Meet Kendall Gill.
Fifteen years in the NBA, now works for the Chicago Bulls on Comcast Sports Network.
Erm, he did until about two weeks ago.
Gill is now suspended from the network for the rest of the season and will probably be terminated for a fight he got in to with another commentator in the newsroom.
You see, Gill didn't like a call made in a March 18 game between the Bulls and Denver.
This was the call, as you hear Gill and his cohort were calling the game with seconds to go in overtime.
Joachim Noah appears to tip in a game-winning basket, which appeared to be passed to him above the rim in a set play.
The referee calls "basket interference" on Noah, and, as a result, the Bulls lose and the winning streak of the Nuggets reaches, at that point, 12. (It would reach 15 before back-to-back losses at New Orleans and San Antonio.)
The problem is that I can't see who actually made the call. The referee on the baseline didn't. The referee on the opposite side of the court to the camera didn't. So it was the third official, and I assume he was the one who handled giving the ball on the out-of-bounds play, so he was nowhere in the shot!
It takes me the replay, fifteen seconds later, and no one has realized the call yet!!, to see that the third official was not even in the frame of the shot and would've had to make that call from about 30 feet away!
And here's the thing: Once you see the replay, you realize the call was CORRECT! If anything, there was no reason to believe that ball was going to be short by anyone, except maybe Noah himself, and, hence, you now have to check to see if any part of the ball was "in the cylinder" (take the circle of the rim and "draw" that circle upward infinitely -- it creates a cylinder. If the ball is in that cylinder, an offensive player cannot touch it or he interferes with the shot, negating any resulting basket.)
If you freeze the frame at 29 seconds, the ball is CLEARLY "in the cylinder". The call is right. Absolutely clear at 50 seconds. Doesn't even appear that Noah needs to do it!
It takes at least 45 seconds to get the first mention of a basket interference call. The referees huddle, and then, almost unspeakably, the person who made this video was actually switching to late in the Heat-Celtics game (and this was when the Heat were running toward that historic streak of their own!!). During the few seconds he's in Boston, the basket is waved off and the Nuggets go on to win.
So is Kendall Gill going to kick my ass for saying it here?
Because that's exactly what he did to Tim Doyle from the Big Ten Network a couple of days later after a taping of "Sports Talk Live", according to several reports. A physical altercation has resulted in Gill's suspension from the network for the season, almost certainly that he will be fired when the situation is "re-evaluated" by the network.
I'll let Howard Cosell (through Brian Tuohy's site) state it better than I ever could about Kendall Gill catching Sports Fan Syndrome. His sixth tenet of Sports Fan Syndrome, published in 1985, fits Gill to a T.
"The fan is sacred, even as sports are. He pays the freight, thus he is an entitled being. The media people tell him this every day. Therefore, once within the arena, his emotions whetted by the Sports Syndrome, the fan adopts what John Stewart Mill found to be the classic confusion in the American thought process, the confusion between Liberty and License—a natural and probable consequence of which is fan violence."
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