Kick Out the Sports!
by Bob Cook

Bob Cook's weekly ruminations on sports appear Mondays in Flak.

"Knock it off!" A phrase normally intoned by arguing siblings, a father raising his hand in anger or Robert Conrad in a 1980s battery commercial. Normally it's a temporal phrase, uttered quickly and soon forgotten.

Unless of course you're a struggling quarterback picked second in the NFL draft and given a $15 million bonus, who says it while menacing a reporter in the locker room as cameras roll.

Yes, yelling "knock it off," or some such phrase toward a reporter, is a no-no for professional athletes, most of whom understand that picking on a pipsqueak scribe or an unctuous teleprompter-reader is a quick way to blemish their images — and future endorsement deals. The quarterback in question, Ryan Leaf, screamed "knock it off" at a reporter in 1998, mere weeks into his professional career. The phrase — as well as Leaf's subsequent, as newspapers are wont to call it, profanity-laced tirade — became emblematic of his inability to handle the pressure of the NFL. It gets replayed whenever Leaf is, again, topping some list of biggest NFL draft busts.

Yet like Leaf, some athletes cannot resist temptation, whether goaded by what they perceive as unfair treatment or bait laid out by a particularly pernicious columnist. It's amazing, really, these confrontations don't happen constantly — imagine, if you will, coming home from the office, trying to take your clothes off for a shower, while 20 people crowd around you in your bathroom and pepper you with variations of, "So tell me about that presentation you blew today."

That it doesn't happen more often is because there's a specific recipe to create such an incident. But before revealing the recipe, let's examine a few recent run-ins: Memphis Grizzlies guard Jason Williams vs. The Commercial Appeal columnist Geoff Calkins, and Los Angeles Dodgers catcher Jason Phillips vs. Los Angeles Times columnist TJ Simers.

Williams was the classic case of the athlete feeling wronged. Calkins had written a column about the Grizzlies' lackadaisical play in their first-round NBA playoff series against the Phoenix Suns. In it, Williams was quoted as saying, "I'm happy. I go home and see my kids and my wife and I'm OK. All of this (stuff) is secondary to me." (Presumably, Williams said something unprintable, instead of saying "stuff" and wagging his index fingers to denote a parenthetical.)

Well, a man who loves his family more than beating the Phoenix Suns is going to feel a backlash, as the man known as White Chocolate did. When the Grizzlies lost against to Phoenix, Williams, instead of talking about how his thoughts were occupied during the game by whether his wife told him to pick up milk or bread on the way home, twice grabbed Calkins' pen out of his hand and screamed in his ear as Calkins tried to talk to other players. Eventually, a teammate and, later, a team official led Williams away. The NBA, on May 4, fined Williams $10,000 for his outburst, showing another reason why athletes hold back — it's a hit to the wallet.

Calkins was merely an innocent bystander in this confrontation. In rare times, it's the journalists initiating contact, as Simers did with Phillips, a journeyman catcher who in the previous day's Times had been quoted as "living paycheck to paycheck" on $339,000 a year. OK, not exactly Latrell Sprewell saying he needed his $14 million a year to feed his family (who must look like the Klumps if he needs $14 million to feed them), but still, a silly thing to say to fans whose salaries, if you pardon the pun, aren't even in his ballpark.

Simers, in his telling, approached Phillips and demanded to see his bills, and hoped Phillips — who also had told the Times that he would need to work in Burger King if he tested positive for steroids after "eating five poppy-seed muffins" — would say something stupid again. Simers struck out on the former, but got Phillips to swing away at the latter. Phillips yelled right in Simers' face before — does this sound familiar? — being led away by a teammate and a team official. (Phillips wasn't fined, however, but he apologized to Simers the next day — and noted he had had a similar run-in while in the minor leagues.)

As Phillips proves, a normally even-keel person, even when deluged by reporters after stepping out of the shower, will not fly off the handle. Certainly, a writer or broadcaster who never says a bad thing about a player will never feel his wrath. And these confrontations will never take place outside the hothouse of the locker room — while coaches and others have said nasty things or gotten emotional while on a post-game podium, it lacks the intimacy of a one-on-one situation in which at least one person is nearly naked. In most cases, these confrontations are more heat than real danger. (Though then-Boston Herald reporter Lisa Olsen's hounding and sexual harassment from New England Patriots' players in 1990 literally drove her into exile for a time.)

With that in mind, here is the recipe for an athlete-reporter confrontation.

Take one athlete and one reporter, place them in separate bowls. In the athlete's bowl, mix two tablespoons of oversensitivity, one-half cup of hot-temperedness, two slices of slump, a pinch of self-delusion and three-and-a-half teaspoons of profanity. In the reporter's bowl, mix one cup of prickliness, two teaspoons of non-deference and two cups of substandard dressing. Mix ingredients in locker room, adding other athletes, reporters and 10 pints of sweat. Heat until agitation.

Maybe Ryan Leaf is studying this recipe now. Word is, he's taking a media relations class at his old college, where at the least he's not telling anyone to "knock it off!"

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.