Oregon is off to the Sweet 16 as the lone double-digit seed remaining after dispatching 13-seed UC Irvine in the Round of 32 in a 73-54 drubbing on Sunday night.
For a brief moment in the second half, the Ducks looked to be in trouble after they were held scoreless for the first six and a half minutes and the Anteaters pulled ahead. However, Payton Pritchard, Louis King, and the rest came alive once again and pulled away for a comfortable win to send Oregon to a Sweet 16 matchup with Virginia.
There wasn’t a ton newsworthy from the game, given the nature of the final score, but during UC Irvine coach Russ Turner’s press conference he admitted to trash talking King in an effort to throw him off his game. Beyond the fact that it seems a bit bizarre for a coach to join in trash talking a player on the court, Turner’s attempt to get in King’s head was to call him “Louis Queen,” as he somewhat proudly detailed after the game.
Here is the video of UC Irvine head coach Russ Turner explaining his reasoning for calling Oregon freshman Louis King "Louis Queen" during the game. pic.twitter.com/2xGnCsYyWa
— Matt Prehm (@MattPrehm) March 25, 2019
Turner seems far to eager too share this information, not quite understanding why it’s a bad look for him, both in trash talking a player and using lazy misogyny to accomplish his goal. He insists he was doing it “out of respect” for King, noting how important he is to their team as a player.
However, one would hope we’d be beyond trying to get in someone’s head by insinuating he’s a woman instead of a man. It’s not clever or funny, but instead it’s just lazy and bad and Turner has rightfully been getting blasted for it on social media. If he addresses it, he’ll likely apologize and insist he meant no wrong, but the real hope is that he and others in male athletics can stop using calling someone a woman in a derogatory way.
