A Heartfelt Apology To Shaun Latham
If you missed this, you might wonder what I did that upset Shaun so. You might think that I referred to the first time I met Shaun–when I walked into the Barstool Heartland office and tried to help him escape because I thought Pat was experimenting on him. Or perhaps you thought I made reference to how Shaun looks like all the toys that Sid worked on, if you melted them together and told them to drink spiked egg nog for 25 years. Or perhaps you thought Shaun was reacting to me asking the Blogs for Dogs workers “what breed is that one?” while pointing at him.
You might, indeed, think that.
If you saw his rant this morning, you might have thought I tipped his fury by mentioning how he met his girlfriend on the dating app Last Chance U. You could easily assume that his anger was a result of me quipping about his choice to skateboard to work as a 40-year-old man. Or perhaps you thought Shaun was enraged due to comments I made about his comedic choice to refer to women as “hunnies,” like some divorced dad who rarely sees his son, trying to connect with him by speaking his way, and missing the mark by such a wide margin that his son files a court order ending his father’s visitation rights.
You might have assumed any of those things.
You might be under the impression that Shaun Latham went completely insane this morning when he discovered the office pool handicapping him as the -4000 favorite for “next #MeToo.” Or maybe you hypothesized that Shaun’s vitriol stemmed from me offering him tissues every hour, on the hour, when he returns from the bathroom with those nasty June sniffles. Then again, you might have surmised that Shaun was pissed when I suggested he start freezing his sperm because his biological clock is running out. And that when he went to the sperm bank, upon finding no child pornography available and completely turned off by adult, legal pornography, he was faced with the terrible reality that his bloodline will die when he dies. Next week. When his skateboard hits a pothole he would have avoided had he been able to corral that tax-payer’s-dollar-unemployment-collecting, my-600-pound-life eye of his.
If you thought that’s how it went, you’d be wrong.
Taking a page from Dave’s playbook, I’ll be the first to apologize when I say something that offends someone on a personal level. Clearly, my words cut Shaun deep. Here’s what I said:
“If [Dave’s] message was simply that we need a wakeup call here, everybody needs to work harder, people need to realize this job should not be taken for granted, I think that’s a very fair point. But the problem is, if he’s starting to threaten people’s jobs and say ‘you’re lucky to have a job here, we need to start trimming the fat,’ people have been saying that for a while. And I hate to say this, but I think there are a lot of people who could use that wakeup call. And I don’t know that the people who didn’t dress up for the Dunkin awards are necessarily the people who really needed that wakeup call. Look who it was: it was KB No Swag, a phenomenal writer. He just got here but I think he’s one of our best writers. It was the lights camera Barstool guys, I think those guys do a great job…”
Who, exactly, am I throwing under the bus here? Some vague allusion to “a lot of people who could use that wakeup call.” Who is that? Who would take that… personally?
The only people who would take offense at such a broad, non-under-bus-throwing generalization are the people who identify in that category. If someone started generalizing about people who wear tons of sunscreen, I might get offended because that’s me. Today, when I generalized about people who need to work harder without naming a single name, Shaun got offended. A + B = C.
And so, I apologize to Shaun, whom I hold in the highest regard. I never meant to offend him personally. I like to think we’re above that here at Barstool.