Speaking privileges

Fort Wayne rolled out the green carpet for the Dan Le Batard Show the other night, the green being the lush carpet adorning Parkview Field. Mike Ryan from the show was on hand. So were several hundred fans of the show, and also Mayor Tom Henry.

A good time was had by all, and the Fort won a few points in the Coolness Standings, proving to the world that, yes, We Get The Show.

This is the refrain every time some Sportsball bore complains that Le Batard, Stugotz and Co. don't stick to sports on their daily ESPN radio show, see. Someone dials up a sound bite, and there is Le Batard's dad, the delightful Papi,  saying reprovingly, "You don't get the show."

Lots of people don't. It's quirky, zany, occasionally stupid and only peripherally about sports. Which is what makes it a must listen for those of us who are devotees. We love it; the Stick To Sports dullards hate it.

I'm guessing they really would have hated what Le Batard did the other day.

Incited by Our Only Available President's racist go-back-to-Africa tweet at four Democratic congresswomen of color, and the way OOAP was conspicuously silent when his cultists chanted "Send her back! Send her back!" as he laid into one of them at a rally, Le Batard spoke truth to power. In so doing, he deliberately defied ESPN's implicit ban on "political" talk, and all but accused ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro, the architect of said ban, of complicity and cowardice.

An excerpt: “We here at ESPN haven’t had the stomach for that fight, because Jemele [Hill] did some things on Twitter and you saw what happened after that, and then here all of a sudden nobody talks politics on anything unless we can use one of these sports figures as a meat-shield in the most cowardly possible way to discuss these subjects ...

“We won’t talk about it unless Russell Wilson is saying something about it on his Instagram page. Then we have the power to run with it. Weak-ass shield. It is antithetical to what we should be, and if you’re not calling it abhorrent, obviously racist, dangerous rhetoric, you’re complicit.”

Strong stuff. And understandable in its passion, given that Le Batard is a second-generation Cuban-American; his father was one of the many who fled Castro's regime. So when Our Only Available President invited, along with three others, Somali-American immigrant Ilhan Omar to back where she came from, it undoubtedly hit home for him.

Calling out his bosses, of course, will certainly get him suspended, if not fired. And ESPN will look exactly as spineless and complicit as Le Batard accused it of being. Knuckling under to bigots and bullies is never a good look for a media entity in an allegedly democratic society, but ESPN did it when Jemele Hill called a spade a spade by labeling OOAP a white supremacist, and it will surely slap down Le Batard for doing the same thing.

But just as it didn't erase the truth of what Hill was saying, it won't with Le Batard, either. Fact is, sports and politics have always been intertwined, and never more so than today. When the President of the United States accuses Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players of "disrespecting" America because they took a knee to protest racial inequality, that is injecting politics into sports in the most basic way possible. Ditto the Vice-President walking out of a game when several players knelt, a completely orchestrated protest of the protest that was as nakedly political as it gets.

Both were specifically designed stratagems to play to the base by using sports. But Le Batard and others are supposed to Stick To Sports?

No one else does. Why should they?