Doug Gottlieb: “The LA Times had a commentary column and a guy named Ben Bolch, who covers UCLA sports, talked about the matchup between UCLA and LSU, and in it he labeled LSU as the ‘dirty debutantes’. It’s clever alliteration, but what’s happened since is frankly embarrassing to women’s basketball. Then you have Hailey Van Lith, who’s White, a talented player, the best player for Louisville last year, said this yesterday:
Hailey Van Lith: “We do have a lot of Black women on this team, we do have a lot of people that are from different areas, and unfortunately that bias does exist still today, and a lot of the people that are making those comments are being racist towards my teammates. I'm in a unique situation where I see it with myself -- I'll talk trash and I'll get a different reaction than if Angel talks trash. I have a duty to my teammates to have their back, and obviously some of the words that were used in that article were very sad and upsetting. I actually didn't want us to read the article before the game because hearing stuff like that -- it's not right, and that type of description of us isn't always motivating. Calling us basically the ‘dirty debutantes’, like that has nothing to do with sports and that's not motivating. I wish we hadn't of read that because I think that that can crush your soul a little bit, that someone would ever say that about us that doesn't know us. In my opinion, I know for a fact that people see us differently because we do have a lot of Black women on our team who have an attitude and like to talk trash, and people feel way about it, but at the end of the day, I'm rocking with them because they don't let that change who they are.”
Gottlieb: “In your opinion you're allowed to think that racial connotations came into play, but is that really what we're doing? When somebody screws up the court for the NCAA, automatically it's 'SEXISM!'.
This all started with the San Antonio 'weight room' situation. Remember that? This was during the COVID year. It's embarrassing that nobody else in the media will actually pick up the phone and call somebody. What was the difference? Why was the men's weight room so nice, and the women's weight room not nice? They had a couple mats, a 'Shake Weight', and all those different deals you can buy on TV -- somebody ordered them and put them in a weight room... Well, the men had the Big Ten Tournament in Indy, and then had all the rounds of the Tournament in one place. They were there for a month and the organizing committee put their resources to it. The women had just showed up like the day before, and then had the Final Four. You have the blame the right people. The organizing committee for San Antonio was to blame there. The people to blame for the court was whoever put the court together. NOT the NCAA, NOT 'sexism', NOT 'racism.'
And as for Ben's column, like I don’t know what world you’re looking at, Hailey, BUT THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT YOU! NOT JUST ANGEL REESE! Has Hailey Van Lith ever been called ‘Kevin Durant’ by anybody in the media? Because she pulled a Kevin Durant. She lost to Iowa in the Elite Eight with Louisville, and then she joined LSU the next year as essentially a ‘free agent’. What’s not mentioned in the article and all of these articles is LSU doing the same thing in baseball, in women’s basketball -- they’re just buying up talent. There is nothing illegal about what they are doing, but do I think it’s good practice to recruit off another team when you win a National Championship and you have good enough players to win? No, not really, but I’m not coaching and I’m not Kim Mulkey, who is trying to cement herself in her mind as the greatest women’s coach of all time.
She’s like ‘WE HAVE BLACK WOMEN TALKING TRASH!’... No, you’re not understanding... The reason no one likes is because 1) You go buy up a player from another team after winning a championship – essentially pulled a Kevin Durant. 2) You run your mouths constantly. 3) Your coach is despised. 4) Any time someone is critical of you, you go with the ‘SEXISM!’ or ‘RACISM!’ card. ‘People don’t like our attitudes!’... YOUR OWN COACH SUSPENDED ANGEL REESE THIS YEAR BECAUSE OF HER ATTITUDE. What we are teaching – frankly, women – but what we’re teaching all young people is there is zero accountability, NONE. Hey, what if we just went out and won the game, and then when the buzzer is over we point to the scoreboard, celebrate however you want in your locker room, enjoy it, go to a Final Four, win another National Championship?... But you can’t do that.
Could you avoid the word ‘dirty’ because ‘dirty’ has a super negative connotation? -- Yeah, I get that, that’s reasonable. But to make it about ‘racism’, like c’mon, what are we doing? We gotta stop because what you're doing is your sport is welcoming in lots of people who are just dropping in, 'hey, I want to see this', and you've made yourself the villain -- that's fine, lean into it. You wanna talk trash? That's fine, but here's the thing... If you talk trash, not everybody's going to like it. People won't. There's a way to handle yourself like champions -- you haven't.
The idea that it's 'racist' because people are pointing out how unlikeable you are? YOU ARE NOT LIKEABLE. NO ONE LIKES YOU AND IT'S NOT BECAUSE OF YOUR BASKETBALL, IT'S BECAUSE OF HOW YOU ACT, HOW YOUR COACH ACTS, AND HOW SHE'S TREATED PEOPLE ALONG HER PATH. If you can't accept that, then this is probably not the pool you should be playing in. This is the adult pool, and in the adult pool you have to be accountable for your actions and people are going to be critical of you. If you can't play through that critique, especially when it's valid, then again, the adult pool is not for you. Go swim in the kiddie pool."
Watch Doug Gottlieb of Fox Sports Radio’s The Doug Gottlieb Show call out LSU guard Hailey Van Lith for flaming a fake controversy after she publicly stated that a recent LA Times opinion-editorial labeling the team as ‘dirty debutantes' was ‘racist.’
The article was published before LSU’s Sweet Sixteen game against Colorado, with the columnist calling the matchup ‘good vs. evil', and referring to the Tigers as the ‘villains.’ LSU coach Kim Mulkey called the piece ‘sexist’, and after enough public backlash, the column's author, Ben Bolch, even issued a lengthy apology for the controversial metaphors, with the LA Times removing some of the phrasing altogether.
Check out the segment above as Gottlieb calls the backlash towards the article ‘embarrassing’, laying out the obvious reasons why sports fans would naturally lean towards pulling against this particular LSU team, and blasting Van Lith, a White player, for piling on the forged controversy by carelessly labeling the article’s tone as ‘racist.'
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