Somebody beats down bigoted Bears fan "but there wasn't any tape"

The Chicago Tribune's John Kass writes today about an incident involving a New Orleans reporter and a bigoted Bears fan.

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"Yeah," Boyd said. "So as we're setting up to do the interview, the shorter Bears fan comes up, screaming, `Katrina! Katrina!' He must've been drunk. I turned and said, `Hey, I'm trying to work here.' And that's when he pushes me and says it. He says the N-word. He dropped it right on me.

"He pushes me and I push back, there wasn't any tape, but the guys in the booth could see it. You could say there was some pushing going on. He kept saying it, ugly, loud, the N-word. Yelling it."

Boyd is not a little guy. He's 6 feet 2 inches tall, weighs more than 200 pounds and played guard on his college basketball team. So I mentioned that I hoped somebody landed a left hook on that fan's jaw, or nose. Not on the mouth, though, because you figure the teeth would be infested, like some Chicago Komodo dragon. As someone who would faint if I couldn't run, I don't advocate violence. But them's fighting words, as a judge might say.

"There wasn't any tape, but I think somebody might have thrown a left hook," Boyd said.
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"What gets me is that fan, the N-word guy," Boyd said. "If he runs into Lovie Smith or an African-American player on the Bears, he'd probably ask for an autograph and tell the guy how much he loves him. And he might believe it himself. But then he's got that word on the tip of his lips too," Boyd said.

You can see it, can't you? The white guy with the big smile asking an African-American sports star to autograph his jersey. The ink isn't even dry and the N-word hangs just behind his teeth. I wonder if players and coaches can feel these seething conflicts, if they care, if they turn it off.
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