Larry Brown Sports

Ladies and gentlemen, it looks like we may have to set up a fight date for Shaq and Jason Whitlock.

Matters between the two got started on NBA opening night Tuesday when Whitlock, a columnist for FOXSports.com, said Shaq was out of shape. The former All-NBA center and current TNT NBA analyst responded by challenging Whitlock to a fight.

Not only did Whitlock not back down, but he wrote a column in response touting his credentials as a street fighter and former football player.

Shaq wasn’t about to back down from his initial challenge, and Whitlock isn’t tapping out, either.

Shaq said on “Inside the NBA” Thursday that he wanted to fight Whitlock next week. The Big Fella agreed to fight in six months after Whitlock said he wanted that much time to train for the bout.

Name the date Shaq! Any time, any place! (I need at least 6 months to train.)

— Jason Whitlock (@WhitlockJason) November 2, 2012

Things are so far along that Shaq received an offer from former heavyweight champion boxer Lennox Lewis to train, much to Whitlock’s disappointment:

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Former NBA All-Star center and current TNT NBA analyst Shaquille O’Neal responded to a tweet about his weight from FOXSports.com’s Jason Whitlock by challenging the writer to a fight.

Whitlock sent the following tweet to “Inside the NBA” before Tuesday’s season-opening game between the Boston Celtics and Miami Heat began:

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Jason Whitlock addressed the racist tweet he sent about Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin Friday, apologizing for ruining the great story, but failing to apologize for invoking a stereotype.

Responding to the Asian American Journalists Association which called for him to apologize, Whitlock wrote the following:

I get Linsanity. I’ve cried watching Tiger Woods win a major golf championship. Jeremy Lin, for now, is the Tiger Woods of the NBA. I suspect Lin makes Asian Americans feel the way I feel when I watch Tiger play golf.

I should’ve realized that Friday night when I watched Lin torch the Lakers. For Asian Americans and a lot of sports fans, his nationally-televised 38-point outburst was the equivalent of Tiger’s first victory in The Masters. I got caught up in the excitement. I tweeted about what a great story Lin is and how he could rival Tim Tebow.

I then gave into another part of my personality — my immature, sophomoric comedic nature. It’s been with me since birth, a gift from my mother and honed as a child listening to my Godmother’s Richard Pryor albums. I still want to be a standup comedian.

The couple-inches-of-pain tweet overshadowed my sincere celebration of Lin’s performance and the irony that the stereotype applies to pot-bellied, overweight male sports writers, too. As the Asian American Journalist Association pointed out, I debased a feel-good sports moment. For that, I’m truly sorry.

That’s a weak apology from Whitlock, and it really isn’t much of one. He doesn’t address the racial stereotype from his tweet which is what many people found extremely inappropriate. The issue isn’t really that he “debased a feel-good sports moment,” but that one of the industry’s leaders on race in sports used a racial stereotype to discredit a professional athlete. That’s what he should have apologized for, not for ruining the story.

Shortly after Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin went for a career-high 38 points to beat the Lakers Friday night, FOXSports.com writer Jason Whitlock sent this tweet:

Whitlock may be able to spin the tweet since no names were named, but nearly everyone who saw it viewed it as a racist joke about Asian penises made against Jeremy Lin.

For someone whose entire writing schtick is based on stirring the racial pot, that was about the dumbest thing he could have said. It will be interesting to see if he gets reprimanded for the tweet, spins it, or apologizes for it. No matter how you view it, Whitlock’s credibility on racial issues just took a major hit. I thought Whitlock preached that we shouldn’t deal in stereotypes, right?

The next day, Whitlock wrote this apology for his joke.

Since then, MSG, ESPN mobile, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, and now Stefon Diggs have ventured into the racially offensive areas concerning Lin.

For the second NBA Finals game in a row, a reporter was shot down in the postgame press conference. While following Game 3 it was a jab at LeBron James that was denied, after Game 4 it was Jason Whitlock’s butt-kissing approach to Rick Carlisle that got the Dikembe Mutumbo treatment.

Whitlock, a columnist for FOXSports.com, didn’t even ask the Mavericks coach a question, which is the first problem. In essence, he had a story planned about how Rick Carlisle had done a masterful coaching job and he just wanted a quote from the coach to confirm it. Instead, he got a door shut in his face. Check out the video courtesy of Ball Don’t Lie:

Maybe that will teach Whitlock the most important point to keep in mind during interviews: Always ask a question! What kind of answer do you think you’re going to get when you grab the microphone and provide commentary rather than a question? Hopefully any aspiring journalist or broadcaster reading this will keep that lesson in mind … always ask a question.

Why do we need to police the media when Kobe Bryant can do it for us? Speaking after winning MVP of the 2011 NBA All-Star Game in Los Angeles, 24 said he was bouncing around and energized in the game because of all the young players around him. FOXSports.com writer and notoriously controversial columnist Jason Whitlock followed up with something pretty ridiculous. Check out this video via CBS Sports and Matt Moore on twitter:

I’m glad Kobe set things straight and that Whitlock asked the question in person to get shot down. Had he not been in attendance for the press conference, we may have been looking at a 1000-word essay on how Kobe was indirectly bitching at the front office for not getting him more help. That’s one mini-controversy we managed to avoid, and we can thank the Mamba for it.

In a November ’06 column on AOL Sports, Jason Whitlock says he has a major love-hate relationship with rap music. My problem is that I’m a newer reader of his, so I don’t know all the background on his relationship with rap music. What I do know is that Whitlock called out the hip hop culture as a societal problem in response to the Don Imus remarks. That’s why I find Jason Whitlock’s participation in producing a new game day song for the Kansas City Chiefs entitled “It’s Now on ’07,” quite curious.

As YOU BEEN BLINDED points out, some of the participants in the song include Rich The Factor, Bacari, Big Scoob, T-Will, Tech N9ne and Zig. All you have to do is take a look at the lyrics for some of these performers’ songs to get an understanding of their music. Just check out Tech N9ne’s song, Absolute Power

we Kansas City players
and we bout sold game,
we make it so that Tech N9ne is a household name
How many points you got? I got 50
here’s a question to the censorship committee
who’s the biggest gangs of niggas in the city,
my villains are Gritty,
Big Scoob, Txx Will, Bakarii,
rest in peace Short Nitty

But this is the same Tech N9ne to whom Whitlock gave a shout out in a column at AOL Sports. What gives? Does this make Whitlock a hypocrite? Has he changed his viewpoints and stances since producing the song? Does he no longer associate with some of those rappers? These are all questions I surely would like answered considering Whitlock attributed a lot of society’s problems to the hip hop culture. Or maybe we should just give him a break because as he says, “he has a major love-hate relationship with rap music.”