ESPN Anchor Criticizes Ichiro Suzuki For Never Learning English And Whoops, He Speaks Fluent English
I’m not gonna kill this guy too bad, because I know I will inevitably tweet something incredibly stupid some day and have this blog thrown back in my face, but come on, man.
My point isn’t even that Ichiro being able to speak fluent English is common knowledge, because it’s definitely not. In fact, I think that way more people were under the impression that he couldn’t speak English at all, rather than the other end of the spectrum. But if you’re gonna be the guy who jumps into a flurry of positive tweets with a negative take about a player who just accomplished an incredible milestone, and said player doesn’t have an ounce of dirt on him, at LEAST do some research about the angle you’re gonna go with.
Oh, Ichiro just reached 3,000 hits, even though he started his major league career at the age of 27? That’s so impressive that I’m gonna fuckin’ tweet about how he can’t even speak English! That’ll show HIM to have an excellent major league career and not learn the language of the country at the same time, all while having a sparkling reputation, that piece of shit! Obviously, after the entire internet corrected him, he backtracked and corrected himself.
His defense, of course, was that he had never seen or heard Ichiro speak English, who more often than not uses an interpreter anyway. A quick little “Does Ichiro speak English?” Google search would’ve turned up that, yes, he does speak English, although not well enough to do so without an interpreter by his side, and he also learned how to speak Spanish just so that he could talk shit to his Spanish-speaking teammates. He’s awesome like that. I only knew that he spoke a little bit of English because of this legendary interview with Bob Costas.
PS – You can read a little bit more about Ichiro reaching 3,000 hits by clicking here.