(LifeSiteNews) — ESPN’s Chris Fowler has come under fire for belittling the persecution Novak Djokovic endured for resisting the experimental COVID-19 vaccine moments after the Serbian star won the Australian Open this past weekend.
“Chris Fowler is a corporatist shill and, unfortunately in that regard, he very much fits the ESPN mold because ESPN is all about the woke narrative, all about supporting their advertisers — including Big Pharma — rather than really covering sports,” conservative commentator Steve Cortes said on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast Wednesday.
Fowler should be an instantly recognizable name to those who regularly watch ESPN. A veteran play-by-play announcer who partners with Kirk Herbstreit to call the nation’s top college football games, Fowler has, for over a decade, also acted as the lead anchor for the liberal network’s coverage of the most prominent tennis tournaments on the planet — the US Open, Wimbledon, the French Open, and the Australian Open.
Mere minutes after Djokovic’s 6-3, 7-6, 7-6 victory over Greece’s Stefanos Tsitsipas Sunday, Fowler’s co-anchor, former World No. 1 tennis player John McEnroe, took a sympathetic approach to Djokovic’s climb back to the top of the tennis world. Fowler seemed to resent his comments.
John McEnroe and Chris Fowler got into an argument about the covid shot live on @espn as Novak Djokovic celebrated his Australian Open win. McEnroe argued Novak should have been able to play, Fowler seemed to take the other side. pic.twitter.com/bPikdGJSOj
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) January 30, 2023
“He gets deported out of Australia. Doesn’t get any points at Wimbledon,” McEnroe began. “Can’t play the [U.S.] Open.”
“A product of his choices, to be fair,” Fowler interjected. “He made choices that led to that for some of those things.”
“I think he should have been permitted to play,” McEnroe continued.
RELATED: Novak Djokovic wins Australian Open one year after he was deported for being unvaxxed
In 2022, McEnroe defended Djokovic’s decision to not receive the shot despite being vaccinated himself.
“OK, well, that’s a debate” an unrelenting Fowler pressed on. “He did make choices that led to that … But that’s forgot for the moment.”
Over the past two years, Djokovic has faced immense criticism from the sports and political worlds for refusing to bow to draconian COVID jab mandates. As a result, his Australian visa was canceled, and he was banned from playing in the 2022 US Open, among other tournaments. A LifeSite petition expressing support for Djokovic garnered over 110,000 signatures at the time.
Djokovic’s win Sunday, which he called the “biggest victory of my life,” has been heralded by conservatives as a symbolic victory over COVID tyranny.
In a column for LifeSiteNews, Austrian journalist Andreas Wailzer wrote, “The unvaccinated won. Perseverance won. After months and months of persecution around the world, the globalist tyrants had to retreat and leave alone the dissidents who refused to be injected, at least for the time being.”
RELATED: Djokovic’s Australian Open win is a symbolic victory of the unvaccinated over COVID tyranny
“What made Djokovic’s win even more epic,” he continued, “was the fact that arch-globalist and vaccine propagandist Bill Gates was in the stands, watching the unvaccinated tennis star win the prestigious tournament for the tenth time. Only a few days prior, Gates admitted that the COVID shots failed and were basically useless.”
“I’m super blessed and grateful…”@DjokerNole paid tribute to the team behind his phenomenal success on the eve of another Grand Slam final. #AusOpen • #AO2023 pic.twitter.com/lBy5XZh8pK
— #AusOpen (@AustralianOpen) January 27, 2023
Djokovic, a devout Christian, is currently ranked as the world’s top tennis player. Aside from some lower-tier tournaments that he’s scheduld to play in this spring, he’ll vie for title number 23 at the French Open in Paris from May 28-June 11. Given Joe Biden’s decision to lift all COVID regulations on May 11, Djokovic is also expected to compete in the 2023 US Open this September.