Last week, during a game between the Indians Triple-A affiliate Buffalo and the hometown Toledo Mud Hens, Buffalo outfielder Shin-Soo Choo was roundly booed. For his performance? Nope, he was booed and heckled because his name kinda sorta looks like Seung-Hui Cho, the Va Tech student who went on a rampage on April 16.
Choo declined to repeat what the fans were yelling but did say:
Some fans said bad things. It’s pretty close to my name. My name is spelled Choo, and his name is Cho. It upset me when a couple of fans talked like that.
We haven’t really thought about Toledo since… well, never. So we decided to do a little research and came up with this rant by a guy who moved out of Toledo:
The people who reside in Toledo are the most intolerant, inconsiderate, ignorant human beings I’ve ever come aross. They are above and beyond anything I’ve ever experienced, and quite frankly, I don’t know how that’s possible. I have encountered a good deal of slack-jawed bumpkins in my day, but nothing compares to these simpletons. They are the crème de la crème of the idiotic.
Listen up, Toledoans, perhaps it’s not fair for us to paint an entire town of 300,000 based on one man’s account of his experience or because of a bunch of ignorant baseball fans… oh yeah, you xenophobic idiots (go ahead… we’ll wait while you look that up) just booed a man for having something resembling the last name of a mass murderer. Toledo Mud Hens fans, you get the big FU of the week.
Links:
[Sports By Brooks]: MUD HENS FANS NEED TO DROP A VOWEL ONCE IN AWHILE
[Cleveland Plain Dealer]: Choo hears boos for wrong reason
One reply on “You stay classy, Toledo”
Toledo … — Like we used to say as undergrads at Bowling Green State University (and if you know your Ohio history): “Toledo is a part of Ohio that nobody really wanted.”