Sports folks often find wrong place to talk race
We hit a trifecta of racialized events in sports media over the past week that serve as a perfect microcosm of some of the most common reactions when these issues burble up. Here’s a rundown:
Curt Schilling doesn’t have a racist bone in his body
Remember when the former pitcher and ESPN baseball analyst was the tech-savvy one? I do. I wrote an article and chatted with him when he started a video game company. Of course, that company went on to almost bankrupt Rhode Island. Schilling also got props for an Internet screed in March when he tracked down some guys who harassed his daughter online.
That said, he was also caught posting racist memes on his Facebook page, for the most part targeting Muslims. The one that brought him down was an Islamophobic tweet that invoked Hitler. For this wonderful imagery, Schilling was suspended for a week from his assign- ment at the Little League World Series. Then after a week of twiddling their thumbs — and Schilling sending inflammatory emails to a writer at Awful Announcing, proclaiming innocence — he was suspended for the rest of the season by ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball.
Schilling said in a statement: “Bad choices have bad consequences and this was a bad decision in every way on my part.”
ESPN’s comment read in part: “We are a sports media company. Curt’s actions have not been consistent with his contractual obligations, nor have they been professionally handled; they have obviously not reflected well on the company. As a result, he will not appear on ESPN through the remainder of the regular season and our Wild Card playoff game.”
Schilling’s made his post-playing career on being outspoken, and — reading between the lines — it’s likely he’ll be back in the analyst’s chair next year.
Darren Rovell thinks race talk is idiotic because of money
ESPN’s sports business personality stepped into it again on Monday when he casually brushed aside any discussion of Serena Williams and race, tweeting: “Racism talk is idiotic when it comes to Serena. It’s the same marketplace that pays big $ to tons of black athletes.”
Well, obviously, since there are several rich black athletes, racism isn’t an issue at all. At least we know who the idiot is. It’s also not the first time Rovell has waded into issues like this, showing his ignorance.
Williams has had a long history of dealing with racist and sexist incidents.
For his part, Rovell got absolutely torched on Twitter. There’s been no recourse from his employers, but many of his colleagues immediately distanced themselves from the comments. For him, it has been business as usual.
Black soccer players also make lots of money, but on Thursday the Football Association reported that incidents of racism and other discrimination in English soccer rose by 21 per cent last season, to 887.
Georges Laraque makes a funny
Greg Wyshynski, at Yahoo’s Puck Daddy blog, had a fascinating locker-room nugget from Jarkko Ruu- tu’s recently released biography, The Divine Comedy. Translated from Finnish, it tells of a prank from his time with the Pittsburgh Penguins, where the enforcer Laraque comes in and finds a doodle of a monkey with a banana hanging in his locker. Incensed and looking for who’s to blame, teammate Colby Armstrong makes a racist comment, including the N-word. Laraque goes to attack him. While the rest of the team expects to see a murder, the pair start laughing. It was something they had cooked up together.
This one goes to the idea that what happens in a locker room stays there. As the post went viral, that was basically Laraque’s defence. He says it was his idea, and followed up by writing to Wyshynski: “I’ve always liked Jarkko as a guy. But what happens in the room stays in the room. To write something like that, that can be borderline offside, you have to ask the parties involved. You have to make sure me and Colby are OK with it.”
Actually, what Laraque’s response really shows is that he knew that if anybody ever tried to tell the story again, it just wouldn’t be very funny.