CARY, N.C. -

The National Independent Automobile Dealers Association (NIADA) offered a rebuttal when an ESPN personality chose a negative dealer stereotype to describe one of his former NFL coaches who resigned amid a scandal involving derogatory comments made about league officials and other executives connected with professional football.

It all started a little less than a week ago when Las Vegas Raiders coach John Gruden left his position in controversy after it surfaced that he sent numerous emails containing vulgar comments connected to race and sexual orientation. One of his former players and now ESPN personality Keyshawn Johnson described Gruden as “nothing but a used-car salesman.”

As you can imagine, NIADA did not take kindly to those comments and made this post on its LinkedIn account.

“Mr. Johnson’s characterization of the ethical and hard-working men and women of the used auto industry, and ESPN’s promotion of that negative stereotype, is irresponsible, inaccurate and inexcusable. The National Independent Automobile Dealers Association (NIADA), and its members, wish to inform Mr. Johnson and ESPN that negative stereotypes are harmful. NIADA condemns these statements. NIADA members conduct business with integrity and by a strict code of ethics,” the association said in that social media post.

This incident prompted a recollection of a successful buy-here, pay-here dealer who eloquently described the positive impact operators can make. It happened in the spring of 2014 when Julian Codding was inducted into the Buy-Here, Pay-Here Hall of Fame by NABD. Codding addressed convention attendees after receiving the honor, recapping how he managed franchised dealerships that sold high-line luxury models before moving into BHPH.

Codding said, “For us (as BHPH dealers), we’ve done a whole lot of good.

“This is a world of human beings. Not everyone is rich. Not everyone is in your neighborhood or mine, or gotten good grades, or gotten lucky and married a nice girl,” he continued.

“We’ve got a lot of customers, millions and millions of people who we are helping with the quality of their life,” Codding went on to say. “I never sold a new Cadillac, Porsche or Maserati to anyone who really needed it. But our customers, millions of them, we have helped them in their lives. We’ve given them a way to get to work to make a paycheck, to have dignity, to take their kids to the doctor, to take their family to church.”

Codding continued his testimony by pointing out that just because the financial situations might be different doesn’t mean that BHPH operators aren’t working with the same kinds of customers that high-end luxury franchised dealers might.

“There’s a few people out there who are not very nice, and they’ve ripped us of and things like that,” Codding said. “But as my grandmother used to say, ‘The worst beer joint and the richest country club each have the same element.’ I’d like to remind you that we could go to Wall Street and find the same classification of people.”

Social media was in its infancy at the time Codding made those astute comments. Now anyone with a smartphone can opine about any topic at any time.

Let’s all remember the wise words of industry sages such as Julian Codding and dust off the blowhards using path-of-least-resistance stereotypes for a line that sounds clever.

Nick Zulovich is senior editor at Cherokee Media Group and can be reached at nzulovich@cherokeemediagroup.com.