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Sunday, August 25, 2019

When Sports And Politics Collide, Bob Cousy Edition

Leave it to Shank to turn Bob Cousy's White House visit (where he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom) into a political editorial:
In the last few years, Cousy has urged everyone he knows to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,’’ which is a letter from the author to his teenage son about feelings and realities associated with being black in the United States.
This being the Boston Globe, there's an Elizabeth Warren ad right below that paragraph.

After graciously accepting his medal, Cousy stood at a podium in front of a portrait of Abraham Lincoln and delivered a five-minute speech. The Celtics legend thanked everyone profusely, including the Holy Cross Jesuits for installing his moral compass, then concluded his remarks with, “This is special because it is being presented by the most extraordinary president in my lifetime.”

The seemingly reverential remark infuriated some Cousy loyalists, including former Worcester Telegram columnist John Gearan, who fired off a mass e-mail, writing (in part), “My lifelong hero, Bob Cousy, has fallen from his pedestal and crashed into smithereens.”

Not so fast, everybody. The statement by Cousy was carefully crafted. Look up the word “extraordinary’’ in the dictionary. In my Google search, it comes up as “1. Very unusual or remarkable.’’

There you go. Would anyone disagree that President Trump is “very unusual”?

It was a perfectly gracious and ambiguous remark. Everybody heard what they wanted to hear.
Well, this guy's heard enough from Shank for the weekend.

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