FanNation - The Republic of Sport

A member of Congress once described a particularly bad law passed by Congress as "...a rotting fish in the moonlight.  It both shines and stinks at the same time."  What I believe that he meant was that Congress' finished product was an exquisitely bad idea.  This saying comes to mind when I think of the geniuses at Golf Week Magazine whose latest edition features a hangman's noose on its cover.

I am no demagogue and don't really like to discuss the issue of race, but talk about an equisitely bad idea!  Let's walk through this.

First, the context: this is being published in the wake of the furor caused by the Golf Channel's Kelly Tilghman who jokingly suggested on-air that perhaps Tiger Woods was so dominant in the sport of golf that perhaps some of his competitors should "lynch" him.  Needless to say, the joke flopped big time and caused a furor.

The point of my blog is not to condemm this reporter for her poor choice of words.  She apologized to Tiger, she made a public apology and was suspended for two weeks by the Golf Channel.  She is friend a of Tiger Woods and he publicly supported her with a statement issued by his agent.  In my opinion, that should have set the matter to rest.

Now, here comes Golf Week Magazine, which supposedly wanted to initiate a public discussion of the incident.  Fair enough.  The issue is how they went about doing it.

Second, the cover itself.  Putting a hangman's noose on the cover is not the way to do this.  There are family members of people who were lynched that are still alive today.  There are veterans of the Civil Rights Movement who had friends and associates who were murdered...some via lynching.  Then, there is the awful history of the 18th, 19th and first half of the 20th centuries when lynching was a sick national sport that was not limited to the South.  While there were lynchings of people of all colors, hundreds of African Americans were lynched each year in more than a few states of the United States, while Congress consistently refused to enact a federal anti-lynching law.  Lynching was a tool used by terrorists (often the Klu Klux Klan) to keep African Americans "in their place" and people were murdered (and often horribly mutilated) for the most trivial of reasons.  This was and is a form of terrorism that was used against defenseless (and often innocent) people, pure and simple.

In the wake of the recent "Jena 6" Civil Rights protests, hangman's nooses started popping up in workplaces and schools...not everywhere, but in too many places. 

Third, there is the equally exquisite issue of the timing of this publication...just before the Martin Luther King National Holiday.  Nice.  Real nice.  Betcha they didn't think about that one at all.

I watched ESPN as a spokesman for Golf Week Magazine tried to defend this nonsense by claiming that they were trying to be "provocative" in order to stimulate a discussion.  Are you kidding me?  I don't know what the publisher of Golf Week Magazine was thinking, but he or she needs to think again.   

It is one thing for a reporter to make an off-the-cuff on-air comment that wasn't meant to be offensive and I wasn't personally offended by her, but the comment was in extremely poor taste.  In the case of Golf Week Magazine, however, this is a different matter ENTIRELY.  This was a conscious and deliberate decision to fan some very ugly flames that had all but died down.  Take my word for it...people are not being overly sensitive about this.  They just plain do not like the association between an ill-advised "joke" about lynching, a hangman's noose, the awful racially-tinged history of lynching and a successful sports figure who is a member of racial minority group. 

And by the way, I am one of those people.

Don't get me wrong.  My issue is not with the reporter.  My issue is with the appalingly poor judgement and lack of common sense demomstrated by the publisher of Golf Week Magazine.

It doesn't matter whether Tiger Woods wanted to make a public comment about this or not.  It doesn't matter whether you do or don't like Rev. Al Sharpton or anyone else who was outraged by this stunt.  

This was an exquisitely bad idea.