A high school basketball announcer is having to own up to his actions after he was heard calling players a racial slur on camera—and unsurprisingly, he’s not doing a great job.
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Matt Rowan had been contracted to record play-by-plays of the playoff games in his part of Oklahoma. During the national anthem, members of the Norman High team decided to kneel…and you can guess where this is going.
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“They’re kneeling?” he asked, before referring to the players using the N-word. “I hope Norman gets their ass kicked. F—k them. I hope they lose. C’mon Midwest City. They’re gonna kneel like that? Hell no.”
According to @RzstProgramming, Rowan initially tried blaming a coach that was in the box with him, since the video didn’t show who was speaking, but he was ultimately forced to come clean.
In a statement released Thursday, he said that he made “inappropriate and racist comments believing that the microphone was off.” While he followed that statement up by saying that’s “no excuse,” it certainly sounds like it is.
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The rest of Rowan’s “apology” reads like a bingo card of everything people say when they’re trying to shirk responsibility but get the public off their backs.
He notes that he’s a “family man,” “at one time was a youth pastor,” goes to church, refers to him being blatantly racist as an “unfortunate incident,” and insists that he’s not racist.
“I have never considered myself to be racist, and in short cannot explain why I made these comments,” he writes.
But weirdly enough, Rowan actually does try to explain his comments away, saying that he has diabetes and his “sugar was spiking” during the game.
“I do not believe that I would have made such horrible statements absent my sugar spiking,” he says.
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It’s creative, I guess, if you want to give him that. But I don’t know any diabetics who suddenly start spouting off slurs of any sort when their blood sugar gets low.
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More than that, there’s inherent racism in the anger towards anyone — which in this specific case means high school girls — for kneeling during the national anthem, which has become a nationwide symbol of peaceful protest against police brutality towards Black people.
If you can sit through an entire summer of heavily broadcast protests and violence against the Black community by law enforcement and still get so mad at literal children for silently acknowledging the injustices that you hope they lose their basketball game, you’ve got a problem with racism that runs a lot deeper than simply using a slur.
Of course, for Rowan to acknowledge that would require actual introspection rather than paying lip service to the idea of apologizing in the hopes that his life doesn’t come crashing down around him in the wake of his public humiliation.
And nobody seems to be expecting that from him.
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The Oklahoma Secondary Schools Activities Association who initially contracted Rowan’s company to announce and stream the games has condemned his actions and said the company will no longer be involved in the process.
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“This kind of behavior will never be tolerated by anyone representing the [National Federation of High School] or OSSAA,” they said.
*First Published: March 14, 2021, 9:32 am
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