You already know that ESPN has fallen very far, from its heyday as the global leader in sports programming to its current pathetic state as a pusher of left-wing social sensibilities that uses sports a foil. ESPN celebrates on-air personalities like Tony Kornheiser, Michael Wilbon and Stephen A. Smith for their courageous liberal pronouncements. (For the record, I love Smith . . . but he is what he is.) ESPN fires conservatives like Curt Schilling who express their opinions, even when they do so off the air and completely apart from their role on ESPN.
ESPN sucks. And it's hemorrhaging viewers as a result. But you already know that.
What you may not know is that ESPN is so dumb, it actually fired a guy for being a racist when what really happened is that no one at ESPN was intelligent enough to understand the word he had used. How mind-boggingly dumb is ESPN?
This dumb:
A tennis commentator dropped by ESPN for a remark about Venus Williams during the Australian Open has sued the sports network for wrongful termination.
Former tennis pro Doug Adler maintains he was describing Williams' aggressive style last month as "guerrilla" tactics and not comparing her with a "gorilla."
He apologized for his poor word choice but was let go from ESPN mid-tournament.
Adler filed suit Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, saying he has wrongly been branded a racist and lost work because of the controversy. The suit calls for punitive financial damages, but doesn't name an amount.
The only thing Adler did wrong here was to "apologize for his poor word choice," because he didn't make a poor word choice. Describing the style of a tennis player as "guerrilla tactics" represents a perfectly good choice of words. It is not offensive. It is not inappropriate. It is not racist. It is not derogatory in any way. Only a complete idiot would hear the word "guerrilla" in this context and mistake it for the word "gorilla," and then go a step further and think Doug Adler a racist.
And only a network full of total imbeciles would not have a single person on staff intelligent enough to correct the others who jumped to such a moronic conclusion.
Because ESPN is so full of intellectual defectives, Doug Adler now has to defend himself against charges of being a racist despite probably never having had a racist thought in his life. This is affecting his career and his life, for no good reason whatsoever.
I hope Adler wins so much money from ESPN that it has to shut down, like Gawker had to after it got its head handed to it in the Hulk Hogan suit. There's nothing good on ESPN that another network couldn't easily absorb, and it would serve them right for treating people like Schilling, Adler, Ray Lewis and Cris Carter as they have.
You might even call this a guerrilla tactic. And don't worry about my having said it publicly. ESPN doesn't know what that means.
