NFL coaching legend turned color commentary icon John Madden was someone who you pretty much never heard a bad word about, whether it was from coaches or players past and present, his contemporaries and those who came after them in the sports announcing world, or anywhere else.
He brought a lot of eyes and understanding to the sport of football due in large part to his ability to explain the game in a way anyone could understand while having fun doing it with the people he worked with throughout his career.
The Hall of Famer, who was also the face of one of the most popular video games of all time (Madden NFL, first released in 1988 with a new version coming out every year since 1990), passed away Tuesday morning at the age of 85.
But there is always one in every crowd who tries to play the role of a party pooper, who loves to rain on someone else’s parade. This week’s culprit was Dallas College history professor Andrew McGregor, who, as I wrote this, locked down his Twitter account. Then he later either deactivated or deleted his account apparently because of the massive Twitter ratio he received after doing a “woke” tap dance all over Madden’s grave.
McGregor wrote a mini-Twitter thread about the “issue” of Madden’s alleged racism, the tweets from which I included below. You can see them via my screengrabs as well as the “ghost” versions of the tweets that are still visible. But it was the first tweet that garnered the most attention in terms of comments and quote RTs for obvious reasons:
Here’s the ratio on that first tweet:
Some of the responses to McGregor’s rant were hilarious:
And after he posted another tweet suggesting that most people are “not ready for Critical Sport Studies,” it got worse for him:
But perhaps the best response of all was from the “Defiant L’s” Twitter account, which did a compare/contrast of a past tweet of McGregor’s on Madden NFL to what he wrote this week:
Oops.
Just for the record, I can tell you that had I not known a single thing about the widespread respect Madden earned over his decades as a player, coach, and commentator, I would know that he wasn’t viewed by the sports world as some type of “exploiter” of black sports figures just by listening to CBS Sports NFL reporter Jonathan Jones’s remarks about him, which Jones gave during an interview on the network Wednesday.
Jones is based in North Carolina, and he covered the Carolina Panthers for several years for the Charlotte Observer before moving on to Sports Illustrated and then CBS. I’m familiar with his work and trust me when I say that he is one of the “wokest” sports reporters out there. He would not have lavished praise on Madden if he had been anything like McGregor described him.
I should also note that McGregor actually went on a little more Wednesday about his thoughts on Madden and “Critical Sport Studies,” but I guess it’s safe to say based on him torpedoing his Twitter account that he finally had enough of people dunking all over him. Unfortunately for him, though, screengrabs are forever.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY