8 minute read
OPINION
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NC State broadcaster faces a woke-up call
BY JD HAYWORTH Tribune Columnist
He’s spent three decades calling the play-by-play for the “Red and White,” and like the legendary Red Barber, he may wind up with a pink slip – for the sin of telling the truth.
Gary Hahn, the “Voice of the Wolfpack,” has used his microphone as a palette, painting colorful word pictures of football and basketball contests for North Carolina State fans. His style of describing the action for radio listeners can best be described in three words: Vivid. Accurate. Honest.
A master of that medium comes to understand that broadcasting an event of several hours’ duration must be punctuated with current events, comic relief and an acknowledgment of the absurd.
Hahn included all three in a single utterance, during his play-by-play account of the Dec. 30 Duke’s Mayo Bowl Game in Charlotte. A pause in the action between the Wolfpack and the Maryland Terrapins provided an opportunity for Hahn to update his audience on the only other post-season collegiate contest underway at the time: “Down among all the illegal aliens in El Paso, it’s UCLA,14… Pittsburgh, 6.”
Irreverent, but on target.
And given the absurdity of Uncle Sam’s unwillingness to enforce immigration law, amusing in a “laugh-tokeep-from-crying” fashion.
Ironically, NC State’s last bowl victory came in El Paso, a 52-31 win over Arizona State in the 2017 Sun Bowl. In the years since, El Paso has changed…and not for the better. In fact, this year’s Sun Bowl “Fan Fiesta” was canceled on Dec. 21 because the city has been using its convention center to house illegal aliens, who have flooded across the international border there in recent weeks.
American media outlets, from the Associated Press to the alphabet networks, adhere to the P’s-and-Q’s of political correctness, also now known as “wokeism.”
That simply means that these allegedly objective journalists now convey a bias on behalf of open border advocates, employing the terms “migrants,” “newcomers,” or as that noted theologian and soon-to-be former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once proclaimed, “God’s Children.”
And faster than Nancy omits any reference to the unborn as “God’s Children” when she changes the subject to abortion, Hahn’s employers took immediate and public exception to his brief Sun Bowl score update.
Learfield Communications, the current broadcast rights holder for NC State Athletics, “suspended Wolfpack Sports Network play-by-play announcer Gary Hahn from his agreement indefinitely following comments made during today’s Duke’s Mayo Bowl radio broadcast.”
That statement came from Wolfpack Sports Properties general manager Kyle Winchester; NC State Athletic Director Boo Corrigan followed his customary practice of not saying “boo.”
There are two reasons for Boo hitting the mute button: His future aspirations as an upwardly mobile athletic administrator; and, directly related to that, his apparent acceptance of a “Great Awokening” throughout higher education.
Corrigan’s current stint in West Raleigh was preceded by eight years as the AD at West Point. While there, he learned that our military leadership today is more in the mold of Mark Milley than Dwight Eisenhower.
see HAYWORTH page 19
Bills player’s collapse raises questions about football
BY DAVID LEIBOWITZ
Tribune Columnist
It was shortly after supper time on the first Monday night in 2023 when Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collided with Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Tee Higgins near midfield. Hamlin popped to his feet. He adjusted his face mask. Then the 24-year-old toppled directly backwards, his heart stopped cold.
“That’s, uh, that’s not what any of us wants to see,” said Troy Aikman, the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback turned Monday Night Football commentator. “You just hope that he’s going to be okay.”
Most of us agree utterly with the second part of Aikman’s analysis: We fervently hope Hamlin, who remains in critical condition as I write this, will not only survive his episode of cardiac arrest, but once again thrive.
That remains to be seen so early one, but some things we already can say for certain:
The impromptu show of support for Hamlin, including the $6 million donated to his GoFundMe toy drive – initial goal $2,500 – is heartening, especially when this country of 350 million people can agree on precious little.
Also, we can submit that Aikman was wrong, or more than a little naive, if he truly believes that football fans don’t tune in to games to see the obliterating hits that Monday Night Football and every other broadcast thrives on.
True, no one wants to see a young man meet death or be maimed on the field. But be real: When hulking brutes of enormous strength square off 11 on 11, some capable of bench pressing 400 pounds while others run 40 yards in a little over 4 seconds, what do you expect to happen?
Every football play at the professional and college level is a traffic accident, minus the vehicles, bumpers and seat belts. The wonder isn’t that Hamlin was felled midgame; it’s that no one has died on a gridiron since football started being played for money more than 100 years ago.
The NFL can talk all it wants about player safety, but the league didn’t command $100 billion in television rights because Joe Sixpack loves to see a well-executed screen pass for 11 yards and a first down.
Football fans watch because we thirst for machismo, combat, violence. Then we cue up the highlights and watch it again. At least until an incident like Damar Hamlin’s collapse reminds us that this isn’t ancient Rome and these aren’t gladiators. These are human beings risking their lives and who suffer from such high levels of chronic traumatic encephalopathy that the NFL has paid out more than $1 billion in settlement funds since 2015 to more than 1,500 concussed former players and their kin – with thousands of additional claims pending.
Since Hamlin fell, I have heard all manner of analysis about how the league
For Boo, the reasoning was simple… if West Point was going “woke,” how much more prevalent would “wokeism” be on the NC State campus? His hunch: a whole bunch.
So, since his arrival in 2019, Corrigan has joined with other university administrators, lurching further leftward, embracing the toxic doctrine intent on destroying the very diversity it claims to champion.
Where does all this leave Gary Hahn? Not in a good place, it appears.
But should NC State issue Hahn his “walking papers,” he can seek solace in the fact that it also happened to one of sportscasting’s greats.
In 1966, Red Barber pointed out that the team for whom he broadcast games—the New York Yankees, ironically owned by CBS at the time—was in last place, losing games in front of crowds as sparse as 413 in 65,000-seat Yankee Stadium.
CBS canned the “Ol’ Redhead” for his candor; NC State would repeat that mistake, should Gary Hahn meet the same professional fate.
J.D. Hayworth’s column was written before N.C. State announced that Gary Hahn would return to his play-by-play duties, effective Jan. 14.
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handled postponing the game, how ESPN covered it, and how Hamlin’s heart may respond to treatment.
All this chatter focuses in precisely the wrong direction. It looks outward at the conditions on the field, instead of looking inward, at why we tolerate a game that inevitably cripples a good number of combatants annually.
Since 1931, when the American Football Coaches Association undertook the first “Annual Survey of Football Fatalities,” statistics show that 1,064 football players have died as a direct result of the game – not counting heat strokes suffered in practice, etc.
That includes last year, when “there were 4 traumatic injury fatalities that occurred among football players during football-related activities.”
All four were high school kids. All four suffered traumatic brain injuries.
Let’s pray Damar Hamlin isn’t fatality number 1,065. Let’s also look in the mirror and ask the face staring back why we never consider turning off the TV and finding something better to occupy our attention?
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