Back from a five-day vacation including watching the Huskers on Sunday, the warmest of the three games, but by the 8th inning in section 302, if you weren’t wearing four layers, frostbite was a real possibility. That was mostly the shade and a little swirling wind, but cold is cold, pal.

Can’t remember a more miserable sports weather spring. If you’re trying to schedule, reschedule or simply watch a track meet or a baseball game or a tennis match, you might as well be in upper Saskatchewan. Unless you’re blessed with a field house, teams from Little League to high school track are sucking very cold and wet wind.

*********
Don Imus is taking a well-deserved pounding for his “nappy-headed hos” comment about the Rutgers women basketball team on his syndicated radio program. He’s been suspended for two weeks. Many are calling for a permanent hook for the long-time, cantankerous early morning talk radio host based in New York City. Imus has feathered his considerable nest by insulting people. We used to call that bad manners and boorish, but somehow it become edgy and hip. Of course, if Imus wants to continue to pass himself off as edgy, hip and intelligent (he routinely has political leaders, movie stars, writers, and other forms of glitterati on his show), calling black college women “hos” isn’t going to do it. He sounded like a second-rate rapper or a kid on a street corner. This wasn’t Richards or Gibson, but you can see it from there.

Now he’s on the mea culpa tour, appearing on Al Sharpton’s radio show and scheduled to meet with the Rutgers team. Sharpton? Please. Why him? Who does he speak for? Imus insults an entire gender and race, and Rev. Al is all over him. But where is Sharpton when Bill Cosby asks why young black men and now men and women of all races are wont to use such language as “ho?”
Imus is an equal-opportunity offender, too, dissing ethnicity, gender, religions, appearance — you name it and Imus has passed it off as humor.
None of which makes him edgier, hipper, or more intelligent.
He is an acquired taste, and some of his loyal following are queuing up to wonder what’s the big deal, arguing that he can say what he wants.
They are right, but also need to be reminded (Imus doesn’t) that what he says has consequences, one of which may be that he gets fired. Obviously that’s his employer’s call, not ours. But in a venue (talk radio) where the competition for listeners has led to coarser content, Imus’ latest diatribe neither surprises nor amuses me.
Nor in a competitive market do people have to listen to Imus. If his ratings go south, the market will do for his boss what his boss may not have the stomach (or financial standing) to do.
I doubt that will happen. Maybe Don Imus will only teach us that when we use contemptuous, crass, and hurtful language, it has a consequence.
Big maybe.