RACE TO JUSTICE
Judge upholds Adler suit for false slur firing
EIGHTEEN months later, Doug Adler, preposterously fired as a racist by the preposterous bosses at ESPN, appears closer to achieving the justice he should never have had to pursue.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Elizabeth Feffer last week refused ESPN’s request to dismiss his suit against the network, ruling that there are “try-able issues of wrongful termination and negligent infliction of emotional distress in Doug Adler’s lawsuit.” ESPN has denied the allegations in the lawsuit.
Adler, now 60 and an All-American tennis player at USC before turning pro, was calling Venus Williams’ match in the Australian Open when he admired her successful poaching of the net as a “guerrilla” tactic, as per an ambush. The term had for years been applied to tennis, so much so that a Nike ad campaign starring Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras was labeled “Guerrilla Tennis.”
Beyond that, even the notion Adler would, out of nowhere but on national TV, slur Williams, an African-American, by calling her a “gorilla” — he said Williams had “put the guerrilla effect on” — was absurd.
But common sense be damned. Reacting to irrational claims on social media that Adler had said what he so clearly had not, ESPN summarily fired, convicted and condemned him as a racist.
ESPN could have dismissed or ignored such idiotic claims. It could have gone to bat — using logic as the bat — for its guy of 10 years. Instead, it sentenced an innocent man to Devil’s Island.
The mass media outrage that such a blatant injustice should have provoked never materialized. No one wants even fringe lunatics to label them “racist.” And Venus Williams, saying she wanted no part of it, offered no support. She couldn’t be bothered.
Thus between the media and Williams, there would be no tennis court of public opinion, no pressure on ESPN to right its wrong. ESPN was allowed to be judge, jury and executioner of an innocent employee.
Adler, who’d soon suffer a heart attack, was left to suffer ESPN’s insufferable devices as if the punishment met his imagi- nary, wishful crime.
The irony, had the media had the guts to pursue it, is as stunning as the injustice.
At the same time Adler was unjustly fired and defamed, ESPN was re-titling its annual ESPYs show Sports Humanitarian Award the “Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award.” Ali had died six months earlier.
Ali’s “humanitarianism” was on regular public display as he consistently exploited media gatherings to verbally abuse and denigrate his next opponents, including an aging Floyd Paterson, a genuine gentleman, and racially slurring Joe Frazier as “a gorilla.”
Ali was responsible for creating what now so obligatorily degrades boxing and MMA: the prefight sells of hate, often ending in violent podium hassles and the cheapest of news.
And at the same time of Adler’s firing and the renaming of its humanitarian award to salute a man who cruelly, unforgettably mocked his black opponent as “a gorilla,” ESPN continued to allow vulgar, N-wording, women-degrading rappers on air.
But now Adler is approaching the justice due him the moment the ESPN caved to some reckless bomb-throwers. And now ESPN, again, quietly, must answer Adler’s charges or reach a settlement.
One more irony: Adler is being represented by the law firm founded by O.J. Simpson’s lawyer, the late Johnnie Cochran.