By now, almost every football fan that makes an effort to follow the Free Agency frenzy during the off season has seen this "viral" video of a little girl crying over the Jimmy Graham trade because "he's a really good player." When it first hit the world wide web, I watched it, shed a little tear, and shared it with the VICE Sports team with an "aww how cute is this?" It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what would happen next because I, like this mother, understand how the internet works and knew it was only a matter of days before this little girl ended up on Ellen or some other rewarding talk show. Alas, ESPN makes St. Patrick's Day her (and her mother's) lucky day to come on set and tell the world why Jimmy Graham going to the Seattle Seahawks broke her precious little heart.
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Jimmy Graham is not only a great football player, but clearly a great guy, making sure Ashley-Ann was rewarded for all her sadness by offering to send her and her family to Seattle for his first home game. Now, given the context of how she got to be here, you would expect Ashley-Ann to jump and cry with tears of overwhelming joy because, Hell, I know I would. I would feel like the coolest kid in the world if my favorite football player invited me on national television to a football game. But she doesn't. She doesn't even say "thank you" until her mother reminds her. Is this a reflection of how ungrateful Ashley-Ann is? Absolutely not. Rather, this is parental exploitation at its finest.I am not at all doubting she was heartbroken because I cried just as hard when Dan Marino hung up his cleats, but unfortunately for me, camera phones weren't around back in 2000 as a device to expose the raw emotions of your children. But as I said earlier, this mother understands the internet and knows how easy it is to get social media famous, whatever merit that holds. "What would you tell Jimmy Graham right now if you could?" is the equivalent of saying "if Jimmy Graham sees this video and doesn't publicly do something to acknowledge how sad you are he is a horrible person."No one—not Jimmy, Ashley-Ann or her mother—did anything wrong, in fact, they all did everything perfectly right.Ashley-Ann, tell mom's phone why you're sad.Mom, share why Ashley is sad to the entire world.Jimmy, make Ashley-Ann not sad anymore.This chain of transaction occurs all the time on the internet and the media continues to salivate over them because it pulls at your heart strings a.k.a drives traffic. But then, you see the lackluster joy from Ashley-Ann complimented by her mother's tears and remember that there really is nothing spectacular about most of these stories or people, they were just smart enough to pull out their camera phones.