“I’ll kill you!!!”
John Chaney had a very successful career as a basketball coach, but unfortunately, it is those three words that he’ll likely be best remembered for.
20 years ago today, Chaney, who was Temple’s head coach at the time, lost it on now-Kentucky, then-UMass head coach John Calipari. His issue? The way that Calipari handled officials.
“Could I say this to you, please?” Chaney said, before the video above picks up. “You’ve got a good ball club. But what you did with the officials out there is wrong, and I don’t want to be a party to that. You understand?”
Cal responded: “You weren’t out there, Coach. You don’t have any idea.”
Chaney fired back: “You got a game given to you by officials right here with G.W. on three bad calls, O.K.? Then you send your kids out there pushing and shoving. You had the best officiating you could ever get here. And for you to ride them, I don’t want to be a party to that.”
And that’s where the video picks up, with UMass guard Mike Williams and future NBA star Eddie Jones, who strolled in shirtless at the end, breaking up what could have been one heckuva fight.
Now imagine if this happened today? With twitter and the 24 hour sports news networks, this video would get played millions of times. Skip Bayless would spend hours upon hours ranting about how Tim Tebow would have won this fight. We wouldn’t hear the end of it for weeks.
Today, the two former adversaries are actually friends. Cal even posted this picture on his Instagram last year.
