I'm a Fan of the Green Bay Packers, but Don't Call Me Cheesehead, Whitey!

Still pondering ESPN college football analyst Bob Griese’s one-week suspension for saying NASCAR driver Juan Pablo Montoya was “out having a taco.”

I’m a Packer fan, born and bred in Wisconsin. Never saw a purple cow. Never wore a foam hat in the shape of a wedge of cheese. Never hope to do either.

But I’m called a “cheesehead” over and over and over again by game analysts, whether on air or in print. I don’t know whether that makes me a blockhead, constipated, or with a Swiss-cheese flow of holes bleeding thoughts from my brain.

I do know, as a Packer fan, I’ve been labeled a “cheesehead” practically every day in print or in broadcast for the past two decades. It started when some Chicago White Sox baseball fans labeled Milwaukee baseball fans as cheeseheads, and some guy with a lot of foam rubber and a lot of yellow paint laying around the garage started his own economic stimulus plan.

We’ve got thousands of sports analysts and writers labeling thousands of Packer fans as “cheeseheads”.

What if there were suddenly several thousands no-shows at a Packer game at Lambeau field and a broadcast analyst said “They’re still in the parking lot snorting bratwurst and Limberger.”  Would the analyst be suspended for an insensitive, ethnic-profiling remark?

When John Madden spent years upon years circling offensive linemen’s bellies with his ‘telestrator’, was he profiling and calling out persons who may have had glandular or other heritable/ethnic issues which were no fault of their own? Did they have “pre-obesity issues” linked to their height, weight, age, or ethnicity?

Griese’s supension came when he was working a Minnesota-Ohio state football game and one of his broadcast partners asked why driver Juan Pablo Montoya was out of the top five drivers. Griese replied Montoya, who is Colombian, was “out having a taco.”

If John Madden was still broadcasting NFL Thanksgiving day games, circled an offensive lineman’s belly, and said he missed the block because he ate too many mashed potatoes, would it be a cause for suspension? Or would it just be another tired reference to a lame, mid-America ethnic holiday in which the ‘winner’ of the Turducken drumstick  agreed to pretend to chew it down while wishing for a spicy taco with verde salsa instead?

If thousands of sports analysts can label me a brat scarfing cheesehead, why can’t Brian Griese imply Montoya is a taco eater? How is my ethnicity less important than Montoya’s?