TWO BAD: ESPN has rightly slammed Riley Cooper for racist comments, but they are handling Hugh Douglas’ remark (top and bottom left) to TV cohost Michael Smith (top) internally.
TWO BAD: ESPN has rightly slammed Riley Cooper (No. 14) for racist comments, but they are handling Hugh Douglas’ (No. 99) remark to TV cohost Michael Smith (far right) internally. (
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What drives fair-minded folks crazy is that fair play, common sense and genuine equality rarely make the cut. The debate is over before it begins, as the fair-minded, seldom invited to sit on the panel, are even less likely to be heard.
The apparently drunken, near-violent, N-worded scene made by ESPN analyst and ex-Jet Hugh Douglas at a National Association of Black Journalists meeting in Florida last weekend kinda took some of the steam out of ESPN’s Shame On Riley Cooper Week.
Though ESPN chose to explore the Douglas episode “internally” — not for the public’s examination or consideration on ESPN — the apparently drunken racial slur spoken by Cooper was exposed, explored and thoroughly exploited “externally” by and on ESPN.
So, if you’re scoring at home, the Cooper thing, according to ESPN, was everyone’s all-day, all-night business. The Douglas thing? That was nobody’s business.
Cooper, for what it’s worth, is 25. Douglas is 41. Both, ahem, college men.
Joe Sophy, reader from South Jersey, knows the score, how it gets lopsided because of selective umpiring. The Philadelphia media, he writes, have been all over Eagles receiver Cooper “and deservedly so. However, the same media never questioned why Delmon Young is collecting a paycheck.”
Young, with the Tigers, last year was arrested in Manhattan after a drunken, early morning, anti-Semitic spew and assault on a man he thought was Jewish.
But as villains go, Riley, not Young nor Douglas, is the latest national sports pariah.
LSU RB won’t be taking it to Big House
Great news, LSU fans! Same for longtime SEC football TV network CBS, and for ESPN, which will share SEC multi-million dollar annual football rights starting next season!
LSU’s leading rusher Jeremy Hill won’t have to go to jail for a probation violation, after all! Yay!
That’s right, the student-athlete who last year as a freshman scored 12 TDs in 11 games — and in just five starts — is eligible to score some more!
Hill, 20, already was on court probation when he and an accomplice were arrested for assaulting a man outside a near-campus bar, at 2 a.m. on April 27. After twice punching the retreating man, knocking him out, they high-fived each other — a scene recorded on a cell phone video camera that was lent to cops.
Hill was on a previous probation after pleading guilty to having had sex with a 14-year-old girl when he was 18 in high school. LSU recruited him, anyway.
Odd thing, too, is that both LSU and the TV folks last season referred to Hill as “a true freshman.” Yet, he turned 20 in October of his “true freshman” year — his college career delayed by his first arrest.
More great news from the SEC: Alabama’s renovated football locker room will look more like a huge penthouse reserved for a sheik and his harem.
The new room, part of a $9 million renovation, will include both a large hot tub and cold tub, waterfalls running down their nearest walls.
That should help recruit impressionable kids while eliminating any inflated sense of entitlement among those student-athletes successfully recruited.
* TNT’s Ernie Johnson doesn’t work much golf, but every year as weekday host of the PGA Championship he just easily slides right back into his reserved seat in TV’s goofy golf cliché grinding machine.
Yep, if you’re “safely on the green” and “the flat stick is working” and if you avoid “carding double bogeys” and finish “atop the leader board,” you can “hoist the trophy.”
Thursday, when Phil Mickelson slightly pulled his drive, his ball landing directly in the rough then staying there, Johnson, of course, told us that his ball “found the rough.”
* FOX, which a few years back wanted Kevin Burkhardt for weekend baseball, finally has him — for football. The SNY Mets rover and occasional play-by-player will call smaller region NFL telecasts with analyst John Lynch.
Other recent FOX and FOX Sports 1 — the latter FOX’s latest ambitious shot at a national cable sports network — additions include 26-year (!) NHL vet Chris Chelios as a studio man, Chris Simms, Phil’s kid, as an in-game college football analyst, recent ex-MLBer Gabe Kapler as a studio analyst, and Ronde Barber to work NFL telecasts with Dick Stockton.
Translating Mayock speak
With NFL Network back in live football action, a Mike Mayock glossary of terms refresher:
“Throwing the ball vertically down the field” means throwing the ball mostly horizontally down the field, or just down field.
“Going vertical to catch [or deflect] the ball” is the same as jumping for it. “High-pointing the ball” is the same as going vertical or jumping to catch or deflect it.
“Leveraging the linebacker [or DB]” is the same as being/getting open to catch a pass.
More to come.
* Reader Jim Neil of Fort Worth, Texas, was the first to write that with the Time Warner Cable-CBS feud, CBS Sports’ Bill Cowher continues to star in come-and-buy-it TV commercials for TW.
* SNY anchor/reporter Jeane Coakley last week promoted interviews with Jets QBs Mark Sanchez and Geno Smith by tweeting photos of herself in cozy, BFF poses, one with each QB.
* Last week in Fenway, Seattle reliever Oliver Perez, in one-third of an inning, allowed two hits and two earned runs, yet was credited with both his fifth hold and third loss. That’s right, he was able to hold on long enough to lose.
* CBS golf analyst Peter Kostis is taking off this PGA Championship, being treated for colon cancer that he says was detected early.
* Lost Tapes: Everything that has transpired in the Biogenesis scandal, but especially the suspensions of Ryan Braun, Alex Rodriguez and 12 others — only Rodriguez has appealed — is exactly what legal expert Mike Francesa authoritatively hollered would not happen because it could not happen.
* ESPN studio anchor Jonathan Coachman, former TV shill for the drug and drug-death saturated WWE, now solemnly reports on MLB’s drug scandals.
* Four years ago, Jets radio and TV ads dishonestly claimed fans had better hurry because the new, great-deal PSL tickets were nearly sold out! Today, Jets ads are pushing tickets — any and all — starting at 50 bucks. Until they and the NFL were overcome by greed, the Jets had a 20-year waiting list.
* Two people heard cheering — plenty of it, too — for Rodriguez on Monday in Chicago. Over all the booing, John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman said folks were cheering.