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Award-winning columnist Tom Archdeacon — an old-school storyteller in a brand-new venue — writes about sports, the city, southwest Ohio and anything else that catches his fancy… or yours.Home > Blogs > Through the Arch > Archives > 2012 > February > 13
Monday, February 13, 2012
Sports tweets bring charges of racism, homophobia
As one person after another in and around the sports world is finding out these days, one little tweet can bring a whole lot of trouble.
The latest to get clobbered by his own 140-character boomerang is Fox Sports columnist Jason Whitlock.
Over the weekend Whitlock apologized for a tweet taking an off-color, mean-spirited - many say racist — swipe at New York Knicks guard Jeremy Lin, who is THE feel good story in sports right now.
After Lin’s magical 38-point performance against Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers last Friday night - the fourth straight victory orchestrated by the previously-unheralded Taiwanese-American hoopster — Whitlock sent out a tweet that said
“Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple inches of pain tonight.” Whitlock - who I’ve know a good while and who isn’t a bad guy - said he meant it as a joke. He said it was an attempt to be funny. It was not and the backlash - rightly so - has come in on him like a tidal wave.
The Asian American Journalists Association called the tweet blatant stereotyping and asked for a public apology.
Whitlock has since offered the following:
“I get Linsanity. I’ve cried watching Tiger Woods win a major golf championship. Jeremy for now, is the Tiger Woods of the NBA. I suspect Lin makes Asian Americans feel the way I feel when I watch Tiger play golf
“I should’ve realized that Friday night when I watched Lin torch the Lakers. For Asian Americans and a lot of sports fans, his nationally televised 38-point outburst was the equivalent of Tiger’s first victory in The Masters. I got caught up in the excitement. I tweeted about what a great story Lin is and how he could rival Tim Tebow.
“I then gave in to another part of my personality — my immature, sophomoric, comedic nature. It’s been with me since birth, a gift from my mother and honed as a child listening to my godmother’s Richard Pryor albums. I still want to be a standup comedian.
“The couple-inches-of-pain tweet overshadowed my sincere celebration of Lin’s performance and the irony that the stereotype applies to pot-bellied, overweight male sports writers, too. As the Asian American Journalist Association pointed out, I debased a feel-good sports moment. For that, I’m truly sorry.”
Whitlock - a former Ball State offensive lineman - is a black journalist with notable clout who often has written and opined on TV on issues of race. He usually pulls no punches, but I thought he went soft on himself on this one.
He did have one thing right about Lin though. The Knicks guard is a feel good story. Linsanity is the new Tebowmania that swept the NFL last season. But Tim Tebow’s heroics, unlikely as they were, weren’t as unexpected as this. The Denver Broncos quarterback had been a national champion with the Florida Gators and had won the Heisman Trophy before his NFL heroics this season.
Lin is a true underdog.
Growing up in California, he had no big time scholarship offers to play basketball, ended up at Harvard, starred there while carrying a 3.1 g.p.a. in Economics, then was snubbed by the NBA. Golden State finally picked him up last year, then exiled him to the end of the bench. He scored just 76 points during the entire season.
This year he was cut by the Warriors and Houston, too. The Knicks finally got him for a bargain basement price, then sent him to the D- League. After shining there he was brought back to the Knicks whose roster was decimated by injuries - most notably to Carmelo Anthony — and then further eroded by the absence of Amare Stoudemire due to the death of his brother.
Not much was expected of Lin or the Knicks, but the point guard took the team on his back and carried them to four straight wins, averaging 27.3 points and 8.3 assists a game.
Such a feel good story deserved all the well-intentioned salutes it got, but not the premature spew from Whitlock. If he had held onto his thought a little more he might have thought through the ramifications of his instant message.
That’s part of the trouble with twitter. There’s not much thought put into it. There’s no filter, often no context or cushion - and usually no excuse - once the tweets are out there.
Whitlock is just one of an ever-growing number of figures in and around sports to tweet himself into a jam.
Remember last year when the Pittsburgh Steelers Rashard Mendenhall tweeted his doubts that the towers of the World Trade Center towers were brought down by hijacked jets? He also cautioned that we had only heard one side of the Osama Bin Laden story.
When the tidal wave came his way he tried to down play the comments, but he still lost the endorsement deal he had with Champion sports apparel.
Last month, my good pal Tony Grossi, the longtime and stellar Cleveland Browns writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer got reassigned to a different beat by the paper because of a tweet he inadvertently sent out to all his followers about Browns owner Randy Lerner. It said:
“He is a pathetic figure, the most irrelevant billionaire in the world.”
The paper thought Tony had shown he wasn’t objective. I know him and his work and no matter how this looked, that’s not the case.
His sin may well be that he worded it wrong. I agree with our Browns afficionado, Sean McClelland, who opined after the Grossi incident:
“I don’t know enough billionaires to determine where Lerner ranks on the relevance scale, but I do know the Browns’ record since he inherited the team from his father in 2002 is far closer to ‘pathetic’ (56 wins, 105 losses, one playoff appearance) than not.”
Last week CNN commentator Roland Martin ended up on suspension for a Super Bowl Sunday tweet that many considered homophobic.
He was offering his take on the H & M commercial for David Beckham’s line of men’s underwear. The up close and personal ad featured the soccer star wearing only a pair of briefs.
To that Martin tweeted:
“If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad smack the ‘ish’ out of him!”
Martin claimed he was taking a jab at soccer fans, not commenting on the gay community or urging violence toward gays. CNN didn’t see it that way.
And so tonight Martin - like Whitlock - is feeling the pain.
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