Sunday, 20-year-old Angel Reese helped lead her college basketball team, the Louisiana State University Tigers, to a national championship. Reese is an impressive athlete, unanimously selected first-team All-American, and she’s set SEC single-season records in rebounds and double-doubles. However, instead of hailing her achievements, some prominent white men on the internets expressed their displeasure with her “trash talking” another player, something no athlete has ever done at any time anywhere.
Keith Olbermann, primarily known for his politeness and moderate nature, tweeted, “What a fucking idiot” — about a kid, who was simply giving the business to rival Iowa star Caitlin Clark. Olbermann was responding to a SportsCenter video that showed Reese tapping her ring finger at Clark and waving her hand in front of her own face — a reminder that she’d be getting a championship ring, in case you wondered if she was alluding to anyone’s marital state. This was nothing compared to what we’ve seen in the House of Representatives.
Barstool Sports president Dave Portnoy also tweeted that Reese was a “classless piece of shit.”
Not surprisingly, Olbermann and Portnoy were seemingly oblivious to how Clark, who’s white, had similarly trash talked throughout the entire tournament, and no one said boo. Clark just backed up her trash talk with victory. This is a familiar turn of events for many Black women who’ve had professional disputes with white women colleagues. Their superiors, much like Olbermann and Portnoy, shoot first and the disciplined Black women can ask questions at the unemployment office later.
See, racism isn’t simply overtly hating Black people. It’s often a refusal to extend Black people the same benefit of the doubt they give other white people. If a white person is seen misbehaving in a brief, out-of-context clip, someone might just assume they’re having a bad day, but a Black woman taps her fingers with mild aggression and she’s a “fucking idiot” and a “classless piece of shit.”
Olbermann had further lectured Reese: “Doesn’t matter the gender, the sport, the background — you’re seconds away from a championship and you do something like this and overshadow all the good. Mindless, classless, and what kind of coach does this team have?”
Portnoy and Olbermann might disagree on Trump, but they easily find common ground on attacking Black women. However, Olbermann is a liberal white guy, so he has to bend over backwards to explain away his actions. Obviously, he can’t just admit he’d fucked up and examine his own implicit biases. That’s too woke for Olbermann’s Sorkin-style liberalism (where women and minorities simply gaze in awe while a white guy pontificates).
So, Olbermann would “apologize for being uninformed last night about the back story on this,” but his insulting tweet is still out there. He said, “I don’t follow hoops, college or pro, men or women. I had no idea about Clark. Both were wrong.” Now, at best, he’s only sexist and not racist, except the fact remains that his most heated invective was directed at Reese, not Clark. I don’t follow college or professional basketball, either, but it doesn’t take much research to learn that trash talking has occurred on basketball courts long before Reese and Clark were born.
However, Shaquille O’Neal, an actual professional basketball player, didn’t hesitate to let Olbermann and Portnoy know they were full of crap. He replied to Olbermann’s tweet bashing Reese: “shut your dumb ass up leave angel reese alone.” In response to Portnoy’s “classless piece of shit” tweet, O’Neal said: “and so is your mother.” What Shaq lacks in his comeback game he more than makes up for by being seven feet tall.
O’Neal also didn’t buy Olbermann’s lament about how “basketball lost” him due to the apparent lack of sportsmanship.
“Every person that wins TYS-es. Talk your shit. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s classy or not. Doesn’t matter. When I won my championships, you don’t think I was talking smack? Pointing fingers?”
“I know Angel,” he continued. “She is a very classy, nice little girl. But hey, she plays with emotion. She’s from Baltimore. When you grow up in certain areas, you gotta grow up how you grow up. So she talks her talk.”
Shaq is right, and not just because he can crush me with his bare hands, though that’s also a compelling point. It’s great seeing prominent Black men standing up for Black women, especially when white dudes get silly.
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