Voice of His Past Haunts Hamilton

It is Wednesday afternoon at XTRA 690, “Sports Nite” is on the air and Lee “Hacksaw” Hamilton ( wants . . . to . . . talk . . . sports . . . with . . . you.

Topic on the table: Minnesota Viking football.

Specifically, the controversy surrounding the resignation of a prominent media figure assigned to cover the Vikings this season.

Specifically, the recently hired play-by-play radio broadcaster for the Vikings.

Specifically, Lee “Hacksaw” Hamilton.

All the phone lines are lit, and Hamilton is in front of an open microphone, insisting he is not a racist.

“I’m terribly bothered by the way I’ve been portrayed around the country, on the Internet tonight,” Hamilton tells his listeners. “I can’t do anything about it except tell you who I am, what I stand for and that I stand by the 15 years I’ve been on this radio station . . .

“I’m not angry at anybody, I’m just hurt and I’m very disappointed. But life’s going to go on. That’s why I was on at 4 o’clock today. I was not going to walk away from this. I’m a stand-up guy and I’m an honest-to-goodness good person.”

Sandwiched between phone calls about the proposed Eric Lindros trade and what’s wrong with the Cowboys, this is serious talk radio: Hamilton, a San Diego sports talk-show host for 15 years and an NFL broadcaster for 13, resigned his position as Vikings’ play-by-play man after coming under fire for racially insensitive comments made during his XTRA tenure.

Reacting to a column written by Larry Fitzgerald of the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, the NAACP looked into Hamilton’s history at XTRA and, according to newspaper reports, pressured the Vikings to fire him. After a Tuesday night meeting between Twin Cities NAACP members and Viking officials, Hamilton decided to tender his resignation with the radio station that carries the Viking games, KFAN.

“I felt uncomfortable with this whole situation from the second week in,” Hamilton tells a caller. “I just didn’t understand it and I didn’t know where it was going to go. But the people who wanted me out, fairly or unfairly, got their way, because I’m just not going to stand in any more crossfire. It’s not fair to me and it’s not fair to my kids.”

Hamilton assures his audience that he’s going to be fine.

So will the Vikings, he says, shifting instantly back into standard Hacksaw mode, “if they can patch the offensive front and stay healthy. Because they have no margin for injuries.”

The record is out there. It has been chronicled by local newspapers for years, but only gained the attention of Twin Cities media when it was announced that Hamilton, who broadcast the Chargers for 11 years and the Seattle Seahawks for two, would be joining the Vikings’ radio team.

The excerpts have been lifted from Hamilton’s five-nights-a-week XTRA talk show. They include Hamilton:

* Calling pitcher Hideki Irabu a “fat Jap.”

* Dismissively assessing a network football analyst, saying that the commentator kept his job “probably because he’s African American.”

* Suggesting that troubled football player Lawrence Phillips be “lynched” and “strung up” for his off-the-field misconduct.

* Explaining why XTRA had no African American hosts thusly: “I think it’s real hard to find an African American who can come in and do sports talk across the board and be able to talk about a lot of different things. I’ve tried very hard to hand-deliver blacks, and when they come into the process, they can talk basketball, but they can’t talk NHL or they don’t want to talk baseball or they’re not interested in a wider variety of things.

“I don’t think it’s a racial thing; it’s an experience thing . . . Just because you’re black doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed a major-market job. If you’re black and you want to go to Pocatello and start and work like a bunch of us did, then maybe you deserve to get into a major market.”

Fitzgerald is black, and works in sports radio. Along with his work for the Spokesman-Recorder, he co-hosts Viking Coach Dennis Green’s Twin Cities talk show.

He says he began looking into Hamilton’s background after the Spokesman-Recorder received a letter critical of Hamilton’s XTRA talk show. He says he talked with people familiar with Hamilton’s show and after hearing tapes of some of Hamilton’s remarks, he decided to “just [write] about what he said. The NAACP picked up on it and they dealt with it with the Vikings.”

Hamilton believes he has been “victimized” and “smeared.”

“I’ve been killed by a black reporter that has an agenda,” he said during an off-the-air interview Wednesday. “The Vikings got caught in the middle of it and I got caught in the middle of it, and there really wasn’t any way out.”

Hamilton said Fitzgerald “got some information that’s three, five and seven years old and he went to [the NAACP] and he raised a huge ruckus. He wrote a column in this black weekly shopper. He called me a racist--right out of the gate--and I have no way to defend myself. He refused to return any of my phone calls.

“The NAACP conducted a six-week investigation and refused to talk to me. They did not want to hear anything I had to say about the context of the statements or apologies [made] or whether this was recent or long ago.”

Fitzgerald, who described the Spokesman-Recorder as “a state newspaper that’s been around for 67 years,” says he did not return Hamilton’s phone calls because, “What do I need to talk to him about? I didn’t hire him.”

Fitzgerald said Hamilton “put himself in this position. He may have been able to do what he has done as a talk-show host for all these years. But when you go into the NFL and you refer to people the way he did with Hideki Irabu and generalize that blacks aren’t smart enough to be good talk-show hosts and some other things he said, you put yourself out there in a position where you’re dealing with a league where 80% of the players are African American.

“And the Minnesota Vikings are probably the flagship franchise in the history of sports in terms of African Americans. Two [club] vice presidents are black, the head coach is black, both coordinators are black, the quarterback is black.

“Did he really think he could just come into Minneapolis with that type of history and nobody would check it out?”

Fitzgerald agreed with Hamilton’s decision to resign.

“I thought it was the smart thing to do, if he wants to continue to do talk radio,” he said. “Apparently the audience he reaches enjoys what he says and that’s great. But this is Minneapolis-St. Paul.”

In San Diego, Hamilton was telling his listeners Wednesday that he didn’t see the difference.