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Colin Cowherd: Duke Is The Only Elite Program To Overcome The “Thug Issue”

Ah, another March, another controversial Duke basketball media moment. Last year’s, if you remember, involved Jalen Rose and “Uncle Toms.” And this one involved ESPN’s Colin Cowherd and the use of a word that’s acquired an ugly racial context to it in the sports world: “thug.”

Cowherd used “thug” a lot on his program earlier today (and just kept going and going) while discussing the Sports Illustrated story investigating the many issues currently befalling UCLA’s basketball program. The issue with using “thug” to describe an athlete was summed up by Matt Ufford a while ago: too often, it equates to “any black athlete with tattoos.”

And that makes it worth pointing out that when he first brought it up, Cowherd was using it to refer to Reeves Nelson, the oft-troubled former UCLA player who is also… white (tons of tats, though). But again, Cowherd kept on using and using “thug,” and talking about how said thugs are everywhere, at programs all around the country, and that he could only think of one program that’s consistently a national contender and doesn’t have that type of person in the program:

Duke, as you probably don’t need to have pointed out to you but we will anyway, tends to have a, well, whiter team than most nationally-contending basketball programs, so coupling that with saying that they’ve largely avoided the thug issue (not to mention some things Cowherd himself has said in the past) – it’s not hard to see how people would interpret that. And Cowherd figured that out pretty quickly. That led to this response later in his show:

It’s true, of course – theoretically, “thug” knows no race. And again, like he said, the “thug” in question earlier is white. But there’s no getting around the connotations, and it’s useless to act like they’re not there. So the easiest way to avoid a potential controversy like this is not to say “thug” to begin with. After all, when Ufford brought up “thug” in the piece we mentioned earlier, it wasn’t necessarily to say it’s racist: it was to say it’s lazy. Lazy. Boring. Something to be ignored. And in Colin Cowherd’s world (i.e. the sports radio world), being ignored is the greatest sin of all.

[h/t Chris Littmann]