Bob Ley is one of ESPN’s all-time great personalities. With Chris Berman (of “back-back-back-back . . . gone!” fame), Ley is one of the last two original SportsCenter anchors still with the company. His longevity isn’t attributable to some Milton Waddams fluke: He is sharp and versatile, having been a go-to broadcaster for covering stories that transcend sports, most prominently as host of the long-running investigative program Outside the Lines.
When Ley retires (hopefully no time soon) a corporate executive will doubtless consider beginning a press release with: “When you hear the name ‘Bob Ley,’ you think of ‘how the commanding general of the Confederate army would’ve introduced himself to strangers if he were a car mechanic instead of a military officer.’ Because Bob is short for Robert, and Robert Lee is close to Robert E. Lee, and Robert E. Lee has a statue near the grounds of Atlantic Coast Conference school the University of Virginia. You might also think of the letters ‘ESPN.’”
Absurd, right? Yet this chain of logic is just one step removed from a decision the network made to pull a lead announcer from a Virginia football game next week. As Clay Travis reported on Tuesday, ESPN reassigned play-by-play man Robert Lee from the UVA-William & Mary season opener “simply because of the coincidence of his name.” And those aren’t Travis’s words: They’re ESPN’s, which confirmed Travis’s reporting by releasing a statement to his website Outkick the Coverage:
A follow-up statement from an ESPN exec sent to journalist Yashar Ali overnight indicates the network initiated the discussion.
There are several questions here. To whom was Lee’s name an issue? Tucker Carlson asked Travis that question Tuesday night. “I think they sat down with him and contemplated whether it was going to be awkward for someone named ‘Robert Lee’ to appear on the show, calling the game,” Travis said. They “contemplated” awkwardness—as if the company’s hypersensitive antennae stood on end once it realized white nationalist dopes were chanting anti-Semitic garbage near a statue of a guy whose name sounds familiar to that of an employee who was scheduled to call football at a nearby stadium in a few weeks. As Honey Ryder might’ve asked, “How can you think of football at a time like this?”
Another question is what makes this supposed “coincidence” meaningful. Are both the University of Virginia and the play-by-play man Robert Lee mutually defined by a statue of Robert E. Lee near the grounds of the university and the controversy its existence has fomented? Is that not unfair to both parties? And if it is unfair, then how is it appropriate to stigmatize the college and the commentator, and not just silly?
Recent football history provides a real case of an uncomfortable coincidence of names. Amid the investigation and trial of serial child abuser and ex-football coach Jerry Sandusky, a sizable chunk of social media made a Baltimore Ravens sportscaster with the same phonetic name persona non grata. Gerry Sandusky must’ve gone through hell; Twitter users wished he were headed there, anyway, he said five years ago. But talk about character—here’s what he added about his unfortunate ordeal, according to CNN: “I can understand the confusion. It is an emotional, heinous crime. I can understand the reactions. You just have to keep a sense of humor with this.”
ESPN has no such trait on the question of Robert Lee. Or good sense, for that matter.
