Dean Jones redux

When I switched on the television in the morning yesterday to catch up with the third ODI between India and Sri Lanka, who should I see in the Neo Sports studio but Dean Jones. What’s he doing, I wondered, on a South Asian channel after the things he had said last year?

And what had he said? I wrote a piece on the controversy at the time which can be found on the Hindustan Times website here. But since Jones has turned up on our TV screens again and since I don’t think that bygones should be allowed to be bygones in this instance, here’s an extract from that article that summarizes its main argument.

“He said, “the terrorist has got another wicket,” when Amla, a bearded South African Muslim of Indian descent, took a catch. Jones thought he was making a private comment to his fellow commentators but the microphone was live and it carried his words to a television public.”

Peter Roebuck and Alan Border leapt to Jones’s defence. Their line was that Jones didn’t mean it, couldn’t have meant it because everyone knew that Jones wasn’t a bigot or a racist.

“”This was the same defence that Darren Lehmann mounted when he called the Sri Lankans “black c___s”. It was also the defence used by Jewish friends of Mel Gibson (another man who has spent some growing-up time in Australia) after his anti-Semitic outburst. Mel, they said, ‘wasn’t like that’.

Wasn’t like what? What does a man’s track record have to be before a bigoted comment made by him qualifies as bigotry? It’s unlikely that a television commentator will have prior form or known links with the National Front or the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or a pro-apartheid party. But why should we need more than the evidence of our ears?

Let’s try to set this in a ‘Western’ perspective because Jones’s defenders seem to be having trouble appreciating the vileness of what Jones said in the context of cricket in Sri Lanka. Here’s a hypothetical circumstance. Tiger Woods is playing golf at the US Open. He sinks a putt, there’s a pause and the commentator, thinking he’s in a commercial break, says to his colleague, with the microphones on, “The nigger’s holed another one.” How long do you think that commentator would last on prime time? How many golf correspondents and commentators would characterise his comment as a ‘bit stupid’? And how many people would buy the line that “some of my best friends are…”?

The truth is that no American commentator working for a major TV channel would use ‘kike’ or ‘nigger’ or ‘faggot’ with their colleagues around even if they thought the mikes were switched off. Because political correctness, in the best sense of that term, has made these words unsayable. To use these words in polite society is to court ostracism.

Dean Jones said what he did because he thought his colleagues in the box would be amused, because he didn’t think the words he used were taboo. Jones assumed that a remark tossed off like that would pass without challenge or reproach. That’s the real significance of this incident, not the fact that he got caught with the microphones on.

“The terrorist has got another wicket”: this is the casual bigotry of the locker room which assumes that the guys will go along. It’s bigotry founded on an assumption of shared prejudice because you can bet Dean Jones’s last Australian dollar that he wouldn’t have said what he did with Rameez Raja and Imran Khan in the room.

That’s why the eagerly forgiving attitude of his peers is disappointing. They’ve responded like members of a guild, not as professional men looking out for cricket or broadcasting. … The reason ‘kike’, ‘faggot’ and ‘nigger’ are taboo today is because public opinion backed up by social sanction made them unsayable. If an Indian commentator was caught calling … a Dalit player a ‘chamar’ he would never work again. Roebuck and Border and cricket’s commentariat seem to think calling a bearded Muslim a ‘terrorist’ doesn’t belong in the same category of proscribed words. Well, it’s up to us to persuade them that it does, through a policy of zero tolerance.

It has been unsubtly suggested in the press that Jones was sacked from Ten Sports because his employers were Muslim. I hope that isn’t true. I’d like to think that ESPN, Star Sports and Zee Sports, regardless of the religious beliefs of their owners would have done the same thing. India is a secular, pluralist nation and sports channels that work out of this country need to make sure that the people they employ respect those ideals.”

Neo Sports must believe that Jones has seen the error of his ways and is therefore fit for public consumption again. Except that he hasn’t and therefore isn’t. After self-serving apologies of the some-of-my-best-friends-are-Muslims sort, Jones tried to suggest that he wasn’t referring to Amla at all.

As Andrew Miller pointed out in Cricinfo earlier this year, ‘Jones was sacked by Ten Sports almost before the utterance had passed his lips, but within the month he was back, denying he'd ever erred. “Amla got the catch, Nicky Boje was the bowler," he wibbled. "I'll leave it up to you to work out who I was referring to." Nice one. Except it had been Pollock bowling at the time.’

A man in denial can’t be contrite. Ergo, Dean Jones shouldn’t be commentating on Indian television.