Freddie Gray White Sox Joke on Twitter Inspires Anger, Disgust

By DENNIS ROBAUGH

The Chicago White Sox played the Baltimore Orioles Friday night in Camden Yards. The Sox lost. And onetime Chicago radio and TV personality, self-described "smart aleck" and self-proclaimed legend Bruce Wolf engaged in a bit of punny social commentary on Twitter.

Freddie Gray is the 25-year-old Baltimore man with a record of minor drug and petty theft crimes who died in police custody one year ago. He went into a coma in a police van after suffering a spinal cord injury. His death sparked riots in Baltimore, was later ruled a homicide and now six police officers are on trial.

Friday was the one-year anniversary of the eerie night game the White Sox and Orioles played to an empty stadium because of the citywide curfew in effect to stem the violence.

And who's Bruce Wolf, you ask?

He's been on the air in Chicago one way or another since the 1980s, talking about sports and politics, on WLS-AM, WFLD-TV and WMAQ-TV. He's also a part-time divorce lawyer. He likes to push buttons. In the past, the 62-year-old North Shore native's talk of racial matters has blown up in his face.

Wolf's Friday tweet blew up Twitter, as Twitter is wont to do:

And Saturday, Wolf replied (taking special aim at Chicago media writer Robert Feder, who's busted on Bruce Wolf's trenchant commentary and career several times):

Wolf says he's just misunderstood.

Don't we all just want to be loved? Using a horrible death and a city's pain probably isn't the best way to show this. Neither would using a baseball game or a bad pun be the way to remind people about "what happened."

What point do you think Wolf was trying to make?