Inspired by the thread about insipid post-game interviews, I figured I’d start a thread on the best televised sports meltdowns.
PLAYOFFS?! Incidentally, when you type the word “playoffs” into Youtube, this is the first thing that comes up.
What are some of your favorites?
A somewhat forgotten classic: John Chaney vs. Jim Calipari
Hal McRae…don’t ask him any stupid-ass f’in questions.
You wouldn’t think women’s college basketball would inspire an interview meltdown, but Kevin Borseth begs to differ. Incredible rant!
In 1983, Cubs manager Lee Elia lost his cool after his team lost a game.
Allen Iverson becoming increasing frustrated because We talkin’ about practice!
Earl Weaver’s amazingly NSFW spot on Manager’s Corner!
Wow. I had never heard that one before. That is classic.
And I, for one, was rooting for Jim Everett to smack Rome in the head repeatedly.
UConn basketball coach Jim Calhoun on failing to recruit Ryan Gomes. “If you want me to say I fucked up, I fucked up.”
Wow, that was impressive. No foreplay, no ramp up, just nuclear from word one.
It was a prank. That’s not to say that it wasn’t authentic frontier Earl Weaver.
Tommy Lasorda on Kirk Bevacqua. He couldn’t hit water if he fell out of a fucking boat
I came in to say this. Lasorda has several that are awesome!
Joe
Sadly, true.
Also true. That’s a hell of a lot closer to Earl’s actual personality than anything that might have made it to the airwaves.
For my money, if they play sports for a thousand years, that one will never be topped. The pre-lights Cubs had been hyping the purity and sanctity of day baseball for decades, and here comes the manager to opine that only motherfuckin’ unemployed bums come to the ballpark during the day. It was classic.
There was an incident, which I can’t find a record of, that occurred just before half time of a Monday Night football game. I think the year was 1973.
Anyway, it was the early days of MNF and Howard Cosell was in the booth. It so happened that George Foreman showed up at the booth just before half time for an interview. Cosell started to interview Foreman and George lit into Cosell. He said things like, “I don’t like you Howard, you are a racist, etc.”. Foreman kept repeating his rant. The weird thing about it was that while the rant went on and after it had ended, the production people kept the cameras on Cosell. He had those Mickey Mouse headphones on and stood there speechless looking like a total fool. It seemed that the production people took the opportunity to intentionally humiliate Cosell.
I was thinking, WTF???
They then cut to the halftime highlights of the previous day that were pre-recorded. There was almost no mention of the incident in the second half or afterwards. Gifford and Meredith were probably in the lavatory sucking down a bottle of scotch trying to figure out what they should do.
I think Howard and George settled matters afterwards but it was an almost surreal moment that has pretty much been forgotten even though it was broadcast live on ABC.
If anybody could resurrect a video of the incident I would love to revisit it.
There was a meltdown by Joe Frazier and to a lesser extant Muhammed Ali in 1974. They had been making the rounds together promoting the first TV broadcast of their 1971 fight in 1971. They were on Dick cavett’s show together and Ali was a far better speaker. Later they were on with Howard Cosell analyzing the fight. Sometime around the 12th round Frazier remarked this is the punch I put you in the hospital with. Ali replied I was in for a day, you were in the hospital for a week. You should shut up, you are so ignorant. Frazier clearly didn’t like being called ignorant after a couple hours of abuse by someone he didn’t like. Cosell was smar, he kept sitting down instead of trying to break it up.
And who could forget Joe Namath telling Suzy Kolber “I want to kiss you. I couldn’t care less about the team strugg-a-ling” ?
Give Joe credit, though. The incident embarrassed him into getting alcoholism treatment.
Agreed, the Lee Elia rant can never be topped.
Not a meltdown exactly, but I distinctly remember Dodgers’ GM Al Campanis on Nightlinesaying blacks may not have “the necessities” to be baseball managers or general managers.
What the clip didn’t show is that later in the show, both Ted Koppel and Roger Kahn (the other guest) tried to give Campanis an opportunity to explain, clarify, retract, apologize or in any way possible dig the bullet out of his foot, but Campanis didn’t/couldn’t.
He was pushed out of his job two days later, despite some of his black former teammates defending him. Campanis apologized, but never tried to deny his responsibility for what he said.