort of thing is hilarious to Americans right now– the NFL is not laughing. The league has reportedly made contact with the Jets over the matter but according to the fan neither the NFL or the Jets have gotten in touch with him.
Just going out on a limb here, but I don’t think we will be seeing this fan replace Fireman Ed anytime soon. The term banned from the premises comes to mind.