On Rocco and Racism
If you don’t know by now there has been quite a controversy over a couple of Johnny Miller’s comments about Rocco Mediate during the playoff round at the U.S. Open. I thought, as an inaugural post, a quick tour these happenings and a good dose of my opinion on the matter would be just perfect.
First, the facts: In the course of the broadcast Miller made two comments about Rocco Mediate that were deemed by some to be off color at best. According to the AP Miller said, "Guys with the name ‘Rocco’ don’t get on the trophy," and that Mediate, ""looks like the guy who cleans Tiger’s swimming pool." So there we are.
I was listening to Eric Kuselias on ESPN Radio while he had a man from the OSIA (Order Sons of Italy in America), who was calling for the suspension of Miller and demanding a public apology as the comments that Miller made were an offense to all Italian-Americans everywhere. This is where I got interested.
I’ll go ahead and say that I don’t think that Johnny Miller’s comments were racially charged. Not on purpose, and not for lack of tactfulness. They were off color and uncalled for, but not characterizations of the Italian-American community. If you remember what Fuzzy Zoeller said about Tiger Woods post Masters a few years ago then you have a perfect example of a racially charged comment. The winner of the Masters picks the menu for the post tournament dinner, and Zoeller said something to the affect that since Tiger had won he figured that fried chicken, collared greens and water melon would be the menu. This slur attached a single man (Tiger) to an unfair and offensive stereotype of the racial group Tiger is a part of, and therefore offended a large part of that racial group. But, Miller’s comments while lewd and without place in the broadcast, did not connect Rocco Mediate to any stereotype (fair or unfair, offensive or inoffensive) of the Italian-American racial group.
That being said I would like to point out the following and give my opinion of why the world works this way. If Miller had made his comments, stereotypical in content or not, about an African-American golfer, or a Latin-American golfer there would have been a media uproar. I’ll go so far as to say that if the rolls had been reversed and Rocco was the guy who dominated the Tour and Tiger was the underdog that Johnny Miller would have never uttered a maligned word against Tiger for the risk of the sort of backlash that Fuzzy Zoeller had to endure. I wonder what it is in this world that makes folks so sober and tactful about one racial group; taking it so far as to never say an indelicate word about certain racial groups, while thinking wholly less tactfully about other racial groups. I don’t know if I’d call it a conundrum but it certainly is a curiosity.
RKW
