The photo was taken in April of 2017, and those who follow the Dodgers and the club’s telecasts on Spectrum SportsNet LA understood it was all in fun: Kiké Hernandez, all 5-foot-10 of him, standing on a bucket to conduct a postgame interview with Kelli Tennant, 6-2 and wearing heels, the continuation of a long-running gag.
And then, almost 15 months later, someone who didn’t know the context or didn’t care decided to weigh in on Twitter:
Siri: show me fragile masculinity pic.twitter.com/XVtCDKSW5D
— Nun Ya (@Ishfery) July 8, 2018
Yes, the tweet went viral, and you can imagine the back-and-forth.
“I had a lot of responses to that emotionally,” Tennant says now. “I think the world of Kiké. He is such an incredible human. … There is no toxic masculinity in any fiber of his being.
“I spoke to him and Mariana, his fiance, over and over, over a period of a couple of weeks because it turned from something that seemed kind of funny into a very, very negative post. And I started posting on his behalf, in defense of him, because I was not OK with the way people were treating him, speaking about him. And I ended up starting to get attacked saying that I was not supportive of women because I allowed him to do that, which if you know anything about me you know that that’s the exact opposite.
“The thing that I tried to really help people understand is that this was a long-standing, over two-year joke between us that happened in the clubhouse. And many other players did it as well. It wasn’t just Kiké. Chase Utley used to jump on a couch and say ‘I’m ready,’ and I thought it was so funny. None of them are ever degrading or said, ‘Oh, don’t wear your heels. What’s wrong with you?’ It was always, they treated me like their sister. Everything was in jest. And I appreciated that.
“And I am really tall. I’m 6-4 in heels. I know that. So if someone wants to make fun of me, I actually think it’s hilarious. I know what I’m doing. I’m aware. And it’s an inside joke that was taken out of context and unfortunately that’s the world of social media. And I’m just so sorry that he had to bear the brunt of that because he didn’t deserve it.”
Tennant dropped away from social media for a period earlier in the year. Was she tempted to say, ‘I’m out’ again after that?
“No, no,” she said. “You know, it’s actually good because I realized that I can’t worry about what people think of me or what they say because at the end of the day everyone’s going to have an opinion and most of these people don’t know me. They don’t know Kiké. And so you have to take everything with a grain of salt.
“And if there was any validity to it then maybe I would have taken an internal look at myself and said, ‘Oh, maybe I shouldn’t do that.’ But there wasn’t any. And you have to be able to have fun. We can’t be so sensitive that we can’t have fun and pull jokes like that (or) what’s the point? You know, life is too short.”
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