So I just checked again, and somehow Chris Broussard still hasn’t been fired for what he said earlier today on Fox Sports’ show First Things First.
In this day and age, it’s completely normal for an on-air personality to say something they shouldn’t, and then promptly get fired for it. A lot of those moments have happened when announcers didn’t know they were being recorded, but that defense can’t be used in this situation.
Broussard was helping to break down the midnight NBA trade that sent James Harden from the Philadelphia 76ers to the Los Angeles Clippers, and was going back and forth with analyst Nick Wright when he said a word that, to be blatant, should never be said.
Wright was talking about the crowded team of superstars that already called the Clippers home, and how adding Harden didn’t make a whole lot of sense, when Broussard broke into the conversation and messed up pretty bad:
“Nick, is the man r*****ed… developmentally disabled, to think that he is going to go to the Clippers where they have Kawhi Leonard as the number one option, Paul George as the number two, and still Russell Westbrook there, and he’s going to shoot 25 times a night?”
Wright stepped in to immediately correct Broussard when he used the R-word, and rightfully told his co-host “you shouldn’t use that word.”
The mistake made things awkward as the analysts continued to discuss the NBA trade, so much so that Broussard decided to give a strange apology just moments afterwards:
“Let me apologize for using that word. My first cousin, we just put him…he died a few months ago, a month or two ago, he was developmentally disabled.
I didn’t mean to use that word. I apologize to the audience and everybody.”
The other two analysts were dying to get to a commercial break, with Nick Wright trying to tread through the suffocating tension and uncomfortableness by responding with a mumbled “that’s very kind of you.”
Long story short, disaster struck First Things First this morning, which you can view here:
