Restaurant Pushes Back on UConn Star Jordan Hawkins’s Calamari Illness Claim

“It must be the calamari?” Dark said. “How do we know it wasn’t the steak?”

The sports world in general can be an unsavory place, and food items from across the world are constantly being blamed for athletes’ personal hardships.

For instance, the longstanding narrative around Michael Jordan’s “flu game” — Game 5 of the 1998 N.B.A. finals — underwent a culinary revision in 2020, when the former Chicago Bulls star claimed his bout of digestive misery was caused by a suspicious pizza delivered to his room the night before the game.

In 2021, the American runner Shelby Houlihan tested positive for nandrolone, a banned steroid, and placed the blame on an unusual pork burrito she said she ordered from a Mexican food truck.

A different (equally delicious-sounding) pork dish was inculpated in 2010, when Chinese judo champion Tong Wen tested positive for a Clenbuterol, another unauthorized substance, and was stripped of her world title.

“She trained in Europe for a while and was sick of European food,” Tong’s coach Wu Weifeng said at the time, “so we gave her a lot of pork chops when she returned home.”

Food, in this way, is always an easy target. And restaurateurs in particular are used to people jumping to medical conclusions about things they ate.

“They always blame the oyster, they never blame the Crown Royal,” said Jim Gossen, the president of the Gulf Seafood Foundation (and “the city’s dean of seafood,” according to the Houston Chronicle), who has opened several restaurants in his career. “Ain’t that the truth?”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/sports/ncaabasketball/uconn-calamari.html