Don't mention this national monument around ESPN's Jay Williams.
During a discussion on the NBA Playoffs, Williams, an analyst for the network, criticized host Stephen A. Smith's suggestion that Steph Curry could replace LeBron James on the NBA's Mount Rushmore if Golden State beats the Lakers.
As soon as Smith made the analogy, Williams expressed his disagreement with it.
Outkick's Mark Harris has more:
Williams' snide โthat's our metric for successโ comment brings the issue full circle.
No, Mount Rushmore isn't a โmetric of successโ it's a metaphor someone used in a sports discussion a long time ago and it stuck. The Mount Rushmore metaphor has nothing to do with the four Presidents, it's just a term we've adopted as a society when we're discussing the Top 4 of any subject.
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Believe it or not, Williams isn't the first ESPN employee to whine about four President's faces on the side of a cliff.
In August 2022, Jalen Rose called the Mount Rushmore termย โoffensiveโ and racist.
Mount Rushmore features the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Historians recognize them as among the 10 greatest presidents. It is almost universally acknowledged that Lincoln and Washington are the top two commanders-in-chief.
Nonetheless, Williams attempted to tarnish their reputations by judging their behavior by 2023's moral standards.
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5 Comments
i have no understanding of what the blacks went through and to an extent still do today, but privileged black athletes and ex-athletes turned commentators show their ignorance to what Mt Rushmore stands for.
Not everything in society is racist because it happened in history or is non inclusive of blacks.
This is where many who try to be sympathetic to racism and black struggles end their sympathy because it never seems as though anything will ever be good enough.
There are more blacks in major sports yet the b*tching continues.
Sorry, Iโm done with it.
How can you say that? I hope is just a very bad idea of a bad joke,black people suffered a lot,and they were and are good people,why judge the whole for a few bad ones?
The majority of black slaves brought to the U.S. were brought by black slave traders. Censuses taken during the years of legal slavery reveal that there were over 2,000 free blacks who owned black slaves and they oppressed them, that’s also in historical records. Blacks ignore that fact and the fact that half of the whites in the U.S. fought to free them and a white president did it. They created Liberia in Africa for freed slaves. They should have all been gathered up and sent there.
Right. The original and most egregious black-on-black crimes were in Africa. Tell that to the whiners.
What we now need is a ‘Mount FLUSH-more’ to depict the four WORST Presidents. I’m sure American Liberty and its readers could swiftly nominate at least four candidates, two form modern days.