Nearly two years ago, football player Anthony Bright was sidelined by injuries so severe that they ended his season and slowed his career. The injuries occurred, oddly, during a team meeting.
On Nov. 18, 2002, Bright and teammate Steve Smith were viewing game film at the Carolina Panthers’ training camp. According to court filings, Bright asked to review a play several times, and Smith bristled.
Then Smith, a star receiver for the team, went ballistic, pummeling Bright so badly that he spent the next two days in the hospital nursing a broken nose and damage to an eye socket.
In May, Bright, represented by Johnnie Cochran (of O.J. Simpson fame) and Guy Crabtree of Durham, N.C., filed a lawsuit against Smith, alleging that the “willful and wanton” beating had effectively cost Bright his NFL career. Bright was released at the end of the 2002 season by the Panthers. He is playing for Orlando in the Arena Football League.
Smith isn’t the only defendant. Also named in the lawsuit are the Carolina Panthers, who Bright claims knew or should have known that Smith was capable of the attack and fumbled in their duty to protect him.
The Bright case poses the classic issues in workplace-violence litigation, issues that rarely arise in the sports industry. Employers are duty bound to try to keep their employees safe from risks they can reasonably foresee.
But is a temper tantrum that morphs into a boxing match foreseeable? And more important to Bright and the Panthers, was it foreseeable in this case?
Bright’s lawyers lay out a case that Smith’s outburst could easily have been predicted. In their complaint, they allege that the Panthers “negligently hired, retained and supervised” Smith. Bright’s lawyers describe the attack on Bright as “part of an ongoing pattern” of violent behavior by Smith, who is still with the Panthers and signed a $27 million contract with the team in February.
Smith “had attacked and either struck or choked other teammates … and individuals not associated [with] the Carolina Panthers. In one such incident, defendant Smith grabbed and choked another teammate in the team shower,” according to the complaint filed in Superior Court in Mecklenburg County, N.C.
After Smith’s attack on Bright, the team acted swiftly. The Panthers levied a one-game suspension and arranged for anger management training. Smith, who apologized for his action, was also slapped with criminal assault charges. The charges were eventually dropped.
If the case goes to jurors, their task would be to decide what, if any, notice team officials had to the possibility that Smith might be a danger to those working around him. Generally, an employer’s responsibility to workers is to take reasonable measures — a highly subjective standard.
Crabtree claims the team had a “duty to intervene” before Smith snapped during the fateful team meeting. The team’s options included insisting that Smith seek counseling, fining him or even dismissing the star receiver from the team, the lawyer said.
“Based on what we know at this point, it took this incident with Anthony for anything to happen,” said Crabtree.
A Panthers spokesman declined to comment for this article. Smith’s agent, Derrick Fox, did not return phone calls. That the case involves a football team might add to the difficulty of deciding whether the Panthers acted reasonably. Smith’s previous outbursts might have put his employer on high alert if he’d worked at a flower shop. But are behavioral norms different in professional football, an inherently violent sport played by overtly aggressive players?
The team might retain an expert witness to testify that in pro football, “violent outbursts [by players] are not so unusual,” said Thomas A. Shumaker II, an employment lawyer who writes on legal issues for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
There’s even an argument to be made by the team that football players are better able to handle horseplay or more serious physical contact, so the team had less reason to foresee an incident resulting in Bright’s injuries.
Bright’s lawyers will have at least one irrefutable point: Smith got in his cheap shot long after the whistle.
“You expect a certain amount of [aggressive] behavior from muscle-bound, testosterone-loaded athletes,” said Norman Bates, president of Liability Consultants Inc. and an expert witness in workplace-violence cases. “But that behavior is meant for the field. It’s not meant for the locker room.”
Mark Hyman (mhyman@sportsbusinessjournal.com) is a lawyer and writer.
