Thursday, September 21, 2006

Commenter's Legion of Doom Nominee: Marge Schott

Nominator: The Ever Prolific Anonymous

Blogger Review of Nomination: badcock

Marge Schott might have been remembered as the first woman to buy a professional sports team, had her legacy not been as stained as her cigarette-brown fingers.

Was her humiliation just the product of the politically-correct liberal media?

She was sued (unsuccessfully) in 1991 by an employee who opposed her policy of not hiring blacks for front-office positions. That started the Drive To Dishonor which only concluded with her death in 2004.

She was accused of referring to outfielders Eric Davis and Dave Parker, who helped win the World Series for her, as "her million-dollar niggers."

And: "I would never hire another nigger. I'd rather have a trained monkey working for me than a nigger."

She had a Nazi fetish, with memorabilia at home and numerous quoted comments about how Hitler got a bad rap: "Everything you read, when he came in, he was good." She was referring to African-Americans when she said that "Hitler had the right idea about what to do with them," but it was also a tasteful dig at the Jews.

She didn't care much for the Asians, either. Sports Illustrated quoted her speaking in a "cartoonish Japanese accent" while describing her meeting with the Prime Minister of Japan. She also told the magazine she didn't like seeing Asian-American children "come here, honey, and stay so long and then outdo our kids. That's not right." (emphasis mine) Later she would argue that the word "Japs" isn't offensive.

An umpire died on Opening Day in Cincinnati. Furiously impatient in the owner's box, Schott fumed, "First it snows, now this. I feel cheated. This isn't supposed to happen to us, not in Cincinnati." Days later, she sent flowers to the wrong umpire crew's dressing room - flowers she had received that day from someone else.

Reds manager Davey Johnson married his girlfriend after saying Schott threatened to fire him if he didn’t marry.

Schott banned players from wearing earrings because “only fruits wear earrings."

She was indicted for falsifying information to meet quotas for her car dealership by using her own employees as part of the fraudulent scheme.

On September 10, 1998, Schott ordered St. Louis player and HGH Spokesmodel Mark McGwire, who is allergic to dogs, to pet her Saint Bernard Schottzie for good luck.

Finally, Schott was the target of legitimate criticism for allegedly allowing her dogs to defecate upon the baseball field itself.

1 comment:

Garwood B. Jones said...

So... is someone other than fruits wearing earrings now? I get all the rest but seems to me that she was pretty much right-on as far as the fruits go.