IF GLEN KUIPER IS A RACIST, WHY DID HE RAVE ABOUT THE NEGRO MUSEUM?

Unlike those who deserve to lose jobs — namely, basketball coach Bob Huggins after his anti-Catholic, homophobic radio comments — the Oakland baseball broadcaster’s N-word stumble seemed unintentional

     I don’t know Glen Kuiper. But I know the difference between a blatant racist and someone who just raved about visiting an acclaimed Black museum. I know the difference between someone pushing 60, with a clean record regarding social hatred of any kind, worn down by the thankless and fatigue-inducing position of broadcasting the games of an 8-28 baseball team likely headed to Las Vegas after alienating a fan base for decades.

     As for Bob Huggins, I do know him. And there is no debating the intent behind his homophobic comments on a radio show. Forever foul-mouthed and crusty, the veteran college basketball coach knew what he was saying during his offseason vacation when he slurred his former rivals at Xavier, from his Cincinnati days, as “Catholic fags.” Huggins apologized immediately. West Virginia University will reprimand him or, more appropriately, fire him. The key word being: intent. Huggins’ purpose was obvious.

     I can’t say that about Glen Kuiper.

     Every sports voice, from Vin Scully to Stephen A. Smith, has fumbled words. They haven’t dealt with the professional challenges of Kuiper, who is operating at some level of understandable exhaustion. With that in mind, I scrutinize the video. It’s the one where Kuiper tells a scant television audience before an Oakland Athletics game in Kansas City, with partner Dallas Braden by his side: “We had a phenomenal day today. (N-word) League Museum and Arthur Bryant’s Barbecue.” I repeatedly replay the tape and study his eyes and mouth. I listen to his voice intonation. I pay close attention to everything in his delivery — a pause for effect, a twitch that hints at his impending language, a gleam in his eye — and notice nothing but a broadcaster thrilled about his day with Braden at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and a world-famous ribs joint.

     Kuiper enthusiastically points toward Braden, who concurs. He prefaces his comment with a thumbs-up. He sounds like a man who has had the time of his life. He does not sound like he hates Black people as much as he’d love to hang out a few more weeks. So why, if we are thinking rationally and not armed with the slings and arrows of cancel culture, would this seasoned pro set fire to his career with an intentional racial slur? Nor can we assume this is how he speaks in private, casually dropping the N-word. More reasonably, as someone who has fumbled words on television and radio and once was ridiculed by a rival host of having “a real problem with your ‘Rs’ ’’ — maybe a function of growing up in Pittsburgh, where people say things like “yinz” — I suggest today that Kuiper did not curl his tongue and lips around the word “Negro” because, in part, he’d just spent several hours at the museum and restaurant. If he’d taken a restful nap in his hotel room, would the tongue and lips have operated in sync and not been so lazy?

     Instead, Kuiper has been suspended indefinitely by the Athletics — who are desperately eyeing scapegoats after trashing a franchise and shaming Major League Baseball — and might never return to his booth seat. He picked the wrong word to fumble and deserves a scolding for the act itself, as an example for aspiring broadcasters who need to get their sleep and carefully enunciate sensitive syllables. But he does not deserve permanent exile, as suggested by web opportunists who want him sentenced to long-term Coliseum confinement with the rats, possums and sewage. I’m afraid Kuiper might be finished after 20 years of calling games, 17 as lead play-by-play man, for a team fleeing the Bay Area soon. The team’s skunk owner, John Fisher, and his dirty-work front man, Dave Kaval, gladly will let someone else take the organizational heat.

     “The language used by Glen Kuiper during today's pregame broadcast is unacceptable," the team said in a statement after the game last Friday. “The Oakland Athletics do not condone such language. We are working to address the situation.”

     Kuiper apologized during the game, saying, “I just want to — a little bit earlier in the show, I said something, didn't come out quite the way I wanted it to, and I just wanted to apologize if it sounded different than I meant it to be said. And like I said, I just wanted to apologize for that.”

     Next day, his regret was stronger in a statement via NBC Sports California. “I could not be more sorry and horrified by what I said," Kuiper said. “I hope you will accept my sincerest apologies.”

     Kuiper’s story doesn’t sink to the unforgivable depths plumbed by Huggins, who will turn 70 in September. Appearing on Cincinnati station WLW, he was asked about the heated crosstown Xavier rivalry that began in the early 1990s and spanned to 2005. “Any school that can throw rubber penises on the floor and then say they didn't do it, my God, they can get away with anything,” Huggins said.

     “I think it was ‘transgender night,’ wasn’t it?” said host Bill Cunningham, recklessly egging him on.

     Said Huggins, “What it was, was all those fags, those Catholic fags, I think,” adding, in an apparent reference to rubber penises, “They were envious they didn't have one.”

     His apology was posted on the school’s basketball website: “… I used a completely insensitive and abhorrent phrase that there is simply no excuse for — and I won't try to make one here. I deeply apologize to the individuals I have offended, as well as to the Xavier University community, the University of Cincinnati and West Virginia University. As I have shared with my players over my 40 years of coaching, there are consequences for our words and actions, and I will fully accept (anything) coming my way. I am ashamed and embarrassed and heartbroken for those I have hurt. I must do better, and I will.”

     What should be coming his way is a dismissal. West Virginia is supposed to be “almost heaven,” if you believe the John Denver ode, and the university’s longtime basketball coach can’t be dropping slurs and continue to recruit players at a university purportedly committed to higher academia.

     Nor does Kuiper’s blunder seem as intentional as Thom Brennaman’s booth bomb, also involving Cincinnati. In 2020, he was unaware his Fox Sports Ohio microphone was live when he blurted a gay slur before a Reds doubleheader in Kansas City: “One of the fag capitals of the world.” His homophobia was loud, clear and intentional, though we’re still not sure which city he was referencing, and he deserved to lose his job as Reds broadcaster. He remains in employment exile, despite the recent efforts of a local columnist arguing he deserves a second chance, and hasn’t worked beyond the Roberto Clemente League in Puerto Rico and a Chatterbox Sports show on YouTube. Kuiper does not deserve the same fate.

     Of course, broadcasting executives — making decisions in conjunction with image-immersed sports franchises — don’t try to differentiate between intent and a slip of the tongue. They’re too busy covering their asses and using others’ misfortune to prop themselves as upstanding humans and industry leaders. Never mind that Kuiper is supported by Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, who said in a statement: “I’m aware of the unfortunate slur made by Glen Kuiper. I welcomed Glen to the NLBM yesterday and know he was genuinely excited to be here. The word is painful and has no place in our society. And while I don’t pretend to know Glen’s heart I do know that my heart is one of forgiveness. I hope all of you will find in yourselves to do the same!”

     Echoing Kendrick was A’s pitching legend Dave Stewart, who grew up in a poor Oakland neighborhood and has close ties to the city’s Black community: “Bob could not have said it any better. I know Glen, have worked with him over the years. I believe it was an unfortunate mistake. He, as we all deserve a second chance.” He finished with a prayer emoji.

     Also defending Kuiper was Mike Krukow, who broadcasts San Francisco Giants games with Kuiper’s brother, Duane. On KNBR radio, Krukow said, “I wondered if it was even appropriate for me, a white guy, to forgive another white guy for misspeaking in such a racially insensitive way, and I hope that it is. … I’ve known the Kuiper family for 40 years, and they’re a family of farmers. They believe that people should take on the responsibility of accepting the task of making a difference. They’re hard workers. They don’t judge people by their color or their religion or their political views. They always look for the good in the person. They care. This is them, this is their family. And they all grew up — Duane, Jeff, Kathy, Glen — with these values. When they had their children, they passed these beliefs onto them. It’s because of this that I will stand by Glen Kuiper.”

     It’s convenient for the A’s to use Kuiper as a fall guy for their own failures. Joe Rogan, Madonna and Justin Bieber are among those who have dropped the N-word and carried on as if they hadn’t. Radio crackpot Don Imus committed a fireable offense in the late-aughts — referring to Rutgers women’s basketball players as “nappy-headed hos” — and somehow kept his career. This is not Jimmy (The Greek) Snyder going off the ledge when he said of Black athletes: “The Black is a better athlete to begin with because he's been bred to be that way, because of his high thighs and big thighs that goes up into his back, and they can jump higher and run faster because of their bigger thighs and he's bred to be the better athlete because this goes back all the way to the Civil War when during the slave trade … the slave owner would breed his big Black to his big woman so that he could have a big Black kid …”

     Those heinous comments were intentional. But so were those of Charles Barkley, who infamously said, “That’s why I hate white people.” He said he was joking. I don’t think he was joking at the time, not that his TNT bosses would care if he repeated the comment today.

     Kuiper is not Barkley in a hypocritical media world. He’s viewed as some aging ball announcer in Oakland, playing out the string for a forgotten team. He’s an expendable target. And Fisher and Kaval can silence him to make themselves feel better, just as they ordered the outfield removal of Coliseum bedsheets protesting the proposed Las Vegas move.

     If fired, Kuiper should enjoy his favorite things in life. Heck, return to Kansas City, where no human with hate in his heart visits the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum before devouring slow-smoked burnt ends slathered with tomato-molasses sauce on Brooklyn Avenue, a living monument to what is great and permanent about Black America.

     Who hasn’t inadvertently stumbled over a word? Some of us even do so at the wrong time. Once, I was on a show talking about my corrupt Chicago media bosses and the word came out “krept.”

     “Krept?” the interviewer said.

     Cor-rupt, I repeated slowly.

     Something is corrupt, I’d say, if Glen Kuiper is muted for life.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.