Former WWE Announcer Todd Grisham Told Ichiro Suzuki To “Learn English”

You may or may not remember Todd Grisham from his time in WWE, he was a fairly vanilla announcer in the mid-2000’s who did work on commercial bumpers, backstage interviews, B-shows, and at one point, ECW, before leaving to pursue a position with ESPN, working on SportsCenter. Well, it looks like Grisham’s ESPN career may not end up going as well as fellow WWE alumni Jonathon Coachman, after Grisham took to Twitter this week to say a particularly stupid thing for someone who hosts ESPN’s flagship show.

http://deadspin.com/espn-dipshit-to-english-speaking-ichiro-speak-english-1784977923 Source: Deadspin.com

He deleted this Tweet, obviously, as well as several others where he tried to defend his mistake (which included liberal use of the word “idiot” in reference to his detractors). And it is a massive mistake, because by all accounts, Ichiro, who just got his 3,000 MLB hit the other night and is a bonafide baseball legend, apparently does speak excellent English, but chooses to use an interpreter for things like press conferences so that he won’t be misinterpreted by attempting to use his second language instead of his native one.

For his part, Grisham did apologize afterwards. Well, kind of.

And BTW, yes Ichiro apparently speaks "fluent" English as I have been bombarded with. My apologies. Have only seen him w/an interpreter

— Todd Grisham (@Grishamfight) August 8, 2016

So, you know, he didn’t actually apologize for trying to call out Ichiro for something that was totally untrue, and instead gave a ridiculous non-apology where he tried to justify his stupid comment, which only happened because he was too lazy to take five seconds and fact check his “hot take” before sending it out on social media for the world to see. We’d imagine that ESPN might be more than a little upset with Grisham at this point.