Kelly Tilghman: In Plain View

By: D.K. Wilson

By now we know the words - in reference to how young golfers should attempt to stop Tiger Woods - that came from Kelly Tilghman’s mouth.”Lynch him in a back alley.”

Most of us also know that Tiger Woods called the incident a “non-issue.” His response, through his agent, Leigh Steinberg, was this:

“It is a complete non-issue. Kelly and Tiger are friends. It might have been a poor choice of words, but there was absolutely no ill intent whatsoever.”

We cannot speculate as to whether or not that is his true feeling. What some people do not know is that on his first day of kindergarten Woods was grabbed and tied to a tree by a gaggle of sixth-graders who spray-painted “nigger” on him and then proceeded to throw rocks at the five-year old boy. We do not know if Tiger Woods recalls that moment each morning when he peers at his reflection in the mirror.

What is ironic about that insidious incident is that by the age of five the boy whose first name was once “Eldrick” already possessed a jewel of a golf swing and would, less than two decades later, dominate the world’s whitest sport - golf - in a way no one has and perhaps ever will. Today there is no debate as to Woods’ place in the world of golf or the sporting world - or the world of product endorsement.

But there is a debate about his friend Kelly Tilghman. Some members of the sports media have, inadvertently or otherwise, apologized for Tilghman, blaming her use of the word “lynch” on the youth and ignorance of people of “her generation.”

Kelly Tilghman is 38 years old.

Other members of the sports media attributed her use of the word “lynch” to “weird behavior.” Yet other members of the sports media have postulated that she might be so colorblind that the word “lynch” does not take on the meaning it “might” have for “some of us.” Using the word lynch in no way implies weirdness, nor does it take on some alternative meaning when uttered by any American, no matter their color.

Kelly Tilghman has never been accused of weirdness and she is an American.

There is but one connotation for the word “lynch” in America’s past or present. And that connotation is as sordid today as it was two hundred years ago. Today, the children of Jena, Louisiana know the power of the word, just as do students at Columbia University. Charles Hester, the Mayor of Selma, North Carolina knows the power of the word. He used it during a town hall meeting just a couple weeks ago and a firestorm ensued.

Kelly Tilghman is a graduate of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, a city that is no stranger to the use of the noose. While Kelly Tilghman pursued her degree on the grounds of Duke as a political science major, John Hope Franklin - America’s foremost living black historian - was a distinguished professor of history at the university. His widely acclaimed book, From Slavery to Freedom, recounts the yeoman - but unsuccessful - work of the members of the NAACP to win passage of a federal anti-lynching law.

Kelly Tilghman is a South Carolina native. It was a senator from that state, Benjamin Tillman who, in 1900, gave an impassioned plea on the floor of the Senate defending the lynching of black people. The senator told his colleagues that lynching was a necessary tactic to facilitate tilting the balance of political power in post-reconstruction South Carolina back in favor of whites. Tillman said in part:

“We of the South have never recognized the right of the Negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.”

“In my state, there were 135,000 Negro voters, or Negroes of voting age, and some 90,000 or 95,000 white voters… We were sorry we had the necessity forced upon us, but we could not help it, and as white men we are not sorry for it, and we do not propose to apologize for anything we have done in connection with it.”

Between 1882 and 1968, some 5,000 black people were lynched in the U.S. At least 156 were lynched in Kelly Tilghman’s home state.

There is no evidence for Kelly Tilghman being ignorant; Duke is not a school for the intellectually challenged. There is no evidence that she is “weird,” and there is certainly no evidence that she is colorblind.

There is ample evidence, though, that Kelly Tilghman is merely a product of her environment.

It is certain that in reference to quelling the dominance of a Jewish golfer, Kelly Tilghman would never have said, “Put him in a gas chamber.”

Then again, no one would offer anything close to an apology for her if she did. We would not hear about her friendship with that fictional golfer. No Jewish person - as have black sports media members - would apologize for her use of that visceral image and vouch for her character. And sports fans and people in the general public would never, ever tell Jewish Americans or those of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) who represent them, to “get over it” as they have to black people who have openly chastised Kelly Tilghman.

Instead of a two-week suspension, the mythical Kelly Tilghman uttering, “Put him in a gas chamber” would have been summarily fired from her position at the Golf Channel, and buried under an avalanche of focused and righteous anger; never again to resurface into the public eye.

But this is not a fictional incident. The only “representative” of black people to speak out against Kelly Tilghman was, predictably, Al Sharpton. Bob Johnson, owner of the NBA Charlotte Bobcats and founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET) was too busy pining for Hillary Clinton while not-so subtly implying that her in-party opponent, Barack Obama, was at one time little more than a drug-addict street thug. Other prominent black men and women in economically or politically favorable positions said nothing at all.

Even less has been made of the fact that it took the Golf Channel five full days to levy a suspension against Kelly Tilghman. But as often happens in cases like these, the sins of the corporation, even the venial sin of acting slowly in the face of fast-mounting pressure, go underreported. And when they are finally brought to light, the iniquity is swatted aside by a company spokesperson who invariably speaks of how the board of directors (i.e. primary stockholders) owed it to all involved to carefully weigh all the evidence presented to them and consider all manner of arcane legalities, far beyond the understanding of the hoi polloi.

It is this tactical maneuver that allows a corporation to sniff the winds of public sentiment and make the most popular decision. And in the case of Kelly Tilghman, allow the object of their ire to either bury themselves or position themselves so that they can be defended by their corporate employers.

Kelly Tilghman offered only a meek apology to those who “might have been offended;” implying that there are plenty of people who share her sense that lynching a black man - “wink, wink” - is but the punch line of a 2008-styled “black humor” joke. She forced her bosses’ hand and they laid down a two-week unpaid vacation.

The irony of this affair is that Kelly Tilghman’s professional accomplishments are similar to those of many, many black men and women past, present, and surely future.

A little more than a year ago at the Golf Channel, Kelly Tilghman broke through the proverbial “glass ceiling” of televised golf to become the first female play-by-play commentator on PGA Tour tournament telecasts.

But, unlike her black counterparts in this respect, Kelly Tilghman failed to understand that, while being “the first” might make her a golden child, she was and is beholden to the men who allowed her to advance in the first place. She had no idea that the privilege of her upbringing held no currency in the face of her corporate money masters; that she could be shackled and removed from her lofty insider view at a moment’s notice.

And with one wrong word a very public lynching could occur.

Hers.

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D.K. Wilson is a freelance sports writer. He is better known on the internet as "DWil," and writes for Sports On My Mind.

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