Steve Elkington, American Tour player, was suspended by the Tour for competition for two weeks and fined $10,000 for a homophobic tweet about gay American rugby player Michael Sam. The sanction was imposed last year (the tweet was written in February 2014), but has now been revealed in an interview Elkington has given to Golf Magazine.
The 52-year-old Australian golfer’s controversial tweet read, “ESPN reports that Michael Sam is leading the purse throw at the NFL Combine…. No one else is expected to throw today.”
“Everyone wants to mess with me on Twitter, but they don’t want to mess with other people,” Elkington told Golf Magazine.
“I’m not saying I’m not responsible for my tweets, but a lot of people are tired of all that political correctness,” added the Australian golfer, who has won ten American Tour tournaments, including one major, the 1995 PGA Championship, in which he beat Colin Montgomerie in a playoff.
Elkington explained that with his tweet he tried to highlight that ESPN was repeating ad nauseam the fact that Sam was a gay player. “They kept referring to him as the gay athlete. The gay, the gay, the gay, the gay,” the golfer said.
Despite the negative comments, it does not appear that Elkington had learned his lesson, as he stirred up controversy again in April by writing about transgender Olympian Caitlyn Jenner.
Leave a Reply