Being thrown on national television at the tender age of 29 and with little prep must be a harrowing experience. That’s where ESPN’s Sergio Dipp found himself on Monday night, when the network cut to a sideline report by the 29-year-old Mexican reporter during the first quarter of the Monday Night Football game between the Denver Broncos and the Los Angeles Chargers. And, well, it didn’t go that well for him.
To say that he didn’t particularly crush it is an understatement, but that’s not the point here. Sideline reports are almost never that informative or entertaining; they are relics from a bygone era, where fans couldn’t find out about injury news with one look at Twitter. Dipp might not have been up to the standards of the network–to the dismay of his newfound legion of fans, ESPN did not let him deliver another report the rest of the game–but he gave us more entertainment than a late night West Coast slugfest ever could.
Of course, being that this is 2017 and everything is the worst, people immediately took to social media to rip on poor Sergio. A lot of the comments were at least good-natured, or as good-natured as Twitter trolling can be:
Even Mexican national team star and West Ham striker Javier “Chicharito” Hernández took to social media to show his support for Dipp:
Some of the Tweets, however, went exactly as you’d expect when a non-American reporter–Dipp was born in Mexicali, and moved to Monterrey in 2006–flubs some filler lines. Yes, the traditional “learn English” crowd was in full effect:
For his part, Dipp took to his Twitter during the game to deliver two quick acknowledgements of his unexpected viral star status:
(Note the first reply to the Google screenshot, which goes full-bore on the “learn English” sentiment.)
Those follow-up replies by themselves would be a great way to tweet through the roast, but the real gem came early Tuesday morning, where Dipp posted a heartfelt clip about being proud to work for ESPN, all while remembering 9/11.
In the 2-minute clip, he shows more of the same “happy to be here” emotion that made the initial sideline clip such a fascinating 30 seconds. He touches on being a minority in a country of immigrants, and reiterates that he wanted to show respect to head coaches Vance Joseph and Anthony Lynn.
If you give us the choice between sterile, irrelevant sideline reports and a moment of real human excitement and emotion like Dipp’s, we’re going to take the latter every single time. At the end of the day, ESPN’s Bomani Jones hit the nail on the head with his pro-Dipp tweet:
Never apologize, Sergio. Keep on keeping on.