BIGOTS come in all shapes, sizes, colors and tones of voice.
Some spew their hateful ignorance loudly and proudly with spit flying from between their teeth, as if they’ve had too much to drink. But they won’t hate themselves in the morning.
Others are more circumspect, more gentlemanly. They advance their prejudice in a suit and tie. They speak scholarly words while providing selective and skewed historical and scientific evidence to support their bigotry.
Still others excuse and justify their hatred by citing their deep spiritual convictions. Heaven knows, while we’re all God’s children, they’re obligated to preach scorn toward certain disbelieving members of His flock. Hey, don’t blame these bigots, they’re only doing God’s work.
But they’re all bigots, none better or worse than the others.
And for that reason I no more want to see the Knicks re-sign Allan Houston than I want to see the Mets or Yankees trade for John Rocker. That Houston’s a gentleman bigot, a God-fearing bigot, or that he can help the Knicks win a game doesn’t wash a thing.
And the silence on this issue from a media that’s practiced in social double standards and selective indignation and sensitivity, while not surprising, is nonetheless outrageous.
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Odd, what strikes some TV folks and some networks as sports highlights.
Monday’s and Tuesday’s ESPN’s “SportsCenter” aired a pile of footage from the riveting Patrick Rafter-Goran Ivanisevic five-set, three-hour Wimbledon final. SportsCenter’s Wimbledon clip package included just about all you needed to know and see, everything except the two players in an exhausted, emotional embrace at the end of the match.
And that’s a pity, because that embrace told as much about the match as any five clips ESPN chose to air.
Is sportsmanship so commonplace today that viewers should take it for granted? We all know the answer to that. There certainly would’ve been enough time to show a benches-clearing brawl.
Live and Learn: Benny Agbayani, on MSG’s “Tim McCarver Show,” disclosed that his father, Ben, is the president of the Hawaiian Ballroom Dancing Society. Growing up, said Agbayani, a squabble in his household was usually “about dance steps.”
Beer Here! Steve Lazarus, 43 and a Bronx boy in his 25th year as a Yankee Stadium vendor, is also an aspiring stand-up comic. Lazarus opens tonight and tomorrow night for Robert Klein at Catch a Rising Star in the Princeton Hyatt Regency.
Interviewed from the NL dugout by ESPN Radio during Tuesday’s All-Star Game, Tony Gwynn said he’d prefer, at this point, to get into college coaching rather than coaching or managing major leaguers. He explained that “there’s more control” at the college level, then, with only a slight giggle, added, “The players aren’t rotten yet.”
That it didn’t work out for Darryl Hamilton in New York is a vast understatement, given that last year his reps sent out printed material and photographs to the local media pitching Hamilton as available for modeling, commercial endorsements and whatever else New York can provide pro athletes in the way of extra revenue and stardom.
If you thought it slightly bizarre that the late Fred Astaire was not long ago seen in a commercial dancing with a vacuum cleaner, PGA star Payne Stewart, who died in an airplane accident less than two years ago, still appears in commercials that appear on The Golf Channel.
Stewart continues to pitch S’port Max, a back support device. The commercial begins with a short disclosure noting that Stewart’s family approves of his sustained endorsement of the product and ends with Stewart draining a long putt, then pumping his fist.
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The one thing we’ve been unable to reconcile about Cal Ripken Jr. is his longtime service to home shopping networks in selling his autograph to the weak-minded and naive.
At 7:45 a.m., the morning after Tuesday’s All-Star Game, the QVC Network was busy hawking Ripken-autographed All-Star Game baseballs for $150 a throw and Ripken-autographed bats for $400 apiece. All “limited edition,” naturally.
For all the good will he spreads, for all of his baseball ambassadorship, Ripken has too long been too available to home shopping networks in order to share the take from overpriced goods carrying his autograph. And the “Step right up, hurry, hurry, hurry, get ’em while they last!” sell of Cal Ripken, Jr. to suckers just doesn’t rhyme with his otherwise classy image.