Troy Aikman: Hall of Fame quarterback. NFL color commentator. Probably not gay.
If you’re wondering what the last part is about, you’ve missed out on the latest Skip Bayless controversy.
Both sports pundits were in the news this week after Aikman slammed his own employer, Fox Sports, for hiring Skip Bayless to host a talk show titled “Undisputed.”
“(In television), I believe success is achieved by acquiring and developing talented, respected and credible individuals,” Aikman said, “none of which applies to Skip Bayless.”
There’s been bad blood between the two since the 1990s, when Bayless, a former print journalist, wrote a book on the Dallas Cowboys containing about six pages speculating on Aikman’s sexuality.
“There’s no substance to that claim, and he’s doing it purely to gain interest in a book,” Aikman told a radio show in 2011.
The former Super Bowl champion isn’t the first to criticize Bayless’s affinity for attracting attention. Sports fans have long loathed Bayless’s hot takes on ESPN’s premiere s--- slinging shouting match, “First Take.”
Spouting off that LeBron James is a choker, Tim Tebow is God’s gift to earth, and the Cowboys would regret not drafting Johnny Manziel, Bayless has made a living off his confounding contrarianism.
Troy Aikman is right. I think Skip Bayless realizes there’s as much money in making someone angry as there is in informing them — and it’s working. His attention-grabbing garbling of the facts has scored him a cool $1.5 million pay raise after leaving ESPN for Fox.
But there’s something inherently different about this exchange. Bringing up a football player’s possible homosexuality to sell books is undisputedly over the line.
To give context, the portion of Bayless’s book in question highlights the struggle between Aikman and then-head coach Barry Switzer. Bayless says Switzer, who feuded with Aikman, was pushing for Bayless to write about Aikman’s sexual orientation.
To his credit, Bayless said in a 2009 interview that he doesn’t care if Aikman is gay or not. But right after, he also said his “only regret about the book is that it does not say that Aikman is gay.”
On a college campus in 2016, being called gay isn’t supposed to bother anyone. A New York court even ruled that falsely calling someone gay is no longer slander, since the idea is “based on a false premise that it is shameful and disgraceful to be described as lesbian, gay or bisexual.”
But that’s not where Aikman was questioned. To have rumors about your sexuality floating around in a 1990s Texas locker room is an entirely different story.
By the time the book was published, Aikman rightfully wondered how you even combat a rumor like that.
“How can I fight this?” he said. “Am I supposed to keep a girl around even if I don’t care anything about her, just so I can keep everybody off my back?”
But Aikman isn’t a bastion of morality. The quarterback has a tendency to be hot-headed, even firing back with “I’m not so sure Skip’s not gay,” in the 2011 interview.
Instead of flinging a homophobic Hail Mary, Aikman should’ve refrained from spouting off the same type of speculation that got us here in the first place.
At the end of the day, it was wrong for Bayless to source an enemy of Aikman’s — a big media ethics no-no — concerning his sexual preferences. And Aikman undermined some fair criticisms with a schoolyard comeback.
So who wins? That would be Jamie Horowitz, the Fox Sports president whose hiring of ESPN’s biggest blockheads and all-press-is-good-press strategy is taking a chunk out of Disney’s bank account.
Matt Brannon is a sports writer. Contact him at mbrannon@alligator.org and follow him on Twitter @MattB_727.
