On Monday afternoon, a few moments before he sent the tweet he will regret the rest of his life, Charlotte Hornets radio announcer John Focke was sitting at his kitchen table and half-watching the Utah-Denver playoff game.
He wasn't yet the radio guy who accidentally used the N-word on Twitter. He was just an obscure NBA play-by-play guy working on an offseason podcast.
But then Focke pulled out his phone and made two errors in rapid succession.
Two keystrokes, Focke said in our interview Tuesday. That's all it took to change what would have been a forgettable tweet into one he calls a "horrible mistake."
Those two keystrokes got Focke suspended indefinitely by the Hornets on Tuesday and have put his job in jeopardy.
Focke said he meant to write: "Shot making in this Jazz-Nuggets game is awesome! Murray and Mitchell going back and forth what a game!"
Instead, he wrote exactly that _ except instead of the word "Nuggets," he typed the plural form of the N-word.
Focke was using an iPhone to send this tweet. Look down at your own screen. The "u" is next to the "i." The "t" is next to the "r." The other five letters of those two words are the same.
That doesn't excuse Focke's mistake. Far from it. Focke screwed up badly and knows it. Beyond his suspension, the Hornets wouldn't comment. He understands he deserves that, and that more may be coming. But Focke does want to explain himself.
"I was trying to get it done as fast as I could," Focke said of the tweet in our Tuesday interview, "so that it was relevant by the time I posted it. I tried to type it and obviously I mistyped the word 'Nuggets.' And I did not reread it _ which, as you know, that's rule No. 1 of working in the media. And unfortunately, I didn't, because I was trying to get it up as fast as possible. And I hit 'Send.' "
There are a lot of cautionary social-media tales that include those four words: "And I hit 'Send.' "
Focke's quickly became one of them.
