When Tommy Kjærsgaard-Rasmussen and his crew from the Danish television network TV3 Sport hit the ground during Super Bowl week, they’re often hard to miss.
At Super Bowl XLVIII media day, Kjærsgaard-Rasmussen dressed as Where’s Waldo. Another year, one of his colleagues at the station challenged Rams star defensive tackle Aaron Donald to a game of slaps, engaging in playful hand combat with one of the strongest defensive players in the league, while hundreds of journalists watched in stunned silence (this was a blessed, pre-COVID-19 setting, of course). Kjærsgaard-Rasmussen said he freestyle rap-battled Cam Newton before Super Bowl 50. And before Super Bowl LII, he walked around media night asking players about their grandmothers (while holding up a picture of his own).
Kjærsgaard-Rasmussen is also an NFL analyst, who provides live Danish commentary during two NFL games every Sunday, plus Danish studio commentary during breaks of andboth of which are broadcast only in English. Aside from the media night high jinks, he also comes to the Super Bowl each year trying to put together a reported, nuanced story about something of particular interest to his viewers back home.
Last year, he wanted to do a story about Chiefs top receiver Tyreek Hill.
“We felt like every time we showed a Chiefs game in Denmark, we would have to discuss his issues,” Kjærsgaard-Rasmussen said over Zoom this week from his home country—because of the pandemic, he’ll miss his first Super Bowl in more than a decade. “We felt like we couldn’t praise him for everything he did on the field without also discussing the accusations off the field. It’s always tough. It’s tough figuring out, especially when you’re from Europe. Your [justice] system is difficult to understand.”
Hill was arrested back in 2014 for punching his pregnant girlfriend in the stomach and choking her. He would later plead guilty to domestic assault and battery by strangulation, which required three years of probation and anger management courses. In 2019, he was investigated for battering the couple’s three-year-old son. Neither Hill nor the mother were ever charged—the district attorney stated that he felt a crime had been committed, but he didn’t have enough evidence to charge anyone. Around that time, audio recordings of a conversation between Hill and his then fiancé included Hill saying, “You need to be terrified of me too, b—-.”
If this isn’t a totally familiar story to you or if the details seem hazy, that’s because Hill is now almost exclusively discussed in terms of his speed on the field during U.S. football broadcasts. The football viewing public has . The accounts are blanketed in vagaries.
The inability to penetrate a surface-level conversation puzzled Kjærsgaard-Rasmussen, who, during media sessions on Wednesday and Thursday of Super Bowl week last year, asked Hill and some of his teammates about how an arrest and further accounts affected their relationship with Hill and complicated life inside the locker room. Kjærsgaard-Rasmussen said Hill appeared offended by his questions. Kjærsgaard-Rasmussen described Hill’s teammates as welcoming, but “no one wanted to talk about the issue in a real way.”
“We got a story done,” he says, “but if this had been Danish soccer players, who I interview the most, we would have been able to talk about it in a different way. I guess maybe we’re just more up front about more serious issues.”
On Sunday, Hill will be on the field for the Chiefs. Buccaneers receiver Antonio Brown, who has a pending civil trial for sexual assault and rape that has been delayed until December 2021, is on Tampa Bay’s active roster (but may not play due to a knee injury). While it’s important not to lump these stories together, their fallout has taken a similar path, one that seems to fast-forward through public contrition (Buccaneers general manager Jason Licht recently told NBC that Brown has been “nothing short of spectacular” and lauded his ability to mentor Tampa Bay’s younger players). Meanwhile, someone like Kjærsgaard-Rasmussen, who isn’t familiar with our penchant to avoid difficult conversations, especially on Sunday broadcasts, is preoccupied by the elephant in the room.
“Americans are a little more afraid to talk about the stuff that hurts,” he says. “The stuff that might explode between your hands.”
