"When you play golf in Palm Springs they say that everything breaks toward Indio — you know, the Mexican neighborhood. Not this time."
/David Feherty on the ouster of George Lopez as host of this week's Bob Hope Classic:
This year's event will be hosted by Arnold Palmer, who may be the most important person ever to play golf. I love everything about Arnold, and I'm not upset at all that he is involved, but I am seriously disturbed at the way George Lopez was treated. After all the effort he put in, he was told in a two-minute phone call that his services were no longer needed. That was it.
Now, maybe they just didn't like George's sense of humor, and that's their right. Of course, Palm Springs is, to say the very least, a Republican refuge, and most of George's cronies are (and I'm looking for a politically correct way to say this, but it's not coming to me) uh... not exactly white, and Democratically inclined. In fact, I might be George's token white friend, I'm not sure. But wasn't Sammy Davis Jr. a friend of Bob's? He used to play, and I think he was both black and Jewish!
I think there's a perception problem here. Most white people in this country have no idea how huge George Lopez is in the Latino community. Just like the Irish, Italians, Jews, Poles, Germans, Scandinavians, and other immigrants of old who started new lives in the New World, Latinos are doing the same, but with less representation and lower self-esteem. These people look up to George Lopez, who at two years old was abandoned by his parents, left to fend for himself, and eventually taken in by his authoritarian grandmother and raised with no love. From almost nothing, George became a huge star, only the third Latino (after Desi Arnaz and Freddie Prinze) to have his own TV show, and he now has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Okay Feherty, you had me until the bit about the star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Where, after all, even John Tesh has a star.
