In some attempts to be humorous and even complementary, people in the public light can make some fairly silly mistakes. I’m not saying that Sean Elliott’s quote about Tony Parker is the worst thing ever, but he probably won’t be welcome in Paris anytime soon.
Sean Elliott, who once returned to basketball after a kidney transplant, was giving Tony Parker a compliment on toughness but put his foot in his mouth when he tossed the French contingent under the proverbial bus for being weak.
According to the Express News:
“Everything that they’ve said about French people doesn’t apply to him,” said Elliott, a former Spurs star who helped the team win its first NBA title in 1999. “It just doesn’t apply. He’s as tough as they come. And I promise you, if he was in a bigger market, they would be comparing him to a guy like (former NBA star) AI (Allen Iverson), who took the hits and fell all the time.”
We respect what you were trying to get at Sean, but you have to do it next time without slamming an entire country.