If I'm Brooks Boyer or Scott Reifert, I'm having a sitdown with both Ozzie Guillen and Hawk Harrelson about Sun-Times columnist Jay Mariotti and saying the following things:
- Don't read him.
- Don't think about him
- And for chrissakes, don't talk about him!
It can be done. I do it just about every day.
It sure would've saved Ozzie from himself when he steeped down to see eye-to-eye with Mariotti and accidentally ended up beneath him when
he called the columnist "a piece of sh-t" and a "f-cking fag."
The second is the truly objectionable part, and everybody has the right to be mad at that one regardless of sexual orientation. It's an ugly word that has ugly implications, and one that you never want to hear out of a leader of an organization.
But to be honest, the words before it piss me off, too. I'm also not a fan of Hawk Harrelson's weekly rants about the man he calls a "hiney bird." Basically, I'm not a fan of any time they discuss Mariotti in public or in private. Any time that happens, they play right into his hands, and in situations like these, Mariotti's the last guy they have to worry about. Fans alienated by Ozzie's apparent casual disregard of homosexuals are the first priority.
I'm not convinced "Jay Mariotti" is an actual person. Not in the sense that he doesn't exist, because you can see his overtweezed eyebrows every day on "Around the Horn," where he's just as petulant. But the media figure, the byline called "Jay Mariotti" doesn't relay the real views and opinions of an actual human being -- it coldly and mechanically cranks out what will get under people's skin.
That's why the man isn't accountable for anything he says -- he isn't a man. Mariotti is merely a spectre designed to attract eyes (or page views/clicks) to his stuff with an outrageous lede, and by the end he leaves you hating "him" or hating all athletic activities. I prefer to do neither, because any attempt to debate him is tilting at a windmill. There's enough stuff that will make you dislike professional sports, and I won't waste time reading synthetic material.
Unfortunately, Ozzie reacted to Mariotti's synthetic material and re-ignited an actual, living, breathing problem with sports. Now columnists can use this, if they want, to discuss the anti-homosexual agenda in sports, and how it's a culture where athletes and coaches can toss off slurs without thought. Even if Ozzie didn't mean it as more than a word, it's a legitimate issue, and it will draw legitimate debate.
None of the controversy Mariotti manufactures is legitimate, and I have no idea why the White Sox organization hasn't realized it by now. Airing their anti-Mariotti sentiments do nothing but lend credibility to an entity that has very little of it. In a way, that lack of credibility benefits him more than it hampers him. If people don't take him seriously, then he's not weighed down by things like accountability and integrity. That's why he can continue to say the opposite of what he said three days ago and not feel a thing.
If he's not feeling a thing, nobody else should -- especially the Sox. They know that he doesn't know the players, coaches, or anybody else in the organization. Guys like A.J. Pierzynski have said they've never seen Mariotti in the Sox clubhouse, yet Mariotti somehow can write with "conviction" about the problems the White Sox have between those walls.
That's what Mariotti does. He doesn't try to advance the discussion of professional and collegiate sports; he advances the discussion of himself, and the easiest way to do it is to write stuff that pisses people off. I have no clue how that's escaped the White Sox organization for this long. Every time the Sox bring him up, he makes more people want to see what he said, perpetuating the Mariotti machine. Ozzie's slur will do nothing but fuel it for another year.
(To see a summary of Mariotti's "work" without giving him a page view, Eric Zorn
did some nice work compiling everything Mariotti said that flew in the face of what he said before.)