One Shining Moment: Boomer Esiason Uses the “H” Word

Here we go again.

On WFAN Sunday morning former NFL quarterback Norman “Boomer” Esiason called Denver Broncos head coach Josh McDaniels “littler Hitler.”

Esiason is one of the guys who is said to ‘tell it like it is,’ and who ‘spares no one with his wrath.’

And similar positive spin blasther attached to his being a verbal bully.

So, will Esiason gat the “he should be fired” treatment Jemele Hill received when she included a Hitler remark in one of her columns? Will Esiason be forced to publicly apologize as did Hill?

Will some jerk – okay, asshole -  like “James” from Columbus, Ohio write Esiason with the following comment and question:

James Columbus, OH: Jemele: How does it feel to be labled a racist, or at the least, a person who incites racist feelings? What about your Hitler comment? Do you try to stir the pot, or are you really racist?

Or will Esiason get the Lou Holtz treatment? Where everybody and their ombudsman covered his ass? Of Holtz, ESPN ombudsman, Leanne Schreiber wrote:

If ESPN had done a better job of explaining itself, I would have a slimmer mailbag and a shorter column. As it is, there is still much to clarify.

First, Holtz did not compare the Wolverines’ coach to Hitler, as many of the Michigan alums who are still writing me believe. The context into which Hitler was dragged was a discussion of leadership among players in the locker room, during which analyst Mark May asserted that to win games “you have to have leaders in the locker room to get the team and the young players to buy into what the coach is teaching you.” Holtz responded, “Let’s remember this, Hitler was a great leader, too. There are good leaders and bad leaders.”

In context, his garbled but detectable meaning was beware what you wish for. You wish for a strong leader, you may end up with a Hitler. Understanding both the context and the danger of misinterpretation, “GameDay” anchor Rece Davis leapt in after Holtz with, “OK, and meaning obviously, that he was a very bad leader.”

Later, Davis told me, “It’s been very frustrating to read some of the things that have been written. Much of it was a complete mischaracterization of the discussion. There’s no way it was implied, nor should it have been inferred, that Lou drew any comparison between Rich Rodriguez and Hitler. He was making a point about establishing leaders in the locker room who lead in the right direction as opposed to the wrong one. Anyone who wrote otherwise either didn’t see the discussion or wasn’t listening.”

“Anyone who wrote otherwise either didn’t see the discussion or wasn’t listening.”

Oh really Rece? Really Leanne? Then why did you leave the explanation of the context to you and Davis rather than supply the public with the video and allow the public to decide the context of Holtz’s statement?

And if the context was only about players, how did Adolph Hitler creep into the conversation? Adoph Hitler was the leader of Nazi Germany, not a player. Sure, he rose through the ranks but Rich Rodriguez is the leader of the Michigan football team, not a player.

But rather than chastise Holtz for being historically inaccurate, and force him to explain his position, Schreiber covered for Holtz to the point where she told the public that higher-ups at the Big Subliminal wrote Holtz’s apology.

What Lou could not speak for himself? Lou couldn’t watch the videotape, think about his comment and explain what he meant, apologize, and be done with the affair?

Similarly, when Kelly Tilghman of the Golf Channel made her “take him in a back alley and lynch him” comment about Tiger Woods she even had Michael Wilbon climbing up her back and apologizing for her. And when Tilghman offered a half-assed apology, the skirt-chasers asked incredulously, “If Tiger Woods accepts her apology, why can’t other Black people?”

And the reposnse to that query is this: why should I, a “Cablanerican” myself, but a man who identifies himself  and is identified with as Black, give a damn if Tiger Woods, a man who might be the only person who fails to identify him as Black, accepts Tilghman’s “sorta apology?”

If Tiger Woods was Eldrick Black or Tiger Woo instead of Tiger Woods and said crap like, “I’m not Black I’m Cablanasiasian or whatever it is he says, he still be famous ———————- as the butt of a videotaped You Tube joke.

Over a year ago, January 10, 2008 to be exact, I wrote a comnmentary titled, “From Bonds to Clemens, from Ankiel to Taylor to Tilghman: We Missed the Moment and Now We Must Pay.”

The gist of the commentary was this: If the insensitive and racist treatment of Barry Bonds and Sean Taylor was not enough, if we could not view the remarks and the writings compared with the apologist treatment Roger Clemens, Rick Ankiel, and Kelly Tilghman received in comparison, we have missed moments to begin to correct the mistakes made with the treatment of Bonds and Taylor, and other Black athletes.

Though the evidence against Clemens, Ankiel, and Tilghman was and remains stark compared with that of Bonds -  respectively, first-hand evidence compared with third or fourth-hand evidence (for Bonds, at the time) – most people, especially white people, played down, dismissed, apologized for, or attempted to ignore the actions of the three white personalities.

With Sean Taylor, a wholly innocent victim of murder while protecting his family, the reportage was so heinous, so insidious, that it was apparent the mainstream sporting media and their blogging Internet counterparts, and the general public had gone over the edge. “He deserved what he got,” and “If you lead that kind of lifestyle, well this is what happens” comprised the tenor of the comments about Taylor. Wilbon jumped into the fray utterly castigating Taylor to the point where he uttered that he was not surprised that Taylor was killed because of the lifestyle Wilbon presumed Taylor led.

My goal here is not to vilify Wilbon, yet he was the most public, easily identifiable, and unrepentant figure in the discussions about Tilghman and Taylor.

And Wilbon, like all but a very few other writers and sports talking heads who made the gross error of bashing Sean Taylor as he lied in a hospital dying and continued to bash him after his death, never apologized for their horrifically insensitive or racist remarks.

But here we are inb 1909, 1939, 1969 – no 2009 and the same racism, at about the same rate, continues. We have a Black president who is compared to a monkey, we have Black athletes getting pulled over and tasered by police because they “looked at them” too many times; Black athletes getting shot in their own driveway by police who could not accept that the Black man owned the home; Black athletes having to genuflect before a league commissioner who will them discern whether or not his apology was sincere after the athlete serves his prison sentence; Black athlete and his wife detained purposely by a policeman not caring that a relative was dying in a hospital; Black athletes pulled from their boat and beaten for, well, being Black in the company of beautiful white women.

And we have no clue at all as to how many average Black men, women, and children are illegally arrested, beaten, or jailed ————– “just because.”

And we still must apologize for using the “H” word instead of having the blame shared with the white copy editors who apparently saw no problem with the context in which Jemele Hill used the “H” word in her column.

But hey, we’re making progress, right? At least we don’t get lynched but every few years, huh?

There is no mistaking Esiason’s context in using the “H” word. Here’s to hoping he gets fired from all his talking head positions.

(Thanks to the members of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) Sports Task Force listserve who caught Esiason red-handed and shared his remark with other listserve members.)