Of Hunt Ignited by Hunter's Comments

Know those candy bar commercials where the proceedings stop immediately because someone has done or said something ridiculous and they "need a moment?"

Perhaps said candy bar should give Los Angeles Angels centerfielder Torii Hunter a call. He'd make a great spokesman after his comments about African-American and foreign-born baseball players came to light this week.

Speaking as a part of a roundtable convened by USA Today, Hunter said that players from the Dominican Republic and Venezuela were essentially being passed off by baseball's hierarchy as black.

"People see dark faces out there, and the perception is that they're African-American," said Hunter, who is black. "They're not us. They're imposters."

As you might expect, Hunter's comments have received widespread attention in the blogosphere, all the way to the Huffington Post, and he's had to explain precisely what he meant.

"It (imposters) wasn't a racist word," Hunter told USA Today's Bob Nightengale, in a followup story. "I can't believe people take that as racism. Maybe it was the wrong word, but I do too much in the community to make this one word ruin anything."

Later, on his blog, which is sponsored by the Angels, Hunter wrote, "What I meant was they're not black players, they're Latin American players. There is a difference culturally. But on the field, we're all brothers, no matter where we come from, and that's something that I've always taken pride in: treating everybody the same, whether he's a superstar or a young kid breaking into the game. Where he was born and raised makes no difference."

Ironically, Hunter has carried the reputation of being inclusive from his days with the Minnesota Twins through now, and he was last year's recipient of the Branch Rickey Award for his humanitarian and community service work.

Hunter's larger premise was an interesting one: that baseball has stopped trying to find African-American talent, replacing it with players from around the Caribbean.

Indeed, once you get past the first eight paragraphs or so of the story in which Hunter's comments first appeared, you find that others, including agent Scott Boras, Cincinnati Reds manager Dusty Baker and Milwaukee Brewers pitcher LaTroy Hawkins, agreed with much of Hunter advanced.

But, the media's general bent toward heat and not light, added to Hunter's poor word choice, ensured that the follow-up stories would send reporters and producers scurrying around spring training camps looking for players, coaches and managers from the Dominican or Venezuela or Puerto Rico to react to what he said.

Even worse, the scribes and microphone and camera-toters looked for subjects to pass judgment on Hunter, either to pronounce him a racist or to grant him absolution.

Of course, it might have been more interesting, or at least more illuminating if the theme of the follow-up pieces had been about all of what Hunter said rather than just one word. But where's the fun in that?

Celebrating Merlin

At the beginning of his stint in the limelight, Merlin Olsen, who died Thursday, was a member of the "Fearsome Foursome" defensive line of the Los Angeles Rams, and a 1982 inductee into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

At the end, Olsen was a pitchman for a nationwide floral delivery company and actor, starring in "Little House on the Prairie" and as "Father Murphy," a frontiersman who poses as a priest to save a group of orphans.

In the middle, Olsen was one of the best television football analysts ever, working primarily with Dick Enberg on NBC telecasts. The pair teamed to do five Super Bowls, and while he never received the attention of CBS' Tom Brookshier or John Madden, Olsen was as good at dissecting a game on television as he was playing it.

"God doesn't create perfect men, but he came mighty close when he brought us Merlin Olsen," Enberg said in a statement released by CBS. "He was athletically GREAT and just as GOOD as a man. He personified the Greek ideal of a 'sound mind in a sound body.'

"He was just as generous as a broadcaster as he was tough as a defensive tackle. I was privileged to be his TV colleague and his friend. I seriously doubt that I shall ever meet another that will measure up to his complete character. He was every part of a gentle giant."

At Long Last, Brackets

If nothing else, Sunday's announcement of the NCAA Men's Tournament brackets will bring a merciful end, if only for a year, to the nonsense called "bracketology."

Each February, in a further attempt to shape news rather than merely report it, ESPN trots out Joe Lunardi, a vice president of communications at St. Joseph's, and allows him to make guesses at the 34 at-large teams the men's basketball committee will select.

Through Lunardi, ESPN creates an artificial drama, as if teams are playing their way into and out of the tournament field on a daily or hourly basis.

In truth, since the committee doesn't begin serious deliberations until the Thursday before the Sunday when the field is announced and doesn't release any preliminary at-large bids, there is nothing happening until the bracket comes out Sunday night.

Worse yet, for ESPN, any drama belongs entirely to CBS.

Wearing Out His Welcome

When, exactly, do the 15 minutes of fame for the wide receiver formerly known as Chad Johnson run out?

Johnson, who now goes by the surname Ochocinco, is connected to a new VH1 reality show, The Tournament, which premieres this July.

The 10-episode series finds Johnson looking for love in a show that smacks of The Bachelor/Bachelorette, as he pairs a field of suitors down from the original 85 (his uniform number and name, get it?) presumably to one.

It's more than apparent that Johnson, who appears in this spring's version of "Dancing With The Stars" is a narcissist of the first magnitude. He certainly isn't the only wide receiver to be in mad love with himself.

The two-fold question going forward is do the rest of us really have to be party to this nonsense and has anyone told Terrell Owens about this show? Surely not, because it won't be long before the most dangerous airspace in America, that between Owens and a camera, gets filled with his preening mug.