Earlier this week, West Virginia Mountaineers men’s basketball coach Bob Huggins appeared on Bill Cunningham’s WLW show in Cincinnati and made a homophobic slur over the air. The school opted not to fire him for his actions, instead reducing his salary by $1 million per year, requiring him to participate in sensitivity training, and having him serve a three-game suspension.
Huggins kept his job. Everyone at WLW has kept their jobs. The only person to suffer any consequences for the comments is a podcaster for Locked On.
Although the events are a topic of discussion in sports media this week, most radio stations and podcasts have refrained from airing the audio of the comments, let alone doing so uncensored. Josh Neighbors, host of the Locked On Big 12 podcast on the Locked On Podcast Network, took a different approach by airing the remarks in full.
“I did that because I thought it was important to play and get the full context of what he had said,” Neighbors explained in a video. “I followed that up by saying I thought what he said was abhorrent. I thought it was hateful and also that if I was the athletic director, I would have fired him and I would not want somebody like that espousing those views coaching my team.”
Executives at the Locked On Podcast Network, founded by Utah Jazz radio play-by-play announcer David Locke, felt differently about the occurrence. They viewed Neighbors playing the remarks on the podcast without them being censored as him choosing to willingly post hate speech, which the company has a zero-tolerance policy towards. Neighbors was informed by Locke that his employment was being terminated, effective immediately.
“I was trying to combat it and say it’s terrible and awful and should not happen,” Neighbors said. “To play it and give the full context to give the folks a chance to hear it all, I did make the choice to play that.”
While he disagrees with the outcome of his actions, Neighbors understands and respects the decision made by the media entity. He emphasized that the conversation was particularly difficult to have with Locke, and that he was not given much of a chance to convey the logic behind his decision to him. After all, the decision had been made before the phone call between Neighbors and Locke – and Locke is receiving a fair amount of criticism for the resolution his company reached.
