Watch Your Mouth

There are two reasons for this post.

One, Brady Ackerman was at the Sun Sports studio this week to tape our "Tailgate Overtime Recruiting Special," and he mentioned how much he enjoyed my previous post on BS sportscaster terms. As far as I'm concerned, that's demand from the readers.

Second, Dan Patrick spent a good two hours on ESPN Radio earlier in the week on a related topic, stemming from Senator Joe Biden's ill-advised characterization of fellow Senator Barack Obama as "articulate." As we've heard ad infinitum from the cable news talking heads, simply calling Obama "articulate" wouldn't necessarily qualify as an insult. It would actually be a statement of fact. Barack Obama was once the president of the Harvard Law Review, for Heaven's sake. Of course he's articulate. Joe Biden can't carry the man's jock, intellectually speaking. It was the full text of Biden's comments -- "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" -- that made Biden sound like a clueless racist, despite the fact that the poor sap was trying to give his fellow Senator a compliment.

Interestingly, it was former ESPN personality Keith Olbermann -- like me, a Cornell graduate and former Sports Director at WVBR-FM in Ithaca -- who best "articulated" the problem when he said on Patrick's radio show, "it's the implication of surprise that makes it offensive." Biden's comment seemed to imply that he found Obama's razor-sharp intellect and commanding presence to be atypical - because, after all, he's black. That's the subtext, and that's why Biden found himself in twelve kinds of deep doo-doo immediately afterwards.

Dan and Keith spent quite a bit of time on this topic last week, applying it to the sports world, where the incessant media coverage provides ample opportunity for a coach, player, or team executive to place his foot in his mouth. Yet, in the many years that have passed since Al Campanis publicly dug his own professional grave with comments about the "necessities" for a coach or manager, you find very few Bidenesque fumbles in the public forum of sports. There are a couple of reasons for this.

First, sports figures are far more cautious with their public statements, in large part to the lessons learned after the Campanis-"Nightline" fiasco of 1987. It would be foolish to suggest that we've all become more worldly and tolerant now; racism does, in fact, exist, even in sports. But the advent of 24-hour coverage via TV, print, radio, and internet has placed a premium on judiciousness. It's made us stop and think before we speak. That's not a bad thing. If we think hard enough, we might learn something.

Second, the expansion of American sports into global markets, and the steady flow of foreign-born athletes into American leagues, has changed the landscape. As sports announcers, we don't have the luxury of drawing lines based on color or creed. The diversity that we see on a daily basis makes that impossible. If you cover Major League Baseball, you deal with white players, black players, Latin players, and Asian players. The NBA is a melting pot of players from Europe, Asia, Latin America, and all corners of the globe. Hockey? Euros, French-Canadians, Native Americans, African-Americans. If you can't handle that, you're not long for this business.

Sports are now global enterprises; we know no other reality. When I take my seven-year-old son to a Magic game, he sees an Orlando roster that includes players from Turkey, Serbia, Puerto Rico, Ft. Lauderdale, and everywhere in between. It's actually a convenient place for me to teach him lessons in diversity and acceptance, as powerful a laboratory as his public elementary school classroom, which is also a cross-section of America.

Coded terms like "articulate," "athletic," "overachieving," and the like often carry a racial subtext. This cannot be argued. However, I would postulate that those who follow sports in this country -- any sport, college or pro -- are receiving a crash course in the true meaning of diversity. It's a giant leap forward to watch a team play without considering the background of each athlete, but millions of fans do it every night. We don't care where the guy is from; it's irrelevant. That, in my mind, is one value that sports can teach us, if we're willing to accept the education. Being a sports fan doesn't guarantee a new level of awareness, but you've got to be pretty thick to develop prejudices when faced with multicultural rosters. San Antonio's star point guard is French; the best player in the NBA's Western Conference is German. This is reality, and there's not a damn thing wrong with it. I can watch Tony Parker and Dirk Nowitzki play all day.

In short, Senator Biden: take in a ballgame once in a while. It might do you some good.