Here we go again, sports fans!  During a recent tennis match between two professionals in Indian Wells, California, a racial slur uttered by one of the players has the usual suspects up in arms.  The first off the bat was, of course, the newspaper that prints only what fits p.c., the dreadful Big Bagel Times.  Michael Llodra of France is usually a mild-tempered fellow, but in his close match against Ernests Gulbis of Latvia—a match he won—he seemed to be out of sorts.  His problem was a Korean-American woman by the name of Alex Lee Barlow.  Mrs. Barlow was accompanied by her husband and brother and stood out by cheering loudly for the Latvian.  Indian Wells is known for having stands very close to the courts, not necessarily a good thing as far as tennis fans are concerned.  Tennis players are known for using four-letter words at every opportunity.

When I was on the tennis circuit 40 or so years ago, the worst offender was Bob Hewitt, an Australian who won the Wimbledon doubles and mixed many a time.  There were no fines back then, and players were supposed to act like gentlemen, but referees turned a deaf ear in Bob’s case because he suffered from a type of Tourette’s, although back then it was called bad manners.  That was then, this is now.  Players no longer act like gents, especially women like the ghastly Serena Williams, who intimidates all and sundry and more often goes unpunished because she’s black.

What Llodra did was to mouth the words “putain Chinoise,” which translate as “Chinese whore,” after some excessive cheering against him by the Barlow group.  He did not yell the words out, muttering them at best, and he did, after all, express his feelings in French.  Now please don’t get me wrong.  I’m against vulgarity in all its forms, but there are mitigating circumstances in this case.  Koreans are by and large monolingual, and the chances of a Korean-American speaking French are long ones.  Ilie Nastase, the great Rumanian player of the 70’s, always swore his head off at umpires and linesmen—but he did it in Rumanian.  They knew that he was using foul language, but there was nothing they could do about it.  Who, after all, speaks Rumanian except for Rumanians?

I’ve heard people cheering hard for my opponent, and in the heat of the match one tends to take it personally.  Llodra looked directly at the woman and called her a “putain Chinoise,” and the p.c. brigade went into overtime.  If he had called her a connasse—which is French for a female part that a bikini hides—no one would have made a fuss.  But because he used the word Chinese, all hell broke loose.  Rappers call white folk far worse names, but call  an Oriental by his ethnic makeup, and the thought-Nazis go berserk.  Barlow claimed that she thought about what happened after the match and decided to complain.  A little bird tells me she had dollar signs on her mind.  Llodra was fined $2,500 for the insult, and Barlow was promised an apology.  But the Frenchman has refused to give one, which I think is correct.  Either a fine and no apology, or an apology and no fine.  And he did teach Barlow a couple of French words, so she should thank him.

Now we all know that the French are an arrogant and unpleasant race, but the Koreans are not much better, and just look at their culture.  Llodra was wrong to call her a Chinese hooker, but I can’t tell them apart, either, except when they’re behind the counter in the 24-hour markets.  The thought police enact hate-crime laws, and the Times is thundering against a Frenchman who called some Korean a Chinese hooker.  As Pat Buchanan wrote, “The new mortal sins are racism, sexism, homophobia and nativism.”  I wonder what would have happened if he had called her a hooker, period.

Over here in the Old Continent, Llodra would already be in jail, as would a certain Dante Alighieri, whose Divine Comedy is a racist, homophobic, anti-Islamic, and antisemitic tract of rare vulgarity.  Not my words, dear readers, but those of Ghe­rush92, which acts as a consultant to U.N. bodies on issues of racism and discrimination.  According to the human-rights organization, the Divine Comedy is “offensive and discriminatory” and has no place in a modern classroom.  The president of the group is one Valentina Sereni, whom I will openly call an Italian putana, and her point is that the epic poem, which consists of 100 cantos, represents Islam as a heresy and Muhammad as a schismatic and refers to Jews as greedy, scheming moneylenders and traitors.  (Many Jews I know are not.)

Worse, homosexuals are damned for being “against nature,” consigned to an eternal rain of fire in Hell.  The fact that Dante wrote the epic some 700 years ago does not seem to matter.  Homos, Jews, and Muslims are minorities and need to be protected from the wicked arrows of white trash like Dante.  Now, if I wrote that Beatrice might have turned out to be a lesbo, I wonder who would come after me—the lesbians or the Greens?  Lesbians, after all, are against nature, ha, ha, ha.