An ABC commentator has refused to apologise for using the word 'darkie' on air. It was a reference to 'Gone with the Wind'. Photo / AP
A clumsily recalled line from Gone With the Wind has cost a veteran rugby league commentator his job, after Warren Ryan refused to apologise for using the word "darkie" on air.
The ABC suspended Ryan, a former player and coach, and his fellow commentator, David Morrow, after Ryan made the
comment during an NRL match a fortnight ago between the Roosters and Bulldogs.
Morrow - who was suspended himself last year for joking that it was difficult to see people in Darwin without the lights on - could be heard laughing at his colleague's remark. The ABC is investigating the incident, but Ryan told Fairfax Media he had resigned "to save them the trouble of conducting it".
During a stand-off between a referee and a player towards the end of the match, Ryan recalled "a line in a movie where the old darkie says, someone says, 'Quittin' time.' He said, 'It's not quittin' time, I say quittin' time.' Then he yells out, 'Quittin' time!'"
The 73-year-old was referring to the 1939 movie set in the Civil War-era American South, and an exchange of dialogue on the Tara cotton plantation between a worker and a foreman (both black, neither elderly).
