Jason Whitlock
This I heart about Jason Whitlock: The man never holds back.
In fact, the Kansas City Star/Fox Sports columnist so graphically gave readers his thoughts about the Rick Pitino scandal, and men in general, a couple of weeks ago I couldn’t bring myself to offer it a link. After all, impressionable children have been known to read this blog.
But now Jason is back, and while his latest take on Rick is hardly G-rated, it’s a different spin, even if Jason has his tongue firmly planted in his sizable cheek. Or maybe not. You decide.
An excerpt:
We, the media, don’t know what we’re talking about. Despite Pimpino opening his press conference declaring his intentions and the audience he would attempt to sway, we missed the utter brilliance of his performance.
“I’m a little upset,” Pitino began. “This is a day I went home to comfort my wife, who obviously, as you would imagine, the last seven months would be having a very difficult time, as her husband was blackmailed during the tournament and extorted for millions of dollars. From that point on, all she’s read is all these false allegations.”
Hello. Pitino is trying to save his marriage.
When his six-minute rant concluded, tears trickled down my cheeks, I rose from my seat and found myself clapping my hands and mouthing the words, “Play on, playa. Play on” and wanting to listen to Johnnie Taylor’s classic “Cheaper To Keep Her.”
A friend in Louisville theorized to me Wednesday that Joanne Pitino had probably just returned home from her daily hair appointment, flipped on her favorite soap opera only to see police video of Karen Sypher saying awful things about her husband. My friend theorized that Joanne quickly got Rick on the phone, and, voila, a press conference commenced.
John Clay is a sports columnist for the Lexington Herald-Leader. A native of Central Kentucky and graduate of UK, he covered UK football for 13 seasons before being promoted to columnist in 2000. He lives in Lexington with his wife and two sons. You can e-mail him at jclay@herald-leader.com.
Must be nice to have a job like Whitlock’s.
This is the only place I can write about this subject because of the fear that the LHL Management is showing to this coach. This is what the press conference was all about. Fear and intimidation to the press for not letting us write our fealings about this man with so much power over the press and people of Kentucky. This guy is a public figure! Will the management of the LHL crawl out of the pocket of this guy and give us a chance to respond to this Press Conference that clearly he was in control of. I can’t wait to see the signs at UConn or Syracuse this year. The public isn’t afraid!