ESPN Magazine writer Howard Bryant, a sports reporter better known for his Black Lives Matter rants about police brutality and his disgust with public displays of patriotism in pro sports, jazzed things up in his latest column with a nasty attack against an unnamed long-time associate (if they were friends before, they won't be anymore) in the February 27 issue (not online).
Tennis megastars Serena and Venus Williams faced off for the Australian Open championship, but Bryant managed to see them as victims of both racism and sexism in “[t]he Williams Movement – In a time of unrest, Serena Williams’ 23rd grand slam title stands as a triumph of talent, perseverance and self-belief.”
Bryant jump-started his usual back-page column with an attack on a white man of his long acquaintance, guilty of some mild criticism of the recent vulgar liberal protest marches, and also guilty of not being rich:
“You watch the protests, hear them outside your window and see them on TV, millions of women marching across the globe on Jan. 21. You talk with a man you’ve known since 11th grade -- white, respectable, of unremarkable wealth or accomplishment yet carrying a learned smugness, completely secure in the legitimacy of his status -- who you discover is offended more by the vulgarity of the protest signs that the vulgarity that created them. Fortified by the protections and perks of maleness in perpetuity, he speaks of the women as a minor inconvenience, a moth on his tweed. ‘It was a moment, not a movement,’ he tells you. “It changed nothing.”
Bryant managed to take it personally:
After a lifetime of diminishment, these words should carry no value, yet they remain inside you, eating at you. During this same conversation, he tells you of his ‘loss of respect’ for civil rights icon John Lewis, and you know then that this person you’ve known for decades is not only talking about the women marching. He’s talking about you too.
You watch the Australian Open championship between Venus and Serena Williams with this tumult in mind, and when Serena becomes a champion again, It was a moment, not a movement rises up like bile, and you wonder whether their presence will not feel like defiance. But you know better. It will not.”
After paying tribute to the Williams’ sisters power game, he found some broadcast emphemera to show that the sisters (with a combined net worth probably north of $200 million) were somehow still victims:
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You watch the patriarchy step on the Williamses, even when it wants to blow them kisses. Serena thanks the crowd, the tournament, her blood – but not her new fiancé, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, an omission that was mentioned often by broadcasters. In your mind, you flip through years of victory speeches, trying to remember a moment when Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal or Andy Murray was chastised for not mentioning his spouse or girlfriend by name. You can find none.”
Even after this latest self-righteous liberal essay Bryant, who goes by the surely purely neutral FullDissident on Twitter, flat out claimed on that platform that: “The sports media is not liberal. How this became a thing because one story suggested it was is, well, just asinine.” Could have fooled us.
