Imus Versus Imus.('The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything')(Book review)

Last month, on the eve of the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, Bloomsbury published a novelty called "The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything." In the estimation of the book's editors--Richard Sandomir, a sports-media reporter at the Times, and Mark Reiter, a literary agent--bracketology is a peerless tool for adjudication. Basically, you set up a bracket, or knockout draw, as in a tennis or basketball tournament. Graphically, it looks like a tree lying on its side. Through a series of binary pairings (or, to sports fans, head-to-head matchups), you narrow down thirty-two contestants to sixteen, then eight, then four, then two, until a winner emerges. This can work across a range of subjects, as long as there are value judgments to be made. Instead of Kentucky versus Ohio State, you get Miller versus Pabst. Sandomir and Reiter collected a hundred and one imaginary draws, to determine the best entrants in such categories as Elmore Leonard Novels, Golf Swing Thoughts, Bald Guys, and Latin Grammar. (The winners were, respectively, "Killshot," "Focus on your target and ball flight," Gandhi, and the ablative absolute.)

One bracket that didn't make it into the book was Good Imus, Evil Imus. Sandomir had drawn that one up in the hope of tempting Don Imus, the talk-radio host and effective promoter of books, to plug "The Enlightened Bracketologist" on his program. In the end, Reiter and Sandomir, loath to pander, decided to leave it out. But last week, in the midst of a controversy over the most extreme--or certainly most consequential--manifestation to date of Evil Imus, a copy of this bracketological outtake found its way here, and provided a useful prism through which to regard the spectacle of Imus's immolation.

Over the years, Imus and, especially, his sidekicks regularly trafficked in minstrelsy, anti-gay patter, and ethnic stereotyping, of degrees ranging from the mild to the execrable. He or his minions have compared Patrick Ewing to an ape, said that pictures of Venus and Serena Williams belong in National Geographic rather than in Playboy, and are reported to have said of Gwen Ifill, then a Times reporter, "Isn't the Times wonderful? It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House." More broadly, they have regularly deployed an array of slurs (Jewboy, towelhead) and a cast of crude voice caricatures (Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as Jose Jimenez, Cardinal Egan as an Irish bigot) that, at best, skirted the line. But finally, two weeks ago, Imus crossed it, or at least got called out for doing so. In a discussion of the Rutgers University women's basketball team, after its appearance in the N.C.A.A. finals, Imus remarked that the players, most of them black, were "rough girls." "Some hard-core ho's," his sidekick and producer (and designated line-crosser) Bernard McGuirk replied. Imus added, inexcusably, "That's some nappy-headed ho's there."

Media Matters for America, a watchdog group, put the offending clip and transcript on its Web site, and in the next couple of days a fury took hold. Imus, initially dismissive, hit the apology circuit, but his grovelling, which managed to seem both grudging and sincere, failed to keep his advertisers and regular guests from abandoning him. (Snoop Dogg, carefully parsing the application of "ho," distanced himself and his rapper peers from the I-man. "We are not talking about no ...