Golfers Sergio Garcia and Tiger Woods haven’t been getting along for a while. Most recently, at the Players’ Championship in Florida, Garcia complained that Woods had caused a distraction when he was taking a shot. Woods pulled out a golf club, causing some of the crowd to shriek. (The thrill! The thrill!) Garcia felt it was deliberate. Woods said he’d been told that Garcia had already hit the ball. (Woods won.) Both grouched to the press. Who encouraged them.
Sergio Garcia, ready to entertain
Reporters teasingly asked Garcia if he would be inviting Woods to dinner during the upcoming U.S. Open. Garcia said “We’ll have him round every night. We will serve fried chicken.” Ooh, curiously fluent in American cultural slur for a Spaniard. Fried chicken! Your mother wears army boots when she serves fried chicken!
Subsequently Garcia issued a statement saying, “I apologize for any offense that may have been caused by my comment on stage during the European Tour Players’ Awards dinner. I answered a question that was clearly made towards me as a joke with a silly remark, but in no way was the comment meant in a racist manner.”
In response, Woods later tweeted: “The comment that was made wasn’t silly. It was wrong, hurtful and clearly inappropriate.”
“I’m confident that there is real regret that the remark was made.”
“The Players ended nearly two weeks ago and it’s long past time to move on and talk about golf.”
Tiger Woods in 2009. Possibly genuinely amused here.
That day, Garcia told the media, “I want to send an unreserved apology. I did not want to offend anyone.My answer was totally stupid and out of place. It was a funny question and I wanted it to be a funny answer in reply. I started to get a sick feeling straight after the dinner and I felt so bad I thought my heart was going to come out of my body. I felt bad about it all day.”
Garcia’s first apology was bad. He was trying to say that he made a racist remark, but he didn’t mean it in a racist way. With the word “silly,” he tried to minimize the insult.
Woods responding by rejecting the word “silly,” although rather than call it racist, he goes with wrong, hurtful, and inappropriate. He also says he’s sure that Garcia regrets it.
Garcia’s second apology is better. He stops minimizing the offense. Indeed he now describes his own remorse in highly dramatic words.
It’s interesting. Woods has a personal history with the fried-chicken insult, having gone through it in 1997 when he won the Masters Tournament, and Fuzzy Zoeller said “So, you know what you guys do when he gets in here? You pat him on the back and say congratulations and enjoy it and tell him not to serve fried chicken next year” (at a dinner for which the defending champion picks the menu).
Woods also has a personal history with telling racist jokes, so I guess he understands that a person can say awful things hoping to get laughs.
The love that dare not speak its name.
Apologies are almost always better delivered to the person who was insulted than to a ring of interested sports reporters. Garcia apparently hopes to talk to Woods personally. He told USA Today that he’d talked to Woods’ business agent, Mark Steinberg, “and he said that they are moving forward. And if I manage to talk to Tiger then I will do that definitely when I see him at the U.S. Open.”
That should be interesting, since presumably the ongoing feud hasn’t vanished. This might be a temporary ceasefire, or they might end up on better terms in the end.
What is the problem with fried chicken? Both Garcia’s and Zoeller’s remarks aren’t actually about Woods’ possible affection for fried chicken. They don’t suggest that fried chicken is a low taste, or an ethnically distinct taste. (Don’t make me post my grandmother’s recipe. This is not a food blog.) They’re both talking about how you could insult Woods by linking him with fried chicken (because he’s part African American). Garcia was saying that if he invited Woods to dinner, he could insult him (because they’re feuding) by serving fried chicken. Zoeller was saying that even if Woods won the Masters (which he implied some would resent on racial grounds), he could be insulted with a warning not to ask that fried chicken be served.
Which basically comes down to saying “he’s black! Anti-black insults would work!” Maybe. Woods doesn’t see himself that way, having famously declared himself “Cablinasian,” a portmanteau word meaning Causcasian, black, (American) Indian, and Asian.
So either you have to pile the ethnic insults a whole lot higher (we will serve him processed cheese sandwiches on white bread, and fried chicken, and dog stew, and rice! his mama doesn’t wear socks!) or give it up and focus on your actual complaints about Tiger Woods as an individual. Which Garcia seems to have plenty of.
As so often happens, this reminds me of myself. When I was a kid at summer camp, one of the older campers tried to tease me by telling an Irish joke. (McCarthy is an Irish name, see?) Which I will now repeat: How do you hide the key to the liquor cabinet from the Irish maid? Put it under a bar of soap.
Some settings just naturally evoke ethnic jokes.
I was baffled. “I don’t get it.”
“Never mind, it was just a joke. It’s not about you. Sorry.”
“But I don’t get it.”
With increasing discomfort he explained the concept of a liquor cabinet. With a key. News to me that there were such things, but okay.
He explained that you didn’t want the Irish maid to be able to get into the liquor cabinet, because Irish people are supposed to be big drinkers.
“Huh.” (Thinking of my father, source of the name McCarthy, a man who seldom drank, perhaps in case it dulled his ability to do math in his head.)
“Okay, but I still don’t get it.”
“It’s just a joke! You don’t want the maid to drink the liquor so you hide the key! I didn’t mean it about you, it’s just a joke.”
“Okay, but why hide it under a bar of soap?”
“…because… they’re supposed to be… dirty! So she wouldn’t look there. It’s just a joke!” (It was a wilderness camp. We were on a three-day hike. We were all dirty. None of us cared.)
“Oh. But that doesn’t make sense. She’s the maid. She has to use the soap to do her job.”
“IT’S JUST A JOKE.”
I was 9 or 10 and too polite to say that I didn’t think it was a very good joke. I now think the other camper who told the joke had heard a grownup tell it, and told it because he remembered that other grownups laughed. It was just a way to tease a person with an Irish name. I am pretty sure he didn’t think I was a problem drinker.
I am now older and more suspicious, and if Sergio Garcia said he was going to have me over for fried chicken I might be offended.
But I would also be tempted to make him explain.
“Why fried chicken?”
“I don’t get it. Don’t Spaniards like fried chicken?”
“Is this about the McCarthy? Because it’s more complicated than that.”
Oooh, wow. That Irish joke. How very rude indeed. However, what fun to deconstruct people’s realities by making them explain why it’s funny. I shall take a page from that book.
Here is my fried chicken story: at a party where, except for an Asian girl and one other biracial girl, my sister and I were the minorities we played Taboo, which is sort of charades game. At one point, we were supposed to be guessing for our team, and our clue-giver was getting frantic, because he’d said “luggage” – but couldn’t say suitcases, or Samsonite – and he’d said “gridiron”- but couldn’t say football – and we still weren’t getting it. “Fried chicken!” he screamed hoarsely. “Fried chicken!!!!” My sister and I gave each other baffled looks as the hourglass ran down. “Fried chicken?” my sister ventured. “Are you stupid?” our Idiot friend roared, a little caught up in the game. “It was O.J. SIMPSON!”
My sister and I exchanged one laden, speaking look, and collapsed in hysterical snorts and laughter. We laughed for a good ten minutes, only shrieking, “O.J. Simpson!” to start us off again. It was just too dumb a connection for us, who’d been raised vegetarian, and didn’t have the “Gosh, guess we’re black people and should eat this” thing. Also, apparently there was a Samsonite commercial – that could only be a vauge memory from very early childhood, so we just didn’t get the connection. And fried chicken simply wasn’t going to help… (unless there was an OJ Simpson friend chicken commercial we didn’t know about, we were supposed to guess that the clue was “a black man.”)
SorryWatch will be mortified to know that Idiot Friend went into a room and scrawled a full-length, hideous apology on a piece of paper towel, and then called us into the kitchen to READ it to us. It was an “If something I may have said may have offended in any way,” sort of mournful thing, and it went on and on. Mostly he was offended that we’d laughed at him, and put upon that he felt pressure to apologize, since others in our group made him aware of his blunder and told him he was racist. All we did was laugh. And laugh. And, to this day, just my sister saying “O.J. Simpson!” in this particularly urgent tone will bring out the snortylaughs all over again.
Oh, that is such a GREAT STORY. “It was O.J. Simpson!”
If you still had the paper towel, we would ask to put it in the SorryWatch Hall of Shame, if we had a Hall of Shame.
Bless BOTH their hearts…
Sorry – he *kept* the paper towel. Of all the nerve!!!!