Tony Dungy woudn't want to "deal with" Michael Sam

How are you going to bring those three up and not tackle the question of whether they're ELITE?!?!?!?

 

Is anyone else bothered that, if Dungy is to be believed, this reporter took a completely out-of-context quote and used it in a completely unrelated story?

I mean, it doesn't change what Dungy believes, or his track record or hypocrisy, but it's still unseemly at best.

 

That's not what happened. Oprah pulled the plug on the project. The NFL and the Rams were worried that all of the positive PR generated by Sam being drafted would be completely turned around if they openly said they wouldn't let him do it, or if they openly discouraged him from doing it.

 

If that's true, yeah, then I'm bothered by that. If Dungy needs to phrase his words carefully to make clear what he means, then the reporter needs to understand the context of those words to make sure they're being put in the right context. If the distraction is the Oprah show, that's a whole hell of a lot more defensible than about Sam being gay. Of course, nobody knew about the OWN show until after the draft, right?

And, yes, Johnny Manziel and his verklempt Browns are doing a great job at ensuring the rookie media spotlight gets turned away from Sam.

 

Since Dungy said in his statement today that he "wouldn't have drafted Sam because it would be a distraction," I'm not sure it was out of context.

 

Did he? He was asking about the locker room mood. In a loose sense, Dungy was talking about the locker room mood. Guys store things up for a long time -- just a guess but I would say he was working ahead at the NFL meetings and collecting material for future months, as every reporter does who goes there.

He might have made a mistake or forgotten that Dungy was talking about the Oprah show, or Dungy might not have made it clear that he was talking about the Oprah show. But I don't think it was necessarily out of context or out of bounds.

 

It depends on the talent

 

Yeah, I went and re-read it and I don't think the reporter did anything wrong. This is also a reporter who used to cover Dungy and knows him very well, so maybe Dungy spoke a little more loosely around him.

I also think this is an instance where Kaufman probably wasn't expecting the reaction to the comments to be so strong. I think if he thought that, he would have used the quote as soon as he got it.

 

Statements from the network and Sam's agent both said "after discussions with the team." The Rams were intimately involved in the canceling of the show.

 

For every Dungy, there's 100 journalists out there who are willing to spin this into the propaganda machine that has told us that this nation overwhelmingly rejects this thinking on it and everything else relating to LGBT.

 

The Oprah show was a huge factor in the situation at the time Dungy's quote was uttered, and was no longer any factor at all by the time his quote was made public.

 

Another aspect of this, being gay in America is tough, but it's even tougher in the black community for a number of reasons. Church has been crucial to a sense of black community and most of those churches are pretty conservative when it comes homosexuality. And there is a lot of resentment over gay rights groups tying their cause to the civil rights era of the 60s, ("I walk into a room, everyone knows I'm black") Most "credit" Obama being on the ballot and a surge of African-American voters as being responsible for the California gay marriage ban passing in '08. Hell, there is even racism within the gay community. Some people might think that a group that has experienced bigotry would be especially sensitive to prejudice experienced by others, but there is more to it.