Have You Ever Lost It In a Press Conference? I Have!

Writer's Note: Being an executive editor-in-chief for my sports blog, PYIR SportsCenter, I often have to deal with press conferences. Sometimes, I get so stressed out, I often lose it.

In the sports world, coaches in all aspects have lost it in press conferences or in any part of sports broadcasting:

• John Wooden often lost it when his UCLA Bruins would lose by a margin they shouldn't have lost. He didn't let it get to him for too long.
• Bobby Knight lost it when any of the teams he coached would lose or make some sort of player error. He always beat someone with some weapon, throw chairs at the media, or something that would create more media attention than expected or necessary.
• ESPN's Chris Berman, Tony Kornheiser, and Tony Reali, despite the FCC-imposed five-second delay, have sometimes been caught off guard with a few colorful remarks, some involving an occasional F-bomb. Berman was confronted about this in 1996 when cursing on TV was normal and next to uncensored five different times, but ESPN management brushed it off and never persued him again until the Super Bowl incident involving Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake at halftime. Kornheiser and Reali were warned once in 2004 and twice in 2006 about the "slipping of the tongue."
• FOX Sports' Terry Bradshaw was caught accidentally blurting out the S-bomb (with how the media is anymore, you may know the word, but I'm not posting it) during one NFL on FOX broadcast in 2003. Management never approached Bradshaw about the issue.
• ESPN Radio's Colin Cowherd went berzerk on the press corps in 2007 about a March 2006 comment regarding Michael Vick relayed back to him and was told by a Chicago Sun-Times writer that the comment was an off-color remark.

Our coaches, sportswriters, and broadcasters are never perfect. Let me give you a little challenge: Find me someone in sports who is perfect (one who doesn't get mad, starts cursing, throws anything around him at referees, coaches, players and/or the press corps, kicks everyone he sees and spits in the face of anyone he runs into) and I'll give you a PYIR SportsCenter T-shirt.