A thousand pardons for veering off into the Politicus Sports realm for this offering, but I couldn’t let the latest bigoted A-hole blather pollute the social environment without some kind of rejoinder. An aging corporate jag-off, B.J. “Red” McCombs, who has enough money to make headlines when he opens his mouth, just bitched about the hiring of Louisville coach, Charlie Strong, to head the once-mighty Texas Longhorns back to their football glory days.
In trying to out-bigot Just Ducky Phil Robertson (quite a feat), McCombs opined on a San Antonio ESPN radio station that the Strong hiring was “a kick in the face.” Strong is black. McCombs, ivory white, was said to favor Aryan blond, Jon Gruden, a decent guy and excellent coach now working football commentary on TV. He complained he wan’t consulted (wonder why?) and insisted that Texas got the selection “wrong.” But Strong was the pick, not Gruden; not the mandatory white guy who McCombs would have insisted upon had he had the final say. And in spite of directing $100 million of his CC and auto dealership bucks to the University of Texas, non-racist heads prevailed. Sadly, $50 million of McCombs’ money bought his name on the Texas School of Business. Oh, where did I put that eraser?
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McCombs was one of the founders of Clear Channel Communications, the most right-wing propagandized outfit in all media. It was Clear Channel that paved the way for the embarrassment that is a grid-locked, racist and hateful America. McCombs and a Texas oilman named Lowry Mays (now deceased) co-founded this political and media juggernaut back in 1972. They both became billionaires with the most ultra-conservative talk radio ever heard. CC would ‘network’ entire states by buying stations in such patterns that the whole state was covered. An impotent and scared sh**less 2003 FCC brothel, with head Madame, Michael Powell (yeah, Colin’s son), allowed for cross ownership of radio and TV stations and newspapers in the same markets and nationally. CC even owns syndication rights to Limbaugh, Hannity and other top wing-nuts. Bain (you remember them) has since taken CC private and God only knows what these “anything” goes corporate doofae are up to.
There were two main goals of McCombs and the May’s family. Paint the U.S. red and make money doing it. Clear Channel also owned music, religious and TV stations, but their core was talk radio.
I know just about everything there is to know about this operation. Some day I’ll tell you why. I know that in most markets, if you crossed the local Republican hierarchy, you could expect to be called into the General Manager’s office and told what to do. I know the top local republicans almost lived at the stations, visited or called the GM daily and monitored every word the host said for it’s political ‘correctness’; the correctness of splaying the right-wing line all over the particular radio market area.
It was nothing for organized Republican pressure and boycotts to mold public opinion. Lists were handed out for pressure calls to sponsors. I know of a sponsor who had a brick hefted through her window. A power-hungry County Republican Party Chairman once threatened to pull all Republicans from a popular restaurant if the owner didn’t pull his advertising off of a certain popular, but far from right-wing enough talk show. Hosts who didn’t toe the line either found themselves moving on or changing their political tunes to fit the Clear Channel template.
So, from that august background comes “Red” McCombs. In his mid-80’s, he’s living proof that blatant racism can survive well into old age. Do these kind of people possess no introspection or humanity whatsoever? What this old fool has done has created an environment of encouraging fellow racists, and there are plenty of them in Texas, to jump on the anti-Strong bandwagon before Charlie’s coached his first game. Maybe they’ll even boycott games or sell their season tickets or fill up local talk shows with their filthy, ignorant rhetoric. Can the N-word be far behind? This almost has a Jackie Robinson feel to it.
Charlie’s no kid. In August he’ll be 54-years-old. And he’s been a football lifer since his days as linebacker at Central Arkansas. Louisville was his first full-time head-coaching job. He was an interim coach for a time at Florida in 2004. Other than that he’s toiled in virtually every assistant and position and coordinator job available to him.
Charlie Strong has had stopovers at a string of distinguished football Universities. Florida, of course, was one of them, where he held seven different coaching positions starting with Graduate Assistant. He was also Defensive Coordinator, Assistant Coach and the aforementioned Interim Head Coach. He’s been an Outside Linebacker’s coach, even a Wide Receiver coach on the offensive side of the ball. He also held assorted posts at Texas A & M, Mississippi, Notre Dame, Southern Illinois and the University of South Carolina before landing in Louisville. This guy knows his football.
He coached at Louisville from 2010 through the current season. The past two seasons, his Cardinals have been 23-3 including a thrashing of Oklahoma, the same team that handed mighty Alabama its second loss of the season.
Let’s put it this way; is Strong the next coming of Nick Saban or Urban Meyer? Probably not, but they both lost games this year they were expected to win. And they both were given well-deserved head coaching opportunities, while Strong made a career of the grunt work of position coaching. At this point, McCombs appears to be the only high-profile hater of all things black, especially coaches for a school he feels he partially owns.
Sincere kudos to new Athletic Director Steve Patterson. He’ll take most of the internal heat for the pick. Don’t worry Longhorns. You’ve got a quality guy who just made four consecutive bowl appearances, is high-respected in the coaching fraternity and will lay the wood to the players both athletically and academically.
Sounds like a terrific find to me and a whole lot of other people.
Red McCombs? He’ll be painted by supporters as the second coming with roughly a million excuses for his comments and endless photos posing with minorities. But “Red” still sounds like an old-school race-baiter to me! And I know damn well one of his old companies excelled at it!
Raised rural & small town, then lived in N.Y., Chicago & LA. Widely traveled. Returned from world wandering to pursue media life of anchorman/reporter and major, medium and small market talk radio. Highly active in politics. Once worked as orderly & security in Mens Lock Ward for the Criminally Insane at a state institution. Much more rational population than current Teapublicans. Great concern for country run by and for the extreme wealthy. The inhumane current running through this country has no precedent in modern history.
Follow me on Twitter @demwriter
