Griese brouhaha misguided

MIAMI – Four words.

Six syllables.

That’s all it takes to stain and scar your name. All the good work before it, all the good decades of good words and good syllables and good professionalism gets swallowed in a hiccup. How have we arrived in this place where so little dark can envelope so much light?

Distinguished Miami Dolphins quarterback Bob Griese was perfect in 1972 and has been pretty publicly perfect since, becoming one of the nation’s best college-football voices. That voice has spent a lot of time in our living rooms over the years, talking to us for hours and hours on Saturday afternoons, but it was silenced this weekend. Punished. Suspended for a week. And stained in a way that hurt his name and echoed throughout The Land Of The Free Until You Say Something That May Or May Not Be Considered Kind Of Sort Of Offensive By Somebody. It was, a wounded Griese said, the first time in 28 years of broadcasting that he has been in trouble with an employer.

“Out having a taco.”

That’s what Griese said during a college-football broadcast a week ago, trying to make a joke about race-car driver Juan Pablo Montoya. And I, a Cuban sports columnist, am still trying to figure out how and why I’m supposed to be offended, and for whom. Colombians? Mexicans? Hispanics in general? Cheap food? Taco Bell?

If Griese had said arepa, would that be allowed because Montoya is Colombian? If Manny Fernandez had said exactly the same thing, would that be OK? Was Griese’s crime getting Montoya’s nationality wrong or his nationality’s food? Or was it being white? Is his joke permissible if Montoya’s car had been sponsored by Taco Bell?

Regardless, I wish I’d heard a fraction as much about Griese’s charity work (helping kids cope with grief) as I did this week about tacos. It didn’t make me angry. What it made me was hungry.

In our zeal to be sensitive, we’re often too sensitive. But this is what can happen when a bunch of white executives punish a white broadcaster for what they think might offend people who aren’t white.

I wanted to have an honest conversation about this with Griese. I came as an ally. But he wasn’t getting anywhere near this stove again.

“It has been a very tough week,” he said. “I want to be known for something else. I don’t want to continue this. I just want to put this behind me. I’ve gotten a lot of support – calls from Keith Jackson, Don Shula. Is this what it feels like to die?”

I asked if this was the toughest week he can remember. “And more,” he said.

You know what gets lost there, right? An honest, open conversation – one in which people learn and understand. You can’t have those when scared. I wanted to know specifics. How and why, exactly, did he apologize?

But I understand his fear. If I didn’t understand all this as the allegedly injured party, how could he? I can say what I want about this, too. I’ve got minority carte blanche. But, I find myself dancing around land mines any time I want to discuss black issues on the radio or TV. Any sentence can end my career, which doesn’t exactly foster healthy communication.

Last week on the radio, for example, we talked a lot about former Heat star Antoine Walker blowing through a $110 million fortune while supporting 70 family members and friends. I wanted to know what elements of this, if any, were cultural, so I brought on three black peers. Washington Post columnist Michael Wilbon said it was a cultural issue. Jalen Rose said it was a socioeconomic issue, not a cultural one, and that people of all color and creeds in entertainment lose their money by being reckless and trying to help loved ones. And Charles Barkley flatly blamed black culture and freeloaders.

But Barkley is the rare fearless celebrity who can say just about anything he wants without worrying about silly things like food stereotypes.

Which might explain how he could say, as he did, that the greatest white man ever is Colonel Sanders.