Fox Sports Pundit To Fan: “Speak English, I Don't Speak Ghetto”

As previously noted here, Fox Sports pundit/middling professional fighter Chael Sonnen is an asshole who does all sorts of things that one has a hard time imagining, say, fellow Fox Sports pundits Terry Bradshaw or Tim McCarver getting away with. There even seems to be a pattern to these things! Here he is calling a black man "boy"; here he is on SportsCenter asking a black woman if he can touch her hair, and here he is, again being an asshole.

The video above is from a question-and-answer session held in Las Vegas this past weekend. These things usually go as you'd expect, though with an oddly high number of people randomly asking UFC figurehead Dana White for a job. At this one, Bill Smallwood, a 2-3 fighter on the local circuits, decided to use his question time to complain about how Sonnen keeps getting high-profile fights—he's slated to headline the UFC's debut on the new Fox Sports 1 network in August—even though he keeps losing.

"The last time you won was against [Michael] Bisping. And that's real talk, dude," said Smallwood, referencing a fight from a year and a half ago. "Dana keeps you around because you're a Fox commentator. Real talk!"

You can go to about the 2:55 mark to see Fox Sports pundit Chael Sonnen's response.

"'Real talk'—stupid, speak English, I don't speak ghetto! I don't even know what real talk means!"

(Is the Columbia Journalism Review just too urban for Fox Sports pundit Chael Sonnen? How about these guys? Perhaps he has something else in mind.)

Fox Sports, asked for comment on Fox Sports pundit Chael Sonnen's remarks, and more broadly on policies for Fox Sports pundits, sent over the following:

We’ve just been made aware of this event. Clearly, FOX Sports doesn’t condone such a disrespectful inference, and we plan to discuss the matter with Chael as soon as possible. In general terms, our advice to our sportscasters is that if isn’t appropriate to say on-air, it shouldn’t be said or written publicly.

I emailed with Bill Smallwood, and he told me he didn't find it weird that Fox Sports pundit Chael Sonnen would rant at him about speaking ghetto. Smallwood isn't black, in any case. He's a Native American Jew—"I am NATIVE AMERICAN & JEWISH," he wrote, adding that while he doesn't speak ghetto he has learned Russian, Hebrew, Farsi, Arabic, Tagalog, French, Portuguese, and Spanish—but whatever.