Wronged parties, and what-not

 The Blob holds no brief for radio foof Dan Dakich, basketball analyst turned wannabe Rush Limbaugh. He's just another bully with a microphone, a bag of gas that could power the Hindenburg. Lots of them out there these days. 

That said, I don't think he's entirely wrong in this tiff he's having with the Indianapolis Star.

That he said some reprehensible knee-jerk things about Scottsburg, In., two years ago is indisputable, because the Star got the tape and printed the transcript of his rant. Also, reprehensible and knee-jerk is just what Dakich does. Hypocrisy, too, when he attacks his favorite stalking horse, the media -- forgetting that he himself is "media," and guilty of many of the same sins for which lambastes others.

In any event, in March 2020 he went after the town of Scottsburg in southern Indiana for firing its winning basketball coach, calling it "hilljack world" and wondering if its citizens were "complete idiots" and "fricking stupid." He also said "take a dump in Scottsburg" should be "our new thing," and that he bet the coach was fired  because a school board member had a kid on the team.

"Let me guess, some jackass of a board member has a kid on the team at Scottsburg that didn't get to play enough," is what Dakich actually said.

If so, he went on, someone should tell that board member his kid was "a methhead" and "a pain in the (expletive)."

The Star printed all of that this week. 

In the same piece, it shared the story of Andrew Slaton, now 20, who says he's the player to whom Dakich was referring. His dad, it turns out, is not a mere school-board member, he’s the superintendent. So people in Scottsburg just assumed Andrew was the kid.

That may be. Problem is, the transcript the Star printed in the same story tends to support Dakich's version of things. 

Dakich claims he wasn't referring to a specific kid, and it's hard to objectively deduce otherwise. Read what he said again. Was he really referring to a specific kid, or simply being hypothetical ("let me guess"), which is how it sounds?   

Believing the former assumes Dakich is much more clever than he is, which is not very. It also assumes he'd done some actual homework before launching his rant, which is not his deal, either.

And so the Blob thinks  Dakich was being hypothetical, and it turned out not to be. Not a stretch at all when you consider how many times coaches, especially in small towns, get fired precisely because a school board member or official thinks little Johnny or Susie isn't getting enough playing time.

Happens more often than not, frankly. Bad luck this time for Dakich, and a lesson in why you should never flap your gums as carelessly as he does. And worse luck for Andrew Slaton, the unwitting victim of that carelessness.

So who is the wronged party here?

How about both, sort of?