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When several San Francisco Giants fans heckled Atlanta Braves pitching coach Roger McDowell, he unleashed a torrent of verbal abuse. On Sunday he was suspended for two weeks. But what was most revealing, and most troubling, about the incident was his weapon of choice.
McDowell could have used all sorts of expletives to tell the offending fans to shut up. He could have told them he was going to kick their ass. He also could have walked away. Instead he resorted to Homophobic Madness, the reflexive athlete comfort zone. Well aware that he was in San Francisco, which has a large gay population, he threatened to take a bat and shove it up the backsides of the three fans taunting him, as reported by Gwen Knapp of the San Francisco Chronicle. "That's how you like it here, right?" Todd Achondo, a fan at the April 23 game, heard McDowell say. What gives Achondo credibility is that he may be the only fan at the park who has not hired Gloria Allred.
In the military, Congress has finally recognized the rights of gays to serve openly and proudly without fear of reprisal. So have dozens of other professions.
But not in the world of professional football, baseball, and basketball, the Iron Curtain of homophobia in the United States. These are men who see themselves as machismo personified, and if a macho man doesn't have the right to make anti-gay remarks and view homosexuals as weak, sissy-boy sexual predators, then what is the point of living?
McDowell's conduct was extreme. It isn't every day that a person, in or out of sports, takes a bat and threatens to put it where the sun sheds no light, with children sitting there in the stands. But the thrust of McDowell's comments is hardly unusual, whether it's here in the U.S. or other countries.
In 1999 the Braves' John...