PLEASE LEAVE CHIP CARAY ALONE, AS HIS GRANDFATHER ANGRILY WOULD PROTEST
Broadcasters stumble, which is why Caray said “fag” when he intended “flag,” and as he avoids punishment in St. Louis, ask why Ozzie Guillen purposefully used “f—ing fag” and has worked for six years
Chip Caray’s grandfather, Harry, was a beer-drinking rogue who spent 288 straight nights in bars. A diary kept track of him, or so he gushed. Once, I went on a nighttime tour and thought his ultra-goliath black glasses would be lost in the toasted ravioli.
“Mark Grr-grrud-zel-zalanik,” he described a player named Mark Grudzielanek on the air. Later, he spelled out the 12 letters. Was he hungover?
“Harry tried to say it backwards last year, and that was funny,” Grudzielanek said.
So, if Caray heard about Chip in the heavens Saturday, he would say we’re drunk. He wouldn’t care about a homophobic slur that was uttered by accident — and he would be as correct as the hops inside his Budweiser. As an announcer for the St. Louis Cardinals, Chip was asked to read a promo for the team’s “Disability Pride Night.”
“With a themed ticket, fans take home a Cardinals cap featuring the disability pride fag, flag …” he said.
What followed was 31 seconds of dead air. Caray was mortified, knowing losers on social media would attempt to have him suspended or removed from the job. This was nothing but a stumble over a word that sounded like “flag,” and thankfully, his bosses at FanDuel Sports Network Midwest are not punishing him. Mistakes happen — the tongue slips — and never should Caray be associated with what happened in 2020 to the son of another sportscasting legend, Thom Brennaman. Referring to Kansas City as “one of the f— capitals of the world,” he lost jobs with the Cincinnati Reds and Fox Sports. I have communicated with Thom, who was devastated by his purposeful homophobic slur and is thrilled to be covering college football for the CW.
He deserves to be back. Caray never should go away. I can make a case that former Athletics broadcaster Glen Kuiper, fired two years ago for mispronouncing “Negro” on the air in what sounded like a slur, should work again in baseball TV. “It was a terrible but honest mispronunciation, and I take full responsibility,” said Kuiper, who discussed a visit to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.
Guess who shouldn’t be working on the air. We’re back in the eternal sludge of Jerry Reinsdorf, and many years ago, his manager referred to me as a “f—ing fag.” Ozzie Guillen was fired twice as a big-league skipper and has worked for six years as a White Sox analyst on Reinsdorf’s TV network, now known as the Chicago Sports Network. Only in Jerry’s Creepy World would Guillen resurface as a commentator without a hitch.
Brennaman sat for almost four years. Not Ozzie, who also meant what he said. Reinsdorf never cared, though the story went public and I had to do interviews with Tucker Carlson and Donnie Deutsch.
What’s bizarre is that Reinsdorf once employed Harry Caray. Wisely, he chose to leave the White Sox and join the Cubs, who turned him into the toast of Wrigleyville. Harry died in 1998 and was celebrated during a funeral service at Holy Name Cathedral.
You know what he’d say about Chip and the Cardinals? Why didn’t someone write a note that asked him to say “image” or “symbol”? Or we wouldn’t be here today.
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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.