Personally, I think this is hilarious. I don't condone it and certainly if you have any professional aspirations then it's a stupid move. But I don't think this guy does - it's just a club team for the university of Virginia.
The only reason I even am talking about this is because the reactions about it speak to a broader social issue: massive political correctness.
Now, don't confuse being politically correctness with human decency. Not being a racist, homophobic idiot doesn't make you politically correct, it just means you have the ability to empathize with people and a desire to be a decent human being. What I am talking about here goes deeper than just being decent, it is an all-out effort to achieve a righteous kind of blandness while posing as someone who is easily offended.
Don't forget that we live in a society that regularly features decapitations and massive acts of violence on TV as long as it's aired after an obligatory warning no one has ever paid attention to, but which insists on blurring out nipples even though everyone has two of em (sometimes three).
Is chugging a beer on the ice a good career move?
No.
Does it make you look like an immature moron?
Of course.
But let's be realistic here for a second: most people who go to college are morons. It is sort of the entire idea of college: it's your last chance to be a moron without real consequences. I was a moron in college and I'm sure anyone who is honest was too. If you weren't ignore this, it doesn't apply to you and accept my pre-apology for thinking you weren't a sensitive and forward thinking mature 19 year old.
My personal take here is that everyone should just lighten up. If beer chugging goalies become an epidemic that will be pretty lame, but just one random goalie chugging a beer is funny. It doesn't hurt anyone and is amusing on a very, very immature level that I'm not too proud to admit I enjoy frequenting on a regular basis.
Yes it's a dumb frat-boy move guaranteed to earn you the nickname Curtis Broseph, but the heavy-handed contempt for the kid that I have seen in the responses to this story just annoys me. It's as if everyone who talks about it needs you to know that they personally are above such loutish behavior.
One guy called it a selfish act. Another was disgusted beyond my capacity to believe in his sincerity. I was going to give some examples, but I figured it would just be needlessly critical of someone who no doubt already thinks its rather unsurprising that I would support the beer chugging goalie.
I don't feel like old C. Broseph needs to be a folk hero or anything, just that people ought to admit when something is kind of funny and go back to their lives without making everything a scandal or, god forbid, a "gate." (And seriously, anyone calling this beergate needs to just admit that adding gate as the suffix of anything is always worse than whatever the scandal actually is that they are talking about.)
Again, don't go chasing waterfalls, but do realize that we are inundated with seriousness and oppressive censorship at all times. But not from some overarching Big Brother, from each other.
Lately I see the most innocuous comments treated like full on endorsements of Hitler and I see mildly amusing acts of idiocy treated with such contempt that it makes it seem like fun is illegal. I've seen comedians have to apologize for jokes as if the very concept of someone who's job it is to make fun of things cannot even be comprehended.
And yet we live in a world where poverty in our richest countries is out of control and the underlying message throughout all our communications with each other seems to be that we can let great atrocities pile up, as long as we do so in polite and socially acceptable ways.
It's funny to grow up and go to school and learn about the Puritans, the repressed Victorians and the censorship of the early Twentieth Century, only to see it all come back around as a response to the unprecedented freedom of expression offered to us by current technology.
Thanks for reading.