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Toughest interviews

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by micke77, Feb 7, 2009.

  1. Twoback

    Twoback Active Member

    The interview was set up by Alabama SID. I think it was J.D. Rutledge, who was really good at the job. It was supposed to be a fairly simple operation. I was to share Bennett with someone; I keep thinking it was somebody from SI, but I'm not 100 percent sure after all these years who the other person was.
    Anyway, Bennett evades us for the better part of 3 hours before SID finally nails him down and makes him sit for the interview. Bennett had a look on his face throughout the entire thing like he was being waterboarded. The interview was just basic college football player stuff, but he acted like he'd never been through a worse experience in his life.
    Haven't forgotten that.
     
  2. Twoback

    Twoback Active Member

    Yeah, but how'd your guy turn out?
    Flop?
     
  3. lono

    lono Active Member

    I've been yelled at plenty of times doing sports interviews and it doesn't bother me much.

    Why?

    When I was on news side, I was a crime reporter and had to cover some of the most heinous subject matter imaginable.

    I once interviewed parents who lost their teenage daughter to cancer. The neurosurgeon finished on her grille while she was unconscious in her bed after brain surgery. I sat right behind them during his trial and you could just feel the pain they must have been going through.

    Once, on the day after Thanksgiving, I had to interview a woman after a domestic incident that saw her estranged son-in-law murder one of her daughters and her husband die from a heart attack after fatally shooting both the son-in-law and the other daughter's boyfriend, who was trying to disarm him.

    One night I spent one hour with a guy who was paralyzed from the neck down because he accidentally got shot in the neck with a freak ricochet from a .22 that kids were target shooting with.

    And one time I stood in the front yard of a guy who had lost family on a Korean airliner that had been shot down by the Soviet air force. Even with the front door closed, I could hear his wife screaming from the living room.

    A few years back, one NASCAR driver was really pissed at me and motherfucked me for about 20 minutes straight. I just stood there and looked him in the eyes. Finally, he got tired of it and said, "You know what? You're OK. Most guys wouldn't have had the balls to stand there."

    I told him, "I hate to burst your bubble, but I've been through a lot worse in life than getting yelled at by a driver."

    We've gotten along great ever since.
     
  4. i had only good experiences with bobby knight

    found him to be thoughtful and expansive when asked good questions

    can't ask for more than that
     
  5. micke77

    micke77 Member

    i've dealt with bobby knight only a couple of times, the main one being when he came in to the D-I program we cover two years ago.
    it was really an hilarious "buildup" to The General coming into this school because the local media didn't know what in the hell to expect. everybody was on the proverbial "pins and needles", wondering how he'd act. and nobody wanted to be the one to ask the first question. didn't bother me. i asked the first one, knight answered it and then took it from there. in fact. for that one question regarding some of the strategy he used, he went on for about five or six minutes, into detail of what they were running.
    at the end of the gig, he started to leave out, then hesitated, came back into the room and told a couple of jokes that the Texas Tech beat writers says he invariably tells.
    all in all, it went well.
     
  6. I Digress

    I Digress Guest

    I'm sorry.. what does this mean?

    "The neurosurgeon finished on her grille while she was unconscious in her bed after brain surgery."
     
  7. Moderator1

    Moderator1 Moderator Staff Member

    Uh, uh: He masturbated over her, leaving the evidence on her face.
     
  8. I Digress

    I Digress Guest

    that's what I thought.... holy bat shit....he shouldn't have been tried, he should have been anally raped, drawn and quartered and his head stuck on a pike outside the hospital.
     
  9. lono

    lono Active Member

    Yeah, it was a horrible story. And I agree with your analysis, ID.
     
  10. Did he show Warren Sapp the ropes?
     
  11. I can relate:
    Interviewed a girl (young woman actually) hours after she discovered her mom's body in a closet. Her dad shot the woman, shoved her in a closet and claimed suicide.
    I interviewed another woman -with four kids - a day after her husband had been killed in a suicide-by-cop shooting. As an oh-by-the-way, the family had six kids, but two had been killed a few months earlier when the father was piloting a fishing boat in the dark, with no lights, when it was hit by a barge.
     
  12. goalmouth

    goalmouth Well-Known Member

    I had an interview with Knicks rookie Pat Ewing, who had been less than well-trained in media relations while at Georgetown Supermax. The first thing I asked him was where he shopped for clothes. He was so taken aback he went on at length about it, and we had a decent, relaxed conversation.

    Sometime those little things break the ice. I memorized a few Japanese pleasantries before interviewing Kimiko Date, who spoke no English, and that got me past 'hello.'

    Sometime nothing works. As Dale Berra told me, "You can say hi, but don't try to have a conversation with [my Dad].
     
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