" --Dan Le Batard, Miami Herald, May 7, 1997 SORRY WE HAD to expose you to this tasteless and offensive remark, but to let it go without comment would only let the writer, who obviously isn't held accountable for turning his column into a waste disposal plant, off the hook. On Tuesday, Le Batard filed a column to the Herald, which the Daily News received as part of a columnist exchange for the Knicks-Heat series. The column obviously was designed to show he has no use for New York or Knicks fans. Le Batard's warped reference to Ewing was placed near the end of the column. It didn't get in yesterday's Daily News because assistant sports editor Roxanne Jones knows racial stereotypes have no place in a newspaper or anywhere else. Jones edited the lines out of the column. The editors at the Miami Herald didn't exercise the same judgment and served Le Bartard's slur up for breakfast on the beach. The Knight-Ridder wire service Knight-Ridder owns the Herald also sent the column out, including the Ewing line, across the country. How soon people forget. As the words were transmitted from Le Batard's alleged brain into his computer, did he suddenly forget about the loose lips of Heat announcer David Halberstam? Did the writer forget about John Calipari or Al Campanis? What about Fuzzy Zoeller? While all their remarks were offensive, they were uttered spontaneously. With the exception of Calipari's angry words to Newark Star Ledger reporter Dan Garcia, all the others were made into a TV or radio microphone. Le Batard's line wasn't presented on the fly under deadline conditions of a game. He had time to sit down at his computer and think about what he wrote. This was a well thought out, premeditated written assault on Ewing. And if Le Batard thinks his Muresan addendum gets him off the hook, he's sadly mistaken. For Le Batard to make fun of a guy who had a pituitary condition shows that nothing will get in the way of his lame jokes. Earlier in the column, Le Batard came dangerously close to playing the ethnic card when he painted a word picture of a Knicks' fan with "grease in his hair" who starts "all sentences with the words, 'Yo Vinny.