Plenty of drama in the last week or so in Iowa City and Tom Kakert and Matt Randazzo are here to discuss it. We dive into the struggling Iowa basketball team and if they can right the ship in the final week of the regular season. We also look ahead to the Big Ten Tournament and where Iowa stands when it comes to the NCAA Tournament. We reflect back to last week’s Dolphin and McCaffery press conferences and then get into some recruiting talk after a big football and basketball recruiting weekend. Then we wrap up talking about four Hawkeyes improving their stock at the NFL Combine.
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A lot of folks love Dolph and want him back on the air. The prevailing idea seems to be that if the King Kong comment can somehow be minimized or morphed into a compliment, then Dolph didn’t make a mistake and he should be immediately re-instated.
The reason Dolph’s comment is a big deal is because it’s one of the many “dog whistle” comments that are only attached to large, muscular black males. Compare him to an ape; a gorilla. An animal from the jungle. It’s the jungle part that becomes the dog whistle. Majority America refers to Black cooking as “jungle food”, Motown music as “jungle music”, women in interracial relationships as having “jungle fever”. This list goes on and on and it is all related to the ape from the jungle theme. This is why this comment is not politically correct today. Gary Dolphin knows this, which is why he said “ I made an unconscious bias remark”. Let me continue – no one would ever call Purdue’s Isaac Haas King Kong and physically he matches the jungle ape more than Fernando. So attacking the validity of the remark is incorrect.
The real reason for Dolph’s suspension is the ongoing friction between Dolph and Fran McCaffery; exacerbated by the ineptness of Iowa’s AD. If Iowa fans want to talk about a gorilla in the room, it’s name is Gary Barta, nor Bruno Fernando.