RACE UNDER FIRE
A S HOMER Simpson hollered when he and Bart were stuck deep in a hole, “Dig up!”
For no good, earthly reasons, we keep digging deeper racial holes into which the guilty, innocent and undetermined are shoved, often never to reappear.
Political correctness isn’t a bad thing — provided you’re correct!
Part I: Last month Doug Adler was fired as an ESPN tennis announcer after noting, during a Venus Williams match in the Australian Open, that she was using “the guerilla effect.”
A “guerilla” move in tennis has become a good, concise description of a player who was mostly playing from the baseline making a sudden, unexpected rush to the net — a surprise, an ambush, a la guerilla tactics.
However, those who illogically chose to hear that Adler, for no sensible reason, chose to call Williams a “gorilla” — chose to excoriate and condemn him as a no holds-barred racist — won. Game, set, match. Two days later Adler was fired.
Before he was sacked, Adler, 59 and a former tennis pro recently hospitalized with a heart attack, was forced by easily frightened, cowardly ESPN to make an on-air apology for choosing a “poor word.”
Adler has filed a wrongful termination and defamation suit against ESPN. His suit claims that ESPN execs well knew that he was saying “guerilla,” not “gorilla” — how could they not? — but cared nothing about the distinction nor Adler’s career and reputation.
But that is how ESPN selectively stands behind its employees. From behind they most easily are pushed off a cliff. Here is hoping Adler beats ESPN with an overhead smash winner.
Part II: While sports talk radio and TV is loaded with smug, selfabsorbed, bad-guess know-it-alls, ESPN TV and radio’s Dan Le Batard stands out.
Le Batard recently was accused of racism by ESPN’s Keyshawn Johnson for the former’s opining that Magic Johnson’s selection to run the moribund Lakers was based only on his playing greatness and sustained popularity, not on his basketball management acumen.
Given Magic Johnson’s two feckless, pro basketball-detached engagements as an ESPN NBA analyst, Le Batard, in this case, made some sense.
And I wrote that — as well as a scold of public figures such as Keyshawn Johnson, who are quick to publicly brand people as racists based on nothing stronger than a guess.
I also wrote that Le Batard has been heard to make reckless racial and racist claims — specifically about white public figures — on his show, but his Magic Johnson opinion didn’t strike me as racist.
On that Monday, Le Batard, adrift in his megalomaniacal juices, told his national audience I not only had written about him — only tangentially true — I had written to him, and for him, hollering, “I don’t need Mushnick to defend me!”
Lost in his self-delusional narcissism was that the column had little to do about him. The larger point was that he was the latest to be torched in a country stuck and sinking in a perilous place, one in which irresponsible claims of “racism!” easily are shouted and easily stick.
Part III: Keyshawn Johnson, in NFL retirement, trashed former Jets teammate and fellow receiver Wayne Chrebet as nothing more than the Jets “mascot.”
Chrebet, undersized at 5-foot10 and undrafted out of Hofstra (Johnson, 6-4 out of USC, was the first pick of the 1996 draft) was among the greatest overachievers in NFL history.
As a Jet, Johnson was an allabout-me, divisive presence who often boasted a better game than he played. Chrebet was a modest, team guy, and, again, one who greatly exceeded his perceived limitations.
So what could have fueled Johnson’s mockery of Chrebet? Jealousy? Or was it something else? Johnson’s fortunate that reckless public claims of racism don’t travel on two-way streets.