Kobe Bryant, easily one of the top 5 most polarizing sports figures of all time, was recently fined $100,000 for calling NBA Official Bennie Adams, and I quote; “Faggot”.  Now it seems the world wants to act as if they are shocked and oh so appalled by such an offensive slur.  Get the “F” out of here America.  We’ve all known for years that Pro Athletes curse, slur, and say the most despicable things in the heat of battle.  This one just happened to be caught on TNT cameras.  Now, from Kobe’s perspective, he may feel as though alternative lifestyle living dudes are encroaching on his turf and disrespecting him.  John Amaechi, Ray Allen, and Vince Carter to name a few…and the referees…who knows?  They all could be a word that rhymes with maggot…and Lord knows the refs don’t respect dude and he may know something we all don’t know about them.  I can’t really call it.  My beef is with the silly, witch hunt-like reaction, filled with condescending self-righteousness and pontifications of exacerbatingly pretentious moral high-handedness.  FOH!  This country enjoys its vices like no other, and name-calling is the least of our worries.  IF we want to get right down to it, the problem I have with all of this is the “political correctness”, which I believe fosters a culture of dishonesty and disingenuous behavior.  Give me the honest bigot over the dishonest, disingenuous, politically correct liar any day.  To the fellas…Political Correctness is like when you see that beautiful woman off in the distance…dressed up, “hair did, nails did, everything did”…but up close she’s a sea donkey, a brillo-padded baboon, or a Jar-Jar Binks look-alike.  She did and said all the right things, had the right clothes on, but…she mislead you from afar.  Or ladies…when that dude has on the $1,500 Hickey Freeman, with the $540 Salvatore Ferragamos, and business cards that say…”Real Estate or Commodities”…but in reality, he lives in his mom’s basement and the CL550 is leased…HE WAS BEING POLITICALLY CORRECT!

Kobe & Bennie

So if Kobe felt a certain way about the officiating of that particular game and needed to let Bennie know that he was being a maggot with an “F”, we should applaud his forthrightness and honest expression of how he felt at the moment.  Perhaps Bennie’s officiating is characterized by “maggotry”…I don’t know….but if you have a problem with the word that was used, then address the culture that perpetuated it and do your part to change hate where you see it, and leave a basketball player engaged in heated combat alone.

B. Austin aka “The Hot Block Commander” of The War Room, for War Room Sports