You can watch above as the world’s No.1 golfer is referred to as a “Leprechaun” by a Fox News anchor during the seminal show Outnumbered. The vitriol comes after Rory McIlroy announced on Instagram that he’s likely to miss the British Open due to an injury he received while playing soccer. He had been due to defend his trophy at the event which takes place on July 12 at St. Andrews.
The joke happens as the show is handed back from Happening Now co-host Jenna Lee to Outnumbered co-host Andrea Tantaros. It’s unclear who exactly says it, but whoever did. did so because leprechauns are supposedly Irish and Rory McIlroy is Irish. Do you get it? Perhaps, the anchor/host also made the reference because it’s the type of lazy stereotype that’s commonplace on Fox News. The Irish are not regularly a target of these jibes thanks to the ancestors of the network’s heavyweight hosts, Bill O’Reilly, Megyn Kelly and Sean Hannity. So perhaps the diatribe is borne out of an internal Fox News struggle that all the Irish hosts are getting the prime time slots while others are left to thread the boards of daytime TV anonymity?
UPDATE:
Fox News reached out to Heavy about the comments. On the July 8 episode of Outnumbered, show co-host Kennedy said she made the comments and that she should have said something worse. Her full monologue:
Yesterday at this time I used the word leprechaun to describe golfer Rory McIlroy. I love sports, I love golf, but I am not a fan of Rory’s. Mostly for the way he treated tennis great Caroline Wozniacki and discarded her like a piece of chewed gum when he broke her heart and broke off their engagement in a short phone conversation. That’s worse than breaking up on a Post-it. Now to be clear, neither Harris nor Jenna Lee used the term and I don’t want them to get the credit for it. I called Rory McIlroy a leprechaun and believe me I wanted to call him much worse. As you know, some of my best friends are leprechauns and they also have tremendous sense of humor. Thank you.