Playing in the NFL isn’t always fun and glamorous, a point Brandon Jacobs was hoping to make on Tuesday when he revealed some of the seedier side of his celebrity.
The San Francisco 49ers running back is a big fan of Twitter and boasts 16,000 followers on the social media outlet.
Only not all of them are all that nice, a lesson he discovered the hard way after the results of an MRI taken on the knee he injured against the Houston Texans earlier this month came back negative. The bruising 6-foot-4, 264-pound back tweeted about the positive results and expected a wave of cheers in response.
That wasn’t exactly the case entirely.
“One person said, ‘I hope you die a horrible death,’ ” Jacobs told Matt Maiocco of Comcast SportsNet Bay Area. “I tweeted him back saying, ‘I’m sure my wife and kids appreciate that. Have a good day.’ It’s stuff like that, it’s uncalled for. There are some real dumb, stupid people out there.”
Jacobs, who helped lead the New York Giants to a Super Bowl championship last season before signing with the 49ers in the offseason, re-tweeted a handful of the boorish tweets that some offensive words in the hopes that they might shed better light on the kinds of rude antics professional athletes sometimes endure.
“Everybody thinks this life is all easy,” he said, “and you’ve got to deal with nothing. I like for people to see what else is out there, what else we deal with as NFL players. Let them see what it is that we go through.”
But Jacobs remained convinced that Twitter is a great way to communicate with fans in a positive way.
“But it’s also a great method for weak, heartless cowards,” he said. “There are a lot of those people out there. It’s more funny to me than anything to know there are stupid, dumb people out there like that. I deal with it and move on with my day.”
