Christian Ponder did not have the most successful tenure as quarterback of the Minnesota Vikings, and to make matters more taxing, his wife, ESPN reporter Samantha Ponder, was in the spotlight as well.
Samantha recalled some of the treatment the couple received in Minnesota to the point that they felt they had to keep the birth of their first child a secret due to some of the abuse they received.
“We were easy targets when we were (in Minnesota). And that’s not like a ‘poor us’ thing, but things weren’t going well,” Samantha recalled in speaking to Michael Rand of the Star Tribune. “Things were rough in public. I had some really bad encounters and basically kind of stayed home for a while when we lived there. It comes with the business. I get it. … It just got so bad when we were there that we decided, ‘we’re going to protect this.’ People can say whatever they want about Christian or me, but if we can protect my stress level while I was pregnant and our newborn baby, we were going to do that as much as we could. And it has been different since we moved.”
Many of the comments came via social media, which she has learned to deal with.
“In some ways, I embrace the hate. As long as you have a firm foundation elsewhere and don’t depend on other people to make you feel good or bad, then I think Twitter can be a great thing,” she added. “Sometimes it does get a little out of hand. As people in Minnesota learned very quickly, I just started blocking people. Especially when you’re pregnant and don’t want to be super stressed out, if you don’t see it, that makes it a whole lot better.”
Ponder has grown rather adept at fending off the Twitter trolls. It’s a pity that people got so abusive toward her and her husband during his time with the Vikings.
