Fired Up?
Something has been bugging me for a few days, all weekend actually.
While I'm not what you'd consider a sports fantatic, I have two teams I really follow (both from are from my hometown San Diego, the Padres and the Chargers, baseball and American football, respectively, for those who don't follow sports). As part of that, I follow a few sports columnists, mostly through Yahoo and the columnists they employ. Michael Silver is one of those columnists. I don't know much about who he's written for in the past, but I would consider Yahoo! to be a pretty general market, not particularly conservative nor liberal.
Anyway, every Wednesday, Silver does a column revolving around the coming weekend's football games, called "32 Questions", where he makes some quippy remark about every team in the National Football League. If you're somewhat in the know with the NFL, they're sometimes funny, sometimes brutally to the point (if a team is doing poorly), often dead on. Anyway, here's the link to last week's column. The part that's really bugging the hell out of me is when he gets to the San Francisco 49ers, who were playing the New York Giants today. His question is the following:
"Will they get treated like Vito Spatafore in Jersey?"
On the page, there's a clear link to Vito's homepage (from The Sopranos, and while the bio page only refers to Vito's death as "a grisly hit", every Sopranos viewer knows Vito, in addition to being murdered, had a pool cue broken off in his ass, mainly because he was outed as a 'omosessuale' (only it wasn't as polite a term in Italian).
When I read this, I saw red. I generally enjoy Silver's column, and this truly pissed me off. I read his quips all the time, and from what I gather from his past columns, he comes across as a fairly liberal guy. I know it's the N-f'ing-F-L, a place notorious for years of homophobia, and I don't expect changes overnight, but I'm still pissed about it. To me, it's no better than Tim Hardaway saying he hates gay people. There's all sorts of mobsters who got whacked on The Sopranos, but Silver zeroed in on the gay one, to represent San Francisco. Admittedly, San Francisco has a big gay population, but for that matter, so does most major metropolitan cities (all of whom have NFL teams of their own). So, I ask you:
Poll
While I'm not what you'd consider a sports fantatic, I have two teams I really follow (both from are from my hometown San Diego, the Padres and the Chargers, baseball and American football, respectively, for those who don't follow sports). As part of that, I follow a few sports columnists, mostly through Yahoo and the columnists they employ. Michael Silver is one of those columnists. I don't know much about who he's written for in the past, but I would consider Yahoo! to be a pretty general market, not particularly conservative nor liberal.
Anyway, every Wednesday, Silver does a column revolving around the coming weekend's football games, called "32 Questions", where he makes some quippy remark about every team in the National Football League. If you're somewhat in the know with the NFL, they're sometimes funny, sometimes brutally to the point (if a team is doing poorly), often dead on. Anyway, here's the link to last week's column. The part that's really bugging the hell out of me is when he gets to the San Francisco 49ers, who were playing the New York Giants today. His question is the following:
"Will they get treated like Vito Spatafore in Jersey?"
On the page, there's a clear link to Vito's homepage (from The Sopranos, and while the bio page only refers to Vito's death as "a grisly hit", every Sopranos viewer knows Vito, in addition to being murdered, had a pool cue broken off in his ass, mainly because he was outed as a 'omosessuale' (only it wasn't as polite a term in Italian).
When I read this, I saw red. I generally enjoy Silver's column, and this truly pissed me off. I read his quips all the time, and from what I gather from his past columns, he comes across as a fairly liberal guy. I know it's the N-f'ing-F-L, a place notorious for years of homophobia, and I don't expect changes overnight, but I'm still pissed about it. To me, it's no better than Tim Hardaway saying he hates gay people. There's all sorts of mobsters who got whacked on The Sopranos, but Silver zeroed in on the gay one, to represent San Francisco. Admittedly, San Francisco has a big gay population, but for that matter, so does most major metropolitan cities (all of whom have NFL teams of their own). So, I ask you:
Poll