Turn on the radio nowadays and you can hear anything from Howard Stern's offering siblings money to make-out to NPR's soothing news of world catastrophe. But when a radio DJ calls a recently widowed woman and asks her for a date, a line needs to be drawn.
On Thursday of last week, 98KUPD's Beau Duran of the early radio show, "The Morning Sickness," phoned Darryl Kile's widow, Flynn, and asked her for a date to the D-Backs/Cardinals game. Cardinal pitcher Darryl Kile died June 22 from a heart attack while in Chicago.
Considering the relative freshness of the widow's wound, the first thoughts springing to mind are that this was ill timed, uncouth and lacked any foresight. I can't imagine our Valley prankster could have foreseen this becoming such a "media frenzy" as KUPD's web-based apology put it.
This expression of regret was not good enough for some people, since it made it sound as if this base act was worthy of our passionate abhorrence simply because the media played it up, which, consequently, is the truth.
Perhaps that's why some people found the apology too weak. Once a frenzy begins, of course, it perpetuates only according to how pissed off the public gets. The reason for our concern is not only because a widow's feelings were hurt, but because the baseball players, managers, businesses involved and every other figure dying to get in their self-accrediting licks said so.
When this became a mob of important people, all giving Duran a public stoning, why wouldn't the public want to join in. We never miss an opportunity to make ourselves look decent and valiant, even if the bandwagon is the only place we can do it.
Unfortunately, I cannot believe that's why Shane Co., a large sponsor of KUPD, pulled out. Their official position is something like, "this was terrible, awful, preposterous, ludicrous and other such synonyms." But the real reason is they don't want to have their name tied to something being thrown to the wolves of the media this week.
Beau is on a week's suspension, and he will likely have to comply with writing a one-page "my bad" letter in the St. Louis paper. But when its no longer required to side against this seemingly despicable act, everything will return to normal and Shane Co. will probably return as a sponsor.
I have to commend the only true victim in this, Mrs. Kile, since when I took to investigating this matter, I did not see a slough of sound bytes baring her anger. I wish I could say the same for the others that took to attacking Duran liked he'd taken a pop-shot at the queen.
We saw a similar phenomenon with Dale Earnhardt, renowned NASCAR racer, when he died. Suddenly the media canonized a man as if he'd died saving orphans from a burning building. The racer who sent himself into his deadly tailspin even had his life threatened by supposedly empathic fans.
Sports figures are people just like anyone else, and I'll bet most of them just want to play the game. Now, though, we have enraged Cardinal fans who act as if everyone representing Arizona would side with a hasty DJ—the whole D-Backs team apologized, in fact.
The bottom line is that despite the sour taste this prank left on the palate of Mrs. Kile, she accepted the apology. Perhaps, since this happened to her, the one who actually knew Darryl Kile, she must bare the burden of deciding whether or not charges should be pressed and apologies demanded, or to truly forgive Duran, but it's her business. Just because companies such as Shane Co. believe they can force attrition doesn't make it so, nor should it make baseball fans feel that some heightened degree of justice has been served.
If the "Morning Sickness" crew did not offend people, no one would listen to them. It is, after all, an entire morning of predominately talking. Yet, the moment one of them does something that doesn't fall into an invisible line of social propriety, he or she is suddenly ostracized and have people believing none of them should have a job.
If reprimand goes any further, it should take place within the privacy of the parties involved and not be taken up as some civil action which fans, sports figures, and business spokespersons feel will make them look noble in the eyes of the public.
Believing a DJ on a show known for improper stunts should swing for this is hardly different than chastising a sports figure for being human and falling from the saintly pedestal on which we place them.
Darren Todd is an English Literature senior. Reach him at Lawrence.Todd@asu.edu.
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