San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich is as disrespectful to sideline reporters as he is successful as a coach. The strange thing is the coach admits he’s a jerk toward them.
“I know, I’m a jerk. I’m going to go ahead and admit it publicly to the whole world,” Popovich said during an interview on the “Dan LeBatard Show” Wednesday.
The problem is that Popovich doesn’t know how to change.
“Tell me what to do. What should I do?” he asked LeBatard. “I don’t know how to answer so sue me for being stupid and not having the answers to the questions.
“It entertains everybody but my wife. When I get home and she says ‘geez why are you so mean? You’re a jerk, people hate you.’ I go, ‘I’m sorry honey, I’ll try to do better next time.’”
Popovich says he can’t refrain from giving the reporters a tough time.
“And there’s no exaggeration. Did you see that guy honey? Did you see him? All you have to do is see him and you know why I answered the way I did! (She says) ‘That’s no excuse, you’re a grown man. Show some maturity.’ I said ‘I can’t, I can’t do it.’”
Popovich had some other really funny lines to delineate how bad some of the questions are that he gets during games. For instance, if the team got outplayed during a quarter, he knows he’s going to get asked about what they can do better.
“Can I make a trade during the timeout? Can we run some drills?” he joked. “I’m just going to go back to the bench and hope we play better.”
We’ve long despised in-game interviews for the same reasons as Popovich, but that doesn’t mean he has to at like a jerk. Have you seen his history of abusing Craig Sager during interviews? It’s truly embarrassing. Hopefully Pop’s wife wins out in this battle.
Another funny clip from the interview was when Pop was asked about Tim Duncan being listed in the box score as someone who didn’t play because he was old. Pop says a trainer and player were joking around about doing that on the box score, and Pop decided to go along with it. He says Duncan gets a big kick out of it. We did too.
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