More than a month ago, my blog post du jour featured the hilarious on-air, profanity-laden screw-up by Craig Smylie, a Philadelphia sportscaster. As you may recall, the station editor at ABC Jet 24 inadvertently played a previously recorded sports teaser in which Smylie capped off a blown line with a few..."choice" words.
I figured it would be a long while before another classic sportscasting moment hit the airwaves. Fortunately for all of us, I was painfully mistaken. After Kentucky beat Kansas in the the NCAA men's college basketball championship in Lexington on April 2nd, wild(cat) fans took to the streets in drunken revelry. More importantly, Lexington's local CBS affiliate, WKYT 27, showed the world that sportscasting classics come in many flavors; sometimes its the fans, not the sportscasters, who make a moment memorable.
I have no idea what the station expected when they sent a reporter outside the stadium to provide live coverage of the post-game celebrations. It was a crazy scene out there, with plenty of alcohol-fueled rioting. By the time things finally calmed down in Lexington in the wee hours of the morning, someone had been shot, a few couches were torched, and the cops had filled the local jails with rowdy fans.
In the midst of this scene, WKYT's Gabriel Rohas made the wise decision to turn the microphone over to a drunken, boisterous fan on live TV who approached him during his hard-hitting coverage of the celebrations. It was clearly the right decision--what better way to get insightful, thought-provoking commentary on an important topic like drunken looting? Of course, I wouldn't be writing the incident if hilarity didn't ensue:
Much like the end the Craig Smylie's video (which YouTube did, indeed, remove from the site), the reaction from the news crew back in the studio is absolutely priceless. I haven't heard any f-bombs on network TV since September 11, 2001, when the significance of the situation gave the major news networks the freedom to air viewers' home video recordings of the terrorist attacks, profanity and all. Fortunately, the f-bomb made it's way onto live TV under much less serious circumstances this time, and it fills me with hope that we may not have to wait nearly as long as I'd feared for our next on-air blunder. When it happens, I'll be ready and waiting to help spread it across the internet.
Here's a link with more details:
http://www.sbnation.com/ncaa-basketball/2012/4/3/2921951/video-lexington-riots-kentucky-vs-kansas-f-bomb-tv
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