ESPN Had Another Headline Issue Today, And This One Included The Word "Gook"

Here's how the headline to this story looked early Saturday morning on ESPN's Soccernet site. We actually got a tip about it from Andy W, but dismissed it because we'd never heard of Lee Dong-Gook and figured ESPN had Westernized the order of his name (in other words, that his given name was Lee and his surname was hyphenated).

That, alas, wasn't the case. "Gook" is actually just part of Lee's given name, and not an especially descriptive one, either. Nobody who knew what they were doing would use "Gook" to mean Lee Dong-Gook, and you'll note that the article has since been changed to use Lee's surname.

Soccernet has always sort of been a satellite operation of ESPN.com, but there'd be a tremendous irony here if the person filling in for Anthony Federico— fired last week over the "Chink in the Armor" controversy—wrote this headline, and was so novice as to not know Eastern name order conventions, and thereby for a time created a headline more inadvertently offensive than the one that led to them having those duties to begin with.

h/t to Dan K for the image