With all the close physical contact and intense eye-of-the tiger concentration that goes on in sport, it’s no wonder athletes end up touching each other in ways that certain segments of polite society still find very hard to come to terms with. Like the segment called “Kentucky”.

The photo shows Jerry Smith of the Louisville Cardinals celebrating something good happening (Hillary Clinton’s stunning comeback in New Hampshire?) by appearing to kiss his teammate Juan Palacios. But “kiss” as in “passionately bite someone’s jaw off.”

Palacios seems too wrapped up in his own brilliance to respond to Smith’s lovebite, but that didn’t stop readers of the Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper reacting with disgust when they were exposed to this photo in their favourite paper.

“An embarrassment,” said one. “A horrible decision,” reckoned another. “Distasteful,” “a mystery” and “shame on you,” chimed in some more lunatics, appalled that their local newspaper could so easily reawaken their lifelong fear that men sometimes kiss each other for pleasure. With the panache that has long characterised the journalistic profession, the paper pounced on the opportunity to fill a whole load of space without having to find any more stories for the day, by stringing out their response, which can be summarised as “Apologise? Are you joking?” for hundreds of words.

[Deadspin]