RUSH: Once again, ESPN remains obsessed with me. Last night on Pardon the Interruption, with Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon.
WILBON: Rush Limbaugh reportedly said Friday night that the NFL “too often looks like a game between the Crips and the Bloods without any weapons,” close quote. Tony, what do you think of that?
KORNHEISER: I’ve said it before. This is blatant race baiting. He has done this before.
WILBON: That’s bigoted!
RUSH: (Laughing.) Once again, they didn’t hear it. (full transcript) Rush Limbaugh “reportedly said Friday night.” No, I said it during the day on Friday, but it was among comments that went on for at least two segments, maybe 20 minutes total, and here’s a little excerpt of those additional comments that I made that these two bigots either didn’t hear or don’t know about and are not interested in learning about.
RUSH ARCHIVE: [A] lot of people have theories on this. I’ve heard this uniform black business has roots in gang culture, but I think this is also rooted in you don’t diss me, you don’t disrespect me, and disrespect can occur with just the wrong glance. There’s a hypersensitivity to it, but it’s not just black players who are engaging in this kind of behavior. I think it’s a just general decline in class, and you can’t leave out the television aspect of this. It gets you on TV, gets you on the highlight reel. There are many, many factors in it. There’s no question and it’s only going to keep getting worse.
RUSH: I was discussing, as you people heard, an overall lack of class that seems to be affecting the National Football League, and it seems to be happening more and more. We just had the tenth Cincinnati Bengal arrested yesterday since the season began! We’ve had players stomping on each other’s faces. We’ve had kicks to the groin, and all of these things have (interruption). What? I’m not baiting anybody. I’m telling you what I’ve seen — and each one of these actions has carried a meaningful penalty that has harmed the team in the quest for victory and so forth. All this head butting going on out there! Somebody said, “Well, you know, Rush, why are you picking on the NFL? I mean, it’s worse than the NBA. You remember what happened up there at Detroit at the Palace of Auburn Hills and so forth.” I think there’s an explanation for this.
Football already is a rough and tough and violent game, and the impression that people have of the people that play it is they’re rough, tough, really tough guys. They imagine these guys are acting that way at home and they imagine that you’ve gotta be of a certain mind-set. So these kinds of things are not all that unexpected in football because it is rough and tough. It is violent, and it is mano-a-mano. It’s brutal. You guys have no concept of it. Television does not do justice to the brutality of this game when it’s played legally, as the rules indicate. So I think there’s less of a shock when these kind of emotions boil over into this kind of behavior that we were discussing last week, whereas in basketball, where there are no pads, it’s a heavy contact game now. It used not to be. It’s heavy, heavy contact game, but no pads. It’s not supposed to be contact. It’s a game about brutal use of force to dominate the opponent as football is, and so it seems to stand out more so in basketball.
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