Pittsburgh Penguins play by play announcer Paul Steigerwald has quite the sick sense of humor.
For those that don't know (which before I got into the research behind this, included myself "The Hobey Baker Award is given annually to the top male NCAA hockey player. Its namesake, Hobey Baker, was a star athlete between 1911-1914 before enlisting in the U.S. Air Force, where he was a pilot during World War I. Tragically, he died in a postwar plane crash in Toul, France in 1918, at age 26." (thanks to Puck Daddy for summing up something I would have spent 3 paragraphs on). What makes that so important? Well, a former Hobey Baker award winner, Mike Mottau, got checked and checked hard in the Pens-Devils game last night, so much so that it was FSN Pitt's "Subway Sandwich of the Game". Well, as going through those highlights, Paul Steigerwald made a very unfortunate joke that I'm sure he will soon be apologizing for.
Pens Analyst Bob Errey: "The Hobey Baker winner went down, real hard. Our Subway sandwich of the game."
Pens PbP Paul Steigerwald: ""Not as hard as Hobey Baker went down, though. He went down in a plane crash."
Not funny. And to top it all off there was muttering and giggling and really a sense of uncomfortableness afterwards. And despite the comment of how "it's nothing to laugh about how [Hobey Baker] left us", they carried on for quite some time, maybe if for no other reason, out of uneasiness.
And as if this story needed another kicker, coincidentally, it was 91 years to the day yesterday that Hobey Baker did die in that plane crash. In other words, Steigerwald made that joke on the 91st anniversary of Hobey Baker's death. Oy ve.
While unlike some people around these parts, I am not in the business of calling for someone's job over one ill-timed, bad, unfortunate, joke (see: Griese, Bob), nor do I think he deserves to be fired over this, however, I do think we should expect and have a right to hear an upcoming on-air apology from Paul Steigerwald for this unfortunate incident.
You Stay Classy, Paul Steigerwald (Puck The Media)
I believe tastelessness is part of the job when announcing for a Pittsburgh team.
ReplyDeletesee Cope,Myron(RIP)
Fire him. Now.
ReplyDeleteYou may want him fired, but the reality of it is we'll be lucky if we get an apology. It's not so much the joke about a guy who died 91 years ago (Steigerwald had no way of knowing it was the anniversary of his death), I just find it rather classless to joke about airplane crashes and people dying in them in general in this day and age.
ReplyDeleteHe'll (likely) apologize and that will be that.