Wright Banished By Cbs Out-Of-Bounds Golf Analyst Runs Out Of Mental Mulligans

CBS Sports silenced Ben Wright on Tuesday, taking him off its golf coverage after nearly eight months of controversy over alleged sexist remarks that made him persona non grata on the LPGA Tour.

In a terse statement, CBS Sports president David Kenin said Wright “will not be a part” of the broadcast team for CBS’s first tournament of the season, the Pebble Beach Pro-Am Feb. 3-4. He also said there are “no plans for Wright’s return to CBS Sports golf broadcasts.”

Still, CBS apparently avoided having to fire Wright by agreeing to honor the rest of his contract rather than buying him out. Wright signed a four-year extension last November.

In a statement issued through his own public relations agency, RLR Associates of New York, Wright apologized to CBS, the LPGA and to Valerie Helmbreck of the News Journal in Wilmington, Del., whose story last May 12 started the controversy.

“Despite the fact that I have been widely misquoted, there is no doubt that I have been guilty of making some insensitive remarks,” Wright said. Wright promised to “be more thoughtful and, I hope, more sensitive in the future.”

Wright, 63, a golf analyst with CBS since 1972, was quoted by the News Journal as saying “lesbians in the sport hurt women’s golf.” Helmbreck also quoted him as saying women golfers “are handicapped by having boobs.”

Wright denied the remarks and was backed by CBS, while the News Journal stood by its story. Helmbreck also was accused of trapping Wright into making the statements, which she denied.

Helmbreck said she considered it “a back-handed apology for him to say that he’d been misquoted and then in the next breath to attempt to apologize to me.”

She also wondered what took CBS so long. “I think it’s a little bit shabby that it took CBS this long to figure out how they were going to deal with someone who doesn’t tell the truth,” she said.