Curt Schilling strikes back

Former ESPN baseball commentator Curt Schilling yesterday told a radio interviewer that ESPN employs “some of the biggest racists in sports” and shows bias through its toleration of leftist opinions but not conservative ones: “If you wanted to go off topic as a sportsperson, you had to go off topic left or you were going to get into trouble.”

Schilling got into trouble when he shared a Facebook post that displayed an unattractive man wearing a wig and breast-cut-out shirt, along with the words “LET HIM IN! to the restroom with your daughter or else you’re a narrow minded, judgmental, unloving racist bigot who needs to die!!!”

As WORLD reported on April 21, ESPN fired Schilling, deeming the posting of comments like that “unacceptable.” Schilling had also criticized Hillary Clinton and radical Islam. He describes himself on his Facebook account as a “conservative pro life pro 2nd amendment American who wants to help those that cannot help themselves.”

Schilling became to many baseball fans a profile in courage when he pitched brilliantly for the Boston Red Sox during the 2004 postseason while bleeding from a procedure that secured a dislocated tendon in his ankle. The procedure had been used before only on cadavers. The headline on a 2005 WORLD Magazine cover featuring Schilling was “Never hide.” That was a quotation from Schilling, who had kept his Christian faith and other views secret earlier in his career, and had resolved not to do that again.

In 2014, when Schilling came under fire for criticizing Darwinian evolution, we reported that he had had “a rough three years—business failure, oral cancer from using smokeless tobacco”—but was staying consistent with his “never hide” beliefs.