One of the most fascinating thing to me in this story is how it intersects with sports. Don Imus has said much worse about politicians and reporters and gotten away with it for years. Indeed, there are precious few reporters and public figures who dared to ignore his show because of its place in the insider media food chain. But this first time — as far as I can tell — he personally attacked sports figures in this way he gets fired. Much of the discussion and the news I heard about Imus I heard through sports shows and sports talk radio. I don’t think its an exaggeration to say that millions more people heard his comments and about the uproar because of sports talk. I have to believe that it had an effect on the outcome. The more people who hear about the affair, the more people there were to put pressure on the sponsors. Rush Limbaugh went through a similar event. He made a racist comment about Donovan McNabb on ESPN and was fired. That comment was mild compared to some of the racist remarks he has made in the past, but it was that remark that caused him to lose a job and that remark that is the one I hear most often when his racist past is brought up.
What does this tell us about sports and our country?
I suspect that it means nothing more than that sports is the one area where we still share a largely common culture in this country and that we, as a society, pay far, far more attention to sports than we do to journalism or politics. But it might also mean that sports — with it’s clearly measurable objectives and obvious markers of success — is the one are of our culture where racism’s inherent idiocy is most clearly revealed. It is easy, sometimes, for people not to see the effects of racism, to argue that minorities aren’t discriminated against in the real world, that they just don’t work hard enough. No one with a brain, though, could argue that the Rutgers players hadn’t worked hard and didn’t belong where they found themselves. No one could argue that Donovan McNabb wasn’t one of the league’s best quarterbacks or that he had gotten where he was because of some weird quarterback affirmative action. Sports fans expect their games to be honest and reflect of actual effort and ability. When someone implies the opposite, the fallacy is obvious and jarring in a way that it isn’t in almost any other activity.
Baseball is celebrating Jackie Robinson today. I have heard people say that Jackie Robinson the baseball player (the distinction matters; Jackie Robinson the man, it is often forgotten, was a tireless champion for civil rights from the day of his retirement to the day of his death) was the most important civil rights leader the country ever had. I used to think that was a ludicrous exaggeration. I still don’t believe it, but I think it’s a lot closer to the truth than I had believed.