Controversy spikes over baseball player's racial gaffe

By Kim Tong-hyung

Here’s your midweek update on the stories in entertainment and media you might have missed while wondering whether Park Geun-hye is keeping secrets from people, Obama is stealing secrets from people, or because your life is undoubtedly a lot more fulfilling than ours.

Slugger bashed for racist comments

Kim Tae-kyun

There was a time when people wondered whether Kim Tae-kyun, the beefy Hanwha Eagles slugger with a simple swing and superhuman strength, had a future in Major League Baseball. His bat still might be good enough. But the lack of a filter between his brain and mouth suggests it might be best to keep him away from the United States.

When attempting to compliment the Lotte Giants’ American pitcher Shane Youman, Kim ended up spewing an amazingly brain-dead comment.

Naver Radioball, a popular Internet radio show, recently quizzed the top hitters in Korean professional baseball about the pitchers they find the most difficult to hit. Kim picked Youman, an African-American, before making a disastrous attempt at being funny.

“Kim said Youman was hard to hit because his face was so black and his teeth looks so white. So when the ball is thrown, Kim said it was hard to pick it up because Youman’s teeth and ball visually overlaps,” said one of the podcast’s hosts in the broadcast.

Social media sites exploded several times over. Kim issued a quick apology and claimed his comments were taken out of context. But he wasn’t able to firmly deny that Youman’s skin color was mentioned in his conversation with the podcast hosts.

“I was just trying to say that Youman was a good pitcher because he has deception in his delivery that makes it hard to read at the plate,” Kim said in the statement.

“I have played in Japan and I know how hard it is for a player to adapt to a different culture. I am very close with the foreign players on my team like Denny Bautista.”

It would be easy to demonize Kim and tuck away his brain fart as an isolated incident if Korea as a society wasn’t so racially insensitive.

Racial discrimination continues to be a problem at work, school and home, and so does the country’s lack of anti-discrimination legislation. It was just a couple of years ago when it was perfectly acceptable for comedians to appear on television in blackface a la Al Johnson in “The Jazz Singer.”

Even on the Naver Radioball, the laughing hosts (E-Daily baseball columnist Jeong Cheol-woo and Sports World’s Jeong Se-won) clearly thought Kim’s comments were humorous.

And you wonder why the country is struggling so much in creating a 21st century multiethnic, multicultural society.

The Internet is sick place for kids

The Internet continues to overflow with sad and stupid people. Their recent target was 7-year-old Youn Hoo, son of pop singer Youn Min-soo, who has become a transcendent personality after appearing with his dad on MBC television’s “Dad, Where Are We Going?,” which groups a number of male celebrities and their children together on humorous camping missions.

Some people decided it was acceptable to pour animosity on Youn Hoo just because he was popular. So they made an online community on Naver (www.naver.com), the country’s most popular website, just to spew bile.

Other Internet users found this so disgusting that they made a different Naver community dedicated to loving Youn Hoo.

Then the head of the Youn Hoo hating tribe had a revelation, told a newspaper reporter that he did the wrong thing, and shut down the message boards.

Yes, you probably turned dumber just reading this.

Actor questioned for assaulting wife

Actor Marco

Actor Marco was questioned by police in Seoul after his wife, professional golfer Ahn Shi-hyun, called him in for domestic violence.

The actor was taken to the Seongdong District Police Office and questioned for about five hours on Sunday as Ahn expressed strong willingness to push assault charges against him.

The fight between the two arose when Ahn asked Marco to give her some tissues after their infant daughter urinated on the floor. The actor, who had been preparing to go out for a filming schedule, got angry enough to throw a vacuum cleaner and mobile phone on the floor and Ahn didn’t find this as mannerly. There were two incidents of physical contact between the two, police said.

The couple, who got married in 2011, now say they made up and are trying to downplay the severity of the fight. Ahn doesn’t want Marco to be punished anymore.