A football broadcasting booth is no place for Dr. Martin Luther King’s colorblind society. Certainly not to Carron J. Phillips, race-monger for the Deadspin sports blog who slammed NBC for pairing Drew Brees with Mike Tirico for fall football broadcasts.
Phillips, who’s black, zinged NBC for making a statement with the “vanilla tag team.”
“1-2-3, All Lives Matter! — Drew Brees joins Mike Tirico to call football games,” Phillips said, lashing out at the retired former quarterback who insisted last year that all lives matter. He slashed the dark-skinned Tirico for previously identifying himself as an Italian from Queens. “Why do I have to check any box?” Tirico asked in reference to his race, back in 2017.
Since when did football broadcasting become African Americans-only? Since when did skin color matter for the person shouting, “He … could … go … all … the …way”? Phillips didn’t say in his Deadspin rant. Here’s what he did say that’s worth critical examination.
“Race is the core fabric of America, which makes it an inescapable topic no matter how exhausting it may be,” says Phillips, who is a longshot to ever not make everything about race.:
“Unfortunately, two people that have the power to lead those conversations are Mike Tirico and Drew Brees. A black man who doesn’t want to be black, and a white former quarterback who spent his entire life playing a game with black people who only saw their uniform hues instead of their color. If you’re a viewer that believes in ‘sticking to sports,’ then this is the broadcast duo for you.”
Tirico drew further condemnation from Phillips for last season’s “useless” interview of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. The interviewer blew it by not pinning the commissioner down for continuing to blackball Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid. Both are former teammates with the San Francisco 49ers who started the kneeling madness in 2016. By dissing the national anthem, those two radicals fleeced the NFL of several million dollars in a settlement over bogus collusion lawsuits.
Apparently, Brees is beyond rehabilitation for his 2020 statement, “I will never agree with anybody disrespecting the flag of the United States of America or our country.” This came on the heels of Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd.
The social justice mob in the NFL and the media raised holy heck over this supposedly villainous statement, prompting Brees to apologize. Phillips branded it a “useless” apology – one which now renders him not woke enough for the race-crucial job of broadcasting football games.
The Brees-Tirico pairing is one more of the NFL’s growing list of mistakes, Phillips rages. The NFL, sports fans and especially these two broadcasters need to admit that uncomfortable conversations about race aren’t going away anytime soon. Media race-baiters like Phillips guarantee that.
Athletes must realize their platforms are the perfect and necessary place to “raise awareness for the ails of the communities they come from, issues they never get to escape from in their everyday lives,” Phillips wrote.
That also goes for broadcasters. Most notably those who, like Brees and Tirico, who are not yet with the Black Lives Matter program.
