Smells Like Team Spirit
Here’s an intriguing sidelight to last week’s big story about racial taunting at a Thornton-Brother Rice basketball game. Taylor Bell, the Sun-Times sportswriter who broke the story, hadn’t attended the game. Reporters who did had trouble recognizing it from Bell’s article.
Tinderbox? “That’s not true at all,” says Ken Karrson of the Hammond Times. “After the game people filed out. The writers were around another 20 or 25 minutes. When we came out [of the locker rooms] the lights were out and people were gone. The parking lot was pretty empty. If that was a tinderbox I don’t know the definition of it.”
Bell stands his ground. “I got a lot of phone calls. The editors got phone calls, the sports editor got phone calls, the prep editor got phone calls. We took it from there,” he said. “The day we wrote the article I talked to the principal of Brother Rice. He did not deny much of what happened.”
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This week Yovino felt a need to go back over what was said when by whom. Did the Brother Rice-Thornton game, he asked in a Beverly Review column, “cross the sometimes thin line between good-natured ribbing and blatant racism?”
“We want to get at the racism,” Jim Casey told reporter Phil Arvia in a story that ran this Monday. “Whether that means we have to look at the blatant inconsistencies as a form of racism, where someone’s punching that race ticket without any merit to it, or whether it’s a student who actually did this…we want to find out the truth about where the racism lies.”
TV crews descended on the two high schools after Bell’s article appeared, and I find it hard to believe that “Buckwheat” is what got them there. “Coon” and “nigger” do have the malign charisma to galvanize the media, and on their behalf I wish I could say I found a single reporter covering the game who heard either word. “A despicable display of racist jeering,” pronounced a Sun-Times editorial, certain of its ability to penetrate the confusion.
