Viewers of Saturday's Ohio State-Minnesota football game got a lot more than game analysis from ESPN sports analyst/color commentator Bob Griese.
While reading a NASCAR promo graphic with photos of the top NASCAR drivers, Griese's partner commentator Chris Spielman asked why driver Juan Pablo Montoya wasn't shown. With a laugh Griese answered, "He's out getting a taco."
It was a remarkably one-dimensional comment to come from such a well-respected and normally eloquent broadcaster. The news comes at the same time ESPN just fired baseball analyst and former Mets GM Steve Phillips for having an affair with a twenty-two year-old ESPN intern named Brooke Hundley.
While the "Taco Comment" is far from the bizarre slip that got former CBS NFL Today commentator Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder fired back in 1988, the off-handed way Griese made the remark and the way he laughed made him come off as something of an insensitive bigot. He sounded more like a hick amused by simplistic stereotypes and lacking in basic understanding of Hispanic culture.
Montoya isn't Mexican he's Colombian and even if he WAS Mexican, it still doesn't mean he runs around eating tacos all the time.
Most football fans know Griese as the NFL Hall-of-Fame QB of the Miami Dolphins. A highly-respected college football color man, he was the former booth partner of former ABC broadcasting legend Keith Jackson, I never would have thought him the type to make such a comment, even in jest in privacy. To say nothing of an open mike on a nationally televised game.
What effect does a comment like that have on the minds of the thousands of young kids who were listening?
While Griese did apologize for the comment later on in the broadcast, his reputation is stained. Not so much for the comment itself, but the startling lack of awareness of the makeup of a multi-cultural society that finds such humor distasteful and offensive.
As Lord Jeffrey warned, "A good name, like good will is got by many actions and lost by one."
