Empty the Bench

This is amazing. Absolutely amazing.

On Saturday I heavily excerpted a recent blog entry by Chris McCoskey, who covers the Detroit Pistons for the Detroit News both in traditional print (which is of course also available online) as well in a blog. You may also remember him from that silly commotion that was made within the blogging community over comments he made some months ago about blogging vs. journalism. Whatever, we don’t really get into or worked up about those kinds of discussions.

Anyway, the excerpt I published concerned a recent run-in McCoskey had with an Orlando sports talk radio personality (read about it here). In a nutshell, he went on the show, felt he was being unnecessarily badgered, and after ending the interview heard that the host ripped on him for about 15 minutes on the air.

Normally I’d let the story die as far as ETB coverage goes right there, but there’s been a juicy update: McCoskey actually confronted said talk-show host in the press room before Game 4 and had to be separated, repeatedly, before finally walking away. Read the whole account here, but here’s a few tidbits:

I see him skulking around the press room before the game and I confront him. That’s sort of what I do. Not real good at letting things slide off me. I am working on it.

Anyway, I walk up to him and I said, “You always rip on your guests once they are off the air and can’t respond?” He said something about how it was his show and for me not to tell him how to run his show. I questioned his courage and some other things and we went back and forth. I remember him saying that I talked down to him, and I said something like, I only talk down to stupid people. I suppose that wasn’t very nice.

The guy’s parting line to me was, “Who are you, anyway. Who are you?” I am the guy in Mike Bianchi’s column. I am the guy who wouldn’t let himself be punked by a know-nothing homer radio clown. I am also the guy who isn’t at all proud of his hair-trigger temper, but, what are you going to do? For the record, at no point was I going to hit the dude. Just wanted to hold him accountable for his cowardly actions.

Ohhhhh, zing!