Erin’s plight

Here's the script for this week's "Sports at Large," which airs each Monday at 5:30 p.m. and again on Tuesday mornings during "Maryland Morning" at 9 a.m. on WYPR, 88.1 FM in Baltimore. You can hear the station through streaming audio at www.wypr.org.

There are many unknowns left in the matter in which a reporter for ESPN named Erin Andrews was apparently filmed surreptitiously while she was in a hotel room, up to and including who did it.

What we do know is the perpetrator is subhuman and deserves to be punished to the limit that the law will allow for robbing Andrews of her privacy and taking away her sense of security.

But we would do a terrible disservice to Erin Andrews and every woman who makes a living in sports, in front or behind a camera, if we were to casually move on to the next topic when the person or persons who filmed Andrews is caught and put on trial.

For those who don't know her, Andrews is a 31-year-old woman who serves as a sideline reporter during ESPN and ABC telecasts.

Her contributions to a telecast typically consist of asking inane questions to a coach trying to rush off the field or the court at halftime of a game or tossing in trivial tidbits about one of the participants during a lull in the telecast.

That, in and of itself, doesn't make Andrews unusual among sideline reporters. Generally speaking, it's a superfluous position, no matter who does it, male or female.

The camera loves Erin Andrews, and many people, OK, men, love her for reasons that have little to do with her knowledge of a cover-two defense.

Chat rooms and blogs and Twitter postings serve as testament that sports fans, the overwhelming majority of them male, find Andrews irresistible.

And it's not just fans. There's a YouTube clip of the Tennessee men's basketball coach enthusiastically grabbing Andrews during an interview. And then there's former Orioles pitcher Rick Sutcliffe who practically leered at Andrews on air during an ESPN baseball telecast last year.

The only surprise for me in this story is that it didn't happen sooner. What I'm about to say will not come as news, but the American culture objectifies women.

Sports magnifies that objectification. Think not? Then ask yourself why former tennis player Anna Kournikova, who never came close to winning a major tournament, yet dominated endorsements and magazine covers.

ESPN has barred New York Post reporters from appearing on the channel because the newspaper ran still images from the video of Andrews that appeared online.

It's laudable that ESPN executives want to protect Andrews. Too bad they didn't take that approach a few years ago, when some of them bounced 50-something Lesley Visser from the Monday Night Football sidelines for a younger woman.

And what were they thinking this year, when they allowed an ESPN The Magazine writer to describe the size of basketball player Candace Parker's breasts in a story?

It's too late to give Erin Andrews her sense of security back. But that doesn't mean that we can't try to create a better climate for all the Erin Andrews to come.

A pointless gesture

I am a man and I am a big fan of women's basketball.

There, I said it and I'm not going to waste space explaining my interest to knuckle-dragging troglodytes who think that barefoot and pregnant is as much as women should aspire to.

That said, I don't understand why the WNBA continues to try to throw itself at the feet of people who couldn't care less about its product.

I'm speaking specifically about the "dunk" that Chicago center Sylvia Fowles threw down at the end of the league's All-Star Game Saturday. The word dunk appears in quotes for two reasons. One, the other nine players on the floor cleared out to allow the 6-foot-6 Fowles to flush it through. Second, Fowles missed the first attempt with a running start, before hitting the second.

Simply put, the dunk is not a part of the women's game, and hasn't been since West Virginia's Georgeann Wells because the first collegian to do it more than 25 years ago. The primary reason is there aren't many women who can do it, but I'd like to believe that even if, say, one woman per roster in the pro or major college game could, they would use it sparingly because there are other more fundamental ways to score. Don't get me wrong; I appreciate a nasty tomahawk as much as the next person. But, if I go to an NBA or men's college game and I don't see a dunk, I don't feel cheated.

To the larger point, Fowles' dunk just feels like one more attempt to make those aforementioned troglodytes pay attention. And they won't. As a matter of fact, I can practically guarantee that the ones who host sports radio talk shows and the ones who listen will bust a gut laughing at Fowles and the rest of the league as early as drive time tomorrow if they aren't doing it already. And if the people who run the league could simply live with the fact that there is a part of the American sports fan populace who will never accept the legitimacy of women athletes and nurture those who do, things would be fine.

Instead, the WNBA, in large measure, continues to ignore the professional women, the African-Americans, the families with young children, the older fans and yes, the lesbians, who embrace it, in search of the Holy Grail, the young men who drool over Erin Andrews, who tune into SportsCenter for bombs, home runs and dunks, and think boxing is too subtle.

At some point, hopefully before it folds, the WNBA's leaders are going to have come to grips with the notion that their product is better than a lot of the people they're selling their souls to bring in.

DT+DUI = WNBA Trouble

What follows is the script that aired on "Sports at Large," on WYPR, 88.1 FM in Baltimore. The program airs each Monday at 5:30 p.m. during "All Things Considered," and again during "Maryland Morning" Tuesday at 9 a.m. You can listen to the program through streaming audio at www.wypr.org.

Over the past 30 years or so, since the advent of Title 9, women athletes have become more than just competitors to their young fans, boys and girls. They've become flat out heroes, to be idolized and emulated.

So, what happens when one of these idols stumbles and falls? To what degree does her image take a beating in the public square, and just as importantly, should she be permitted the same latitude as a male counterpart.

Three weeks ago, Diana Taurasi, a guard with the Phoenix Mercury of the WNBA, scored 22 points in a 93-81 home win over the Seattle Storm. After the game, Taurasi and friends went out to celebrate.

Phoenix police said Taurasi's vehicle was driving 20 miles an hour over the 35-mile-per-hour limit, and that an officer saw the car drift out of a traffic lane.

When Taurasi was stopped at 2:30 a.m., she was driven to a mobile DUI van, where she gave a blood sample. Her blood-alcohol level was a point-17, more than twice the Arizona limit of point-08.

She has pleaded not guilty to the DUI and speeding charges, and Taurasi faces a minimum of 30 days in jail and a maximum of six months if she's convicted. She is to face a hearing on Wednesday.

Even to those who are indifferent or hostile to women's basketball, the name Diana Taurasi is a known commodity.

She led the University of Connecticut to three NCAA championships, and has been a key cog on two Olympic gold medal winning squads.

Men who hate women's basketball have been known to confer on Taurasi the status that she plays like a guy, based on her athleticism and brashness.

And by the way, men, that's no compliment.

Diana Taurasi was a driving force of the Mercury's league championship squad two years ago and currently leads the WNBA in scoring.

She's so good that a former competitor once named one of her adopted twins in her honor. The child is a boy and she named it Taurasi.

At any rate, the WNBA's All-Star Game takes place this Saturday in Connecticut, and Taurasi would normally be expected to be a part of the festivities back in the place where she became a star.

But should she be? Can a league that so depends on the goodwill of its fan base have one of its leading stars on display under these circumstances?

Save for a one-game suspension for mouthing off to officials, Diana Taurasi has never been in trouble before. Under normal circumstances, that might get earn her a pass.

But Diana Taurasi could have killed one of the little girls who idolize her with her thoughtlessness, and she deserves some punishment.

The Mercury, with the WNBA's blessing, gave Taurasi a two game suspension. That's a decent first step, but Diana Taurasi should take the next one by sitting herself down and taking herself out of Saturday's contest.

After all, All-Stars and heroes, males and females, don't just exist on the playing field. Their best and most lasting work comes when the jersey is taken off. It's a lesson Diana Taurasi won't soon forget.

ADDENDUM: Since this script was written and recorded, Diana Taurasi was selected to the Western Conference All-Star squad yesterday.

Freakin’ sweet

They tell you always to be careful when you're drinking so that your beverage doesn't end up choking you. That is useful and wise advice…provided, of course, you aren't startled by news you never expected to hear in mid-swallow.

That's precisely what happened in the midst of Thursday's announcement of the prime-time Emmy Award nominees. In went the coffee just at the moment that the Outstanding Comedy Series nominees, and in particular, Family Guy, were being revealed. Out went the coffee in a spit take worthy of Danny Thomas, father of Marlo and star of the sitcom, Make Room For Daddy.

Don't get me wrong. For years now, I've been telling people that Family Guy, the animated adventures of the Griffin family of Quahog, R.I., is the funniest, take no prisoners show on television. So, how the hell was I to believe that Emmy Award nominators, of all people, would actually listen? These are people, after all, who gave a nomination and then an Emmy to the late John Ritter for his seminal work as Jack Tripper on Three's Company.

But there was Family Guy, the first animated show to land a Best Comedy Series nomination in 48 years. Amazing stuff, this. Perhaps this portends a new, hipper day in the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Of course, this was the first step in the proverbial journey of a thousand miles, meaning the Academy ain't quite so hip yet. The nomination panel missed some good stuff along the way.

To wit:

*The wonderful Pushing Daisies deserved more than a Supporting Actress in a Comedy nomination for Kristen Chenowith as it pushes up daisies after it was cancelled by ABC.

*The Big Bang Theory should have joined Family Guy and How I Met Your Mother among the Comedy Series nominees. At least Jim Parsons, as the delightfully socially inhibited Sheldon, snared a Best Actor nomination.

*How in the name of all that is holy could Friday Night Lights be left out of the Outstanding Drama Series category? Again? And Connie Britton, who portrays Tami Taylor, turned in the most amazing single scene of work last season by an actress during an episode when she spoke frankly and honestly with her daughter about sex. And Kyle Chandler, as her husband, Coach Eric Taylor, was similarly brilliant in a scene where he spoke evenly, but firmly to the object of his daughter's lust, his starting quarterback. Yet, both were shut out of the acting categories.

*HBO's No.1 Ladies Detective Agency was apparently the only show on the pay channel not to get a major nomination, though CCH Pounder did snare a Guest Actress nod, and the show got a couple of minor nominations. The show, which stars singer Jill Scott, could use the attention a nomination and a win could provide.

*Tony Shaloub? William Shatner? Kyra Sedgwick? Charlie Sheen? Tina Fey? 30 Rock? Again? Really?

A big thumbs up for HBO's Generation Kill, which snagged 11 nominations. I know a very special person who slept a lot better Thursday night after that news came down. Way to go, K!

The air around McNair

What follows is the script for this week's "Sports At Large,'' which airs each Monday at 5:30 p.m. and during "Maryland Morning" each Tuesday at 9 a.m. on WYPR 88.1 FM in Baltimore.

It's well more than a week since Steve McNair, a married man with four sons, and his girlfriend were found dead in a Nashville condominium, and frankly, I still don't have any concrete thought on what to make of it all.

I first heard about a strong-armed quarterback named Steve McNair in the early 1990's. Back then, he was "Air McNair,' leading Alcorn State out of the obscurity most historically black colleges and universities labor under.

In the process, he set passing records for Division 1-Double A for a season and a career that still stand.

Despite the grumblings of so-called experts who claimed that the football he played at Alcorn wasn't the same as the football played at major schools, McNair finished third in the 1994 Heisman Trophy voting.

Taken third overall in the 1995 NFL draft, McNair learned on the Houston Oilers bench for two years, but when the franchise relocated to Nashville in 1997, he became the starter.

From then on, McNair became a symbol of efficiency, toughness and cool. Time after time, he would take massive hits, only to get up from virtually all of them, dust himself off and make his way to the huddle for the next play.

Trailing the St. Louis Rams late in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl 34, McNair led the Tennessee Titans in a furious late game drive that ended one yard short of the goal line, seven points short of a tie.

McNair went on to share the league's Most Valuable Player trophy in 2003. When he came to Baltimore in 2006, McNair's best days were behind him, but he immediately gave the franchise credibility at quarterback, something the Ravens had never had to that point.

McNair retired after the 2007 season, and left football as one of only three quarterbacks to throw for 30,000 yards, while running for more than 3,500 yards in a career. The other two, Fran Tarkenton and Steve Young are enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and so should McNair someday.

In addition to all of his playing field exploits, McNair was a force in his community, whether it was Nashville or his native Mississippi, where he personally loaded and paid for trucks filled with relief supplies after Hurricane Katrina.

In a two-dimensional sense, Steve McNair was the kind of man whose jersey you'd be proud to wear or whose poster you'd want to your kid to have hanging on the wall.

It's that third dimension, the one with human frailties, the one that emerged with his death that gives me pause about how to review the Steve McNair movie that just ended.

While Steve McNair was competing in that Super Bowl in 2000, Baltimore linebacker Ray Lewis was being charged with double homicide in connection with an incident outside an Atlanta nightclub.

Lewis' coach, Brian Billick famously told the media the next year that they weren't qualified to pass judgment on Ray Lewis.

Right at this moment, I feel similarly about my qualifications to stand in judgment of Steve McNair or anyone else for that matter.

How are your qualifications?

‘They Won’t Go When I Go’

If you were one of the hundreds of millions around the globe watching Tuesday's memorial tribute to Michael Jackson, you heard Stevie Wonder deliver arguably the musical highlight of the day, first with a quick instrumental line of "I Can't Help It,' a song he wrote that Jackson covered on "Off The Wall." Then you heard Wonder sing "Never Dreamed You'd Leave In Summer," a haunting song that ranks among his very best, if not well known.

Finally, you heard another song, the title of which appears at the top of this blog entry. It's a track from his 1974 Grammy winning album, "Fulfillingness' First Finale," and it is a withering indictment of false prophets and misplaced spirituality. The album is my favorite of Wonder's, and "They Won't Go When I Go" is a brilliant piece among a masterwork.

Yet, I'm willing to bet that unless you are a Wonder devotee (which I certainly am), you didn't know that song (which is understandable). But the fact that none of the networks and the nation's leading newspaper bothered to note it, much less comment on its inclusion in the program, speaks to a particular pet peeve of mine, namely the utter disregard mainstream African-American popular culture receives in the broader media.

For all the sizable contributions that Black artists make to the broader culture, they are routinely ignored in mainstream publications and telecasts. Music and television and movies that are of great import to African-Americans are blithely dismissed by E!, and Entertainment Tonight and People and the like.

Need proof? Think of the number of times Tyler Perry movies have opened to sizable box office figures, if not the very top spot in weekend figures, yet reviews of his works often require magnifying glasses to find in major papers and magazines. If you live in a major American city, chances are a gospel-flavored musical will come to your town at some point. But don't hold your breath looking for profiles of the actors/singers in your town's mainstream press.

Heck, Entertainment Weekly, the bible of American popular culture, effectively dismissed Michael Jackson's entire body of work with The Jacksons after the group left Motown in their recent retrospective of his career. That means, for instance, "Triumph," a platinum selling album, the group's first album to chart No.1 on the R&B charts in nine years, went without comment. It was as if the magazine wasn't interested in anything Jackson did from his days as a little boy until "Thriller."

During Tuesday's telecast on ABC, Martin Bashir, whose fame is due largely to his 2003 interview with Jackson, dropped in the bombshell that Jackson alone sang the vocals on the Jackson Five's "I'll Be There," a fact that will no doubt come as a surprise to Jermaine Jackson, who shared the lead with Michael, not to mention the millions of people who have heard that song over the past 28 years. Yet, to my knowledge, Bashir hasn't been corrected. Ask yourself if a correspondent at a major television network could have made a similar gaffe about a Beatles or Bruce Springsteen song without drawing heavy fire.

Look, I don't expect the nation's Big Media to suddenly start quoting Stevie Wonder album tracks as a matter of course. But it would be nice to know that someone in Big Media knew where to find those cuts and what they mean when they are important.

Providing a full account

It was frankly painful as a Black man to watch the Michael Jackson tribute service on the various broadcast networks and cable channels Tuesday and to see few people who looked like me who could explain what was happening and provide a framework beyond the historical.

Though the service was non-denominational, what America and the world essentially got Tuesday was a peek inside the Black church. They got to see how we worship and how we send our departed onto the next spiritual realm.

Yet, until ABC's Robin Roberts, one of network television's few prominent African-American faces, declared at the end of the telecast that we had been to church, we got no sense of that from the nearly three hour broadcast.

ABC was hardly the only offender; CBS dumped out of the telecast at 3:50 p.m., after Michael's daughter Paris offered a moving tribute to her daddy, but before the pastor could provide the closing prayer. What was the rush?

Even worse was the absence of context, which led to errors of omission and commission. ABC's Martin Bashir, who owes his meteoric rise to an extensive 2003 interview with Jackson, told Charles Gibson that he and Jackson had spoken extensively about the reporter's ability to play the signature bass line of "Billie Jean."

Just after the first musical number of the tribute, a duet of "I'll Be There," with Mariah Carey and Trey Lorenz, Bashir observed that while Carey and Lorenz had to split the lead, Jackson had done the song solo, a monstrous error that completed ignored Jermaine Jackson, who was sitting in the front row of the Staples Center.

Any casual observer, much less devoted fans, knew of the mistake, yet Bashir was never corrected. Ask yourself how quickly Gibson or Bashir would have backtracked if they had committed a similar error on a Bruce Springsteen or Paul McCartney song.

Why didn't anyone speak to the incongruity of Motown founder Berry Gordy declaring Jackson to be like a son, when he wouldn't let Michael and his brothers keep their name, the Jackson Five, when they left the label? For that matter, where was the person to ask why Gordy didn't let the boys write their own songs and play their own instruments while they were with Motown?

Perhaps anchors and producers who remembered that Michael Jackson didn't fall off the face of the earth between the time he was an adorable moppet and when "Thriller" shook the world by its collective collar, might have been able to tell a complete narrative.

I used to think that a conspicuous African-American presence on stories that involved or were centered in and around the Black community did more harm than good. Now, I'm not so sure. I just wish I got the feeling that more people who make those decisions gave a damn.

Broadmindedness under the rainbow

In the midst of the observation of the 40^th anniversary of the Stonewall uprisings in New York, as well as the ongoing national discussion over same sex marriage and President Obama's seeming reluctance to champion issues of interest to gays comes an interesting storyline from, of all places, soap operas.

From Soap Central.com comes a story that actress Patricia Mauceri, who has been a member of the cast of One Life To Live for 14 years, was bounced last month because of her objection to how her character, Carlotta Vega, was to be portrayed.

Specifically, according to Soap Central, the longtime soap is planning to romantically pair two male characters in an upcoming storyline. Mauceri believed her character, who is Hispanic, would not endorse the pairing, though OLTL's writers are going to write her that way.

The piece goes on to say that Mauceri, who was recently seen in an episode of the new hit USA Network drama Royal Pains, had been dissatisfied with another OLTL storyline and that this new plot development was the last straw for both sides.

What makes this so fascinating is that soaps, though considered low on the television food chain, have traditionally been in the forefront of storylines that addressed controversial topics way before they were taken up in prime-time.

The soaps handled abortion, domestic violence, homosexuality and discrimination well in advance of anything seen at night. Indeed, it was OLTL that introduced a groundbreaking story in the late 1960's about a light-skinned Black woman who attempted to pass as White. The topic was so hot that, according to a history of the show, a station in Texas dropped the show for a time.

I've always found it amusing when actors are asked to comment on what they believe the characters they play would do or feel, as if the characters are real people. However, if the to-date anecdotal stories from California that majorities of Blacks and Hispanics voted to outlaw Prop 8 are accurate, Mauceri might be onto something.

On the surface, it would seem that Mauceri badly overplayed her hand, and got fired because of it. But that doesn't mean that we all shouldn't remember that true tolerance should be extended in all directions.