When video of an announcer dropping a racial slur on a streaming platform broadcast of an Oklahoma high school girls’ basketball game first surfaced, Matt Rowan initially claimed it wasn’t him. Rowan, the owner of the OSPN streaming platform that broadcast Thursday’s game (in conjunction with the NFHS Network) and one of the announcers on the stream, initially told Oklahoma publication The Frontier in a phone interview Friday that he wasn’t the one who made the comment after seeing the Norman High School girls team kneel during the national anthem. But a few hours later Friday, Rowan issued a statement through his lawyer saying he made the comments, not his coworker Scott Sapulpa. In that statement, Rowan blamed his blood sugar levels:
The announcer who made the racist statements is partially blaming it on low blood sugar. pic.twitter.com/6cTwIZdJZI
— Dylan Goforth (@DGoforth918) March 12, 2021
There’s plenty of bad apology bingo in here (it’s not relevant at all to your decision to say a racial slur if you have children, were a youth pastor, or are a member of a church; if anything, you make those people and groups look worse by emphasizing your association with them), but the comment about diabetes and spiking blood sugar seems particularly ridiculous, especially when it comes to “I do not believe that I would have made such horrible statements absent my sugar spiking.” There are countless people who deal with diabetes without ever uttering racial slurs, and the “I do not believe I would have made such horrible statements absent my sugar spiking” really feels like Rowan attempting to dodge responsibility for his actions here. He said a terrible thing thinking listeners couldn’t hear him (that’s happened before), got caught, and tried to blame it on blood sugar. That’s not a good look.
