Athlete-Reporter fights

SI.com's Pete McEntegart presented his top 10 Athlete-Reporter confrontations. It's an extremely lazy compilation mostly consisting of athletes shoving photogs (in honor of Belichick)
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/writers/pete_mcentegart/01/12/ten.spot/index.html

So anyone got some good ones, either yours or others.

My favorite story in this subject is Will McDonough's locker room fight Raymond Clayborn:

In 1979, after the New England Patriots beat the NY Jets 56-3, McDonough was standing beside defensive back Raymond Clayborn's locker. He listening in on an interview when Clayborn approached.

Clayborn jabbed his finger into McDonough's chest, but the finger slipped and poked the writer in the right eye. So McDonough stepped back and unloaded a straight right hand on Clayborn, then a quick left. And as Clayborn is going down, the journalist gives the football player a third shot to side of his head.

TKO.

Another writer in the locker room looked around and thought, "This is when they kill all the sportswriters."

What Clayborn didn't know is that McDonough grew up in public housing in the Old Colony Project (and St. Augustine's Parish) in South Boston. If you've seen "Goodwill Hunting" that's 'Southie' to you. McDonough died in 2003, but that story goes on. And on. And on.

“I said that if any guy pushes me to the point, then something is going to happen,” McDonough said at the time. “It’s just unfortunate for [Clayborn] that he did it.”

 

Didn't Dominik Hasek pick a sportswriter up by the necktie once about 10 years ago?

 

Wasn't that Jim Kelly, of Buffalo News fame?

 

Yes, it was. IIRC, Kelley had suggested in a column that Hasek was dogging it and playing up a supposed injury.

 

I'm a big enough guy that if someone pushed me past my flash point, I could hold my own, but I'll be damned if I'm going to get into it with an athlete unless it's ground zero-type stuff (threatening to kill my mom and skullfuck her corpse, stuff like that). Not only for the obvious damage it'd do for my ability to handle my job impartially and professionally, but good gravy, throw hands with someone with personal security? Eh eh.

 

I can't wait for the day that Steve Williams tries to confiscate a camera from someone who has, say, an eighth-degree black belt, a hair-trigger temper and a tendency to "black out." Nighty-night, Steve-O, you knob-gobbler.

 

Didn't John Denny have a physical confrontation with a reporter?
Didn't Dave Kingman dump a bucket of ice water on a reporter's head?

 

For what it's worth, and it's probably not worth much, but I have it on good authority that this list was specifically intended to be Sports Figures vs. Cameras (And The People That Carry Them). Thus it intentionally excluded contretemps such as McDonough-Clayborn, Bobby Bonilla-Bob Klapisch and the like. That might be fodder for a separate list.

Thus while the list could perhaps be teased more accurately (and that might well be tweaked), I don't think the writer was unaware of battles between ink-stained wretches and athletes. It's just that the presence of a camera was the key to this conceit.

Still, I don't doubt that this McEntegart fellow is very lazy.

 

thanks for the example

 

Perfection.

 

I don't know what you're talking aboot.