On Wednesday night during a game between the San Antonio Spurs and Los Angeles Clippers, Gregg Popovich went viral after he grabbed a microphone midway through the second quarter and chastised Spurs fans.
Popovich, upset with the fans for booing former Spurs All-Star Kawhi Leonard, delayed the game and ripped into the very people who pay his salary, demanding they they hold themselves to a higher standard.
“Excuse me for a second,” said Popovich. “Can we stop all the booing and let these guys play? It’s got no class, it’s not who we are. Knock off the booing.”
Spurs fans weren’t having it and began to boo even louder.
With a few days to rest on it, Popovich refused to back down. In his mind, he knows how Spurs fans should conduct themselves and it should be in accordance with his way of thinking. He has no regrets for talking down to them or demanding they conform to his idea of accepted behavior.
“Absolutely not,” Popovich said when asked if he regretted the moment, via ESPN. “It’s pretty easy to understand. I listened to it for a while and it just got louder and louder and uglier and uglier, and I felt sorry for him, and I was embarrassed for our city, for our organization.
“Because that’s not who we are, that’s not how we’ve conducted ourselves for the last 25 years. It’s the opposite of the way we’ve conducted ourselves, the way we’ve worked in the community.”
Spurs fans are obviously still upset that Leonard forced his way out of San Antonio but that means little to Popovich, who once took personal aim at Leonard himself.
Apparently, in Popovich’s mind, it’s rules for thee but not for me.
“It’s kind of an indication of the world we live in today. It was hateful,” Popovich said. “It was really disrespectful, it was just mean-spirited. We’re the team that when somebody comes back to town after having been a Spur, so you first come back to town, we show a video of them.
“There’s enough hate the world where I think that’s totally inappropriate. It’s not what you would teach your kids to do. So it doesn’t make any sense, it’s unwise, so on every level, I have no regrets whatsoever.”
When Spurs fans express disdain for an opposing player, that’s a no-no. But when Popovich expresses a disdain for those same fans, it’s apparently A-OK.
We call that hypocritical and narcissistic. And Popovich is most certainly both of those things.
