Familiar Latin temper and one right vaquero

WELL, HISPANIC Heritage Month certainly got off to a roaring start, didn't it? On the first night of the 2008 celebration, Monday Night Football's (MNF) Tony Kornheiser stood accused of making racially insensitive remarks about a Spanish-language broadcaster, and HHM wasn't two days old when I found myself locked into an increasingly public squabble with Jose Sulaiman, the Mexican-based president-for-life of the World Boxing Council (WBC).

Unlike other traditional celebrations like Black History Month (February), Irish-American History Month (March), Gay Pride Month (June) and National Baked Beans Month (July), in which a month is, well, a month, Hispanic Heritage Month runs from September 15th through mid-October. The tie-in is that Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua all celebrate their independence on September 15th, and Mexico a day later.

In its eagerness to acknowledge the occasion, two nights ago ESPN's Baseball Tonight honoured the top five Hispanic home run-hitters in history, but whoever compiled it was guilty to some degree of racial profiling in that the list (Sammy Sosa, Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, Carlos Delgado and Juan Gonzalez) omitted the name of Ted Williams, who didn't have a Spanish surname but had a full-blooded Mexican mother.

With Opening Day of Hispanic Heritage Month coinciding with Monday night's telecast of the game between the Dallas Vaqueros and the Aguilas of Philadelphia, they occasionally cut to the Spanish-language telecast.

Kornheiser, a balding, 60-year-old veteran of Newsday, the New York Times, and, for three decades, the Washington Post, was brought to the MNF booth for his humorous insights, though it's safe to say that, three years into the job, he's rarely as side-splittingly funny on television as he is in print.

When the network replayed Felix Jones's electrifying, 98-yard kick-off return for a touchdown in Monday night's first quarter, it accompanied the footage with an animated voice-over from Alvaro Martin, who was calling the game en Español for ESPN Deportes.

"I took high-school Spanish," said Kornheiser, "and that either means 'nobody is going to touch him' or 'could you pick up my dry cleaning in the morning?' "

In some quarters the offhand quip was interpreted to have been demeaning to Latin Americans, though it's hard to see how. (Kornheiser didn't make Martin the delivery man in his little joke. Don't Spanish broadcasters get their clothes cleaned, too?)

In any case, the network suits were shortly shouting in his earpiece, and in the fourth quarter Kornheiser apologised to viewers for saying "something I shouldn't have said". Back in Bristol, Connecticut, the ESPN switchboard did not exactly light up.

The next day at least one Hispanic viewer complained to the New York Times, "I'm not sure if he was implying that Spanish people should be picking up laundry. But why is the Spanish language a joke to him? Are we not beyond that?"

It seemed clear enough, to me anyway, that Kornheiser was mocking not the language but his own academic deficiencies, but the point is well taken. We should be beyond that.

I had promised myself that out of deference to Hispanic Heritage Month I would refrain for 30 days from describing the WBC as "Los Bandidos" and would not during that time evoke Bob Arum's classic description of Jose Sulaiman ("a fat Mexican dictator"). But now that Sr Sulaiman has effectively challenged my journalistic integrity, all bets are off.

I'm not so vain as to believe that Sulaiman's September 16th communique was intended to target me. Rather, it was a self-serving attempt to redeem his image after he had been publicly bitch-slapped by a backwater boxing commission in Biloxi, Mississippi. But since it was my account (on ESPN.com) that chronicled the backstory surrounding Saturday night's WBC title fight between Timothy Bradley and Edner Cherry, and since Sulaiman's revisionist version of events contradicts that reality, one of us is clearly lying, and I can promise you it isn't me.

The bare bones of the episode concern a dispute over the officials assigned to the 140lb world title fight. In most jurisdictions, Sulaiman is accustomed to being treated like a head of state, and he did not take kindly to the Mississippi Athletic Commission's (MAC) rejection of his slate of ringside judges assigned to Bradley-Cherry.

Sulaiman initially threatened to withdraw sanction from the bout, but once it became clear he was fighting a losing battle and that Mississippi would appoint its own slate of officials, he responded by announcing that he would fly in an alternate set of WBC judges, who would sit in the stands and independently tabulate the result.

MAC chairman Jon Stewart pointed out that Mississippi law makes it a felony for any unlicensed official to "judge, or act as a judge" in a boxing match in that state, and threatened to have the WBC judges (including 80-year-old Tommy Kaczmarek, a veteran of over 100 world title fights) handcuffed and jailed if they showed up.

Both sides looked rather silly in an episode that ended in a - shall I say - Mexican stand-off, since both sets of judges agreed on the outcome. Only the scores of the Mississippi-appointed slate (David Taranto, Raymond White and Bill Clancy, all of whom had Bradley winning) were read at ringside; the scores of Kaczmarek, Max De Luca and Orrin Schnellenberger were quietly collected by WBC supervisor Joe Dwyer, and since they concurred with the result, no one was arrested for felonious judging.

Had the two tribunals differed, Dwyer confirmed afterward, he would not have presented the championship belt to the Mississippi winner.

Two days later Sulaiman, apparently humiliated by the widespread assumption that he had been faced down by the Mississippi upstarts, issued a widely circulated press release in which he, in defiance of reality, claimed that "the Mississippi commission appointed the two ring officials originally recommended by the WBC".

Pure, unadulterated horse manure. Or, since it's Hispanic Heritage Month, pendejadas.