UNM’s Greenwood rises above online cowardice

The sad part: It’s all so commonplace.

It’s all so expected and, in a disturbing sort of way, universally accepted.

Billions of people — with a capital B — for billions of minutes a month take to social media, tweeting and posting and Instagraming our way through life.

Which means there are billions of opportunities for cowards to shield themselves behind the pretense that with such independence comes the right to maliciously attack others without the fear of being held accountable.

It’s a coward’s life, hiding behind a window of hate and concealed by bizarre screen names.

There is some good to the computer-mediated tools that allow people to share information and ideals and pictures, at times empowering others to support those causes that most need it.

The ice bucket challenge, which promoted awareness of the horrific disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, began on social media. Within weeks of the challenge going viral, the ALS Association had received $41.8 million in donations. That’s power. That’s the incredible amount of positive influence that can be created with a click of a mouse, that can enact wonderful change. That’s historic.

That’s the good part about social media.

The bad part can be disgusting.

It was front and center again Wednesday night, minutes after New Mexico beat UNLV’s basketball team 71-69, after the Rebels over the final 35 seconds again showed little knowledge of how to defend — not fouling when they had one to give, committing the mortal man-to-man sin of allowing a baseline drive, not having anyone from the Thomas & Mack Center to Summerlin on the weak side to block out and rebound a miss.

UNLV is not a good defensive team. The evidence continues to be overwhelming. It would take a jury minutes to convict.

But in the aftermath of a sixth UNLV loss in seven games came the words of Lobos senior point guard Hugh Greenwood, who recounted how a Rebels fan, or at least a person posing as one, attacked the player and his mother on Twitter during the day.

Greenwood’s mother is battling breast cancer for a second time. The disease has spread to her lungs, but with such suffering her son has discovered a way to bring positive light to a dire situation.

He began a fundraising campaign called Pink Pack to accept donations for breast cancer awareness and has grown his hair dating to his sophomore season, which he is expected to cut next month as another way to bring awareness through the “Locks of Love” organization.

The coward suggested Greenwood drive his mother to the game in a hearse. The coward later tweeted that “The only line being crossed is the line between life and death your mom is on. Sweet dreams.” The coward then tweeted that cancer still would be real when Greenwood awoke the following day.

The challenge is to always rise above the coward, to understand that you can’t reason with those who choose to cover their identity, whose ignorance doesn’t allow them to see certain lines that decent, educated, moralistic people wouldn’t cross. You can’t reason with a ghost. Cowards aren’t the face-to-face types.

“I’m very, very close to my family, and I’m just trying to make a difference in the community, not just for breast cancer, but cancer as a whole because it affects so many people,” Greenwood told reporters. “Obviously, seeing what my Mom goes through, popping that chemo pill every morning … Karma comes around. I’m not wishing anything bad on (the person who tweeted) because that would make me stoop to his level. But I’m sure he has family members, one way or the other, affected by cancer. There’s just a point where you have to get a life.”

This is how you defeat the coward, or at least deem him insignificant. You travel the higher road, refusing to let his intolerant words of anger and jealousy and bitterness touch your soul or influence how you live.

But you also don’t forget. You use the coward as motivation.

Many shrugged their shoulders Wednesday night about the Greenwood situation, not in a manner of excusing or promoting or concurring with anything the coward tweeted, but as a sign that such hatred is a daily occurrence on social media, especially throughout the sports world.

That’s the sad part. The universal acceptance of it.

My father died of complications due to cancer a year ago. My mother died last week, shortly after scans showed there were too many tumors around her liver for doctors to count. Both gone in less than 365 days.

See, I don’t accept hateful tweets or texts or messages, and I’m in a business in which deflecting negative and unpleasant arrows aimed in my direction is also commonplace. Which is fine. It’s all part of it. Thick skin is a must.

But while mine might be a minority opinion, I can’t arrive at a place of shrugging my shoulders at the coward’s ignorance and hate, be it through Facebook or Twitter or message boards that require no accountability.

Rise above it? Definitely.

Accept it? Never.

There are so many positives about social media, so many ways it allows us to enact magnificent change in the lives of those sick or less fortunate.

But there is a darker side to it, a cruel, insensitive side.

Hugh Greenwood in a span of 24 hours taught us all how best to combat that side of it.

With class and dignity and character.

The coward will always lose that battle.

Not surprisingly, the coward who tweeted at Greenwood had deleted his account by Thursday afternoon.

How typical.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618. He can be heard from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday on “Gridlock,” ESPN 1100 and 100.9 FM. Follow him on Twitter: @edgraney.