In one of the stranger announcer-athlete pairings in recent memory, former Miami Dolphins QB/current ABC announcer Bob Griese and driver Juan Pablo Montoya found themselves bound by a storyline over the weekend. During Saturday's Ohio State-Minnesota game, announcers were discussing the Chase as part of a promotion of Sunday's Martinsville race. Talk turned to Juan Pablo Montoya's absence from the Top 5. And, announcers being what they are -- utterly lost when trying to improv -- Griese made a joke about Montoya being "out getting a taco." (Check the video here.)
It was a dumb joke, but it was also a race-oriented one, which gets people very up in arms these days, as you may have heard. Don't shoot me; that's the way the world is these days. Everybody's more sensitive than a drunken Irishman with a broken heart. (I'm part Irish, so I can say that.) Griese's comment was in the same neighborhood as golfer Fuzzy Zoeller's Masters line about Tiger Woods ("tell him not to serve fried chicken") -- thoughtless but not an instant indicator of evil, blackhearted racism.
Still, ESPN had to take some action, and thus suspended Griese for one game for his comment. Fair enough; that seems appropriate. Though it fell to Montoya to give the perfect capper to the whole affair:
"Somebody mentioned it to me," he said. "I don't really care, to tell you the truth. Yeah, I don't. I could say I spent the last three hours eating tacos, but I was actually driving a car."
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