Bob Collins
Adrian Peterson , the former Minnesota Vikings star, didn’t learn a thing from his arrest and trial for beating his son with a switch.
He’s a big star again, now with the Washington Redskins, and sounded prideful in his interview with Bleacher Report.
“I had to discipline my son and spank him the other day with a belt,” Peterson said. “There’s different ways I discipline my kids,” he says. “I didn’t let that change me.”
He was suspended by the league after his earlier “disciplining,” eventually declaring he’d never use a switch on his kid again.
In the sympathetic article, Peterson said it makes him feel good to know his children will make better decisions in the future.
When he spanked his then-four-year-old son with a “switch,” a flexible branch used for corporal punishment, he didn’t know he would become the face of a national conversation about how to discipline a child. He was just doing what he thought was right. He had grown up in Texas being disciplined in a similar manner. The switch was long with ridges, and Peterson—who was 6’1″ and 220 pounds at the time—was a man of tremendous strength. (He once displayed his trademark death-grip handshake on Jimmy Fallon in 2013.) The lashings left numerous cuts and bruises on the child’s legs, back, buttocks, ankles and scrotum. (Photos were later released and went viral.) But according to Peterson, the child didn’t move or cry during the whupping.
“My kids are different,” Peterson says. “They have my blood in them. They have my genes in them.” As unbelievable as a child not flinching from being beaten by a professional football player might sound, Peterson says his kids possess extraordinary strength: “It’s crazy when you think about it. But for me, it’s not. I know my kids. I know what they’re capable of, and I know the types of things they do.”
As for his earlier promise, “nine times out of 10,” he says, “that’s not the case” that he uses a switch to inflict his punishment.
After the article appeared, his agent tried to clean up the mess.
“There is nothing more important to Adrian Peterson than being a good father to his children” and that Peterson “learned several valuable lessons” in 2014 because of the suspension and counseling,” agent Ron Slavin said in a statement to ESPN.
