Sports are a great type of entertainment. They provide excitement in the form of suspense, happiness in victory and also give drama with loss. They rarely, however, offer comedy. If you want to laugh at sports you can occasionally catch decent blooper reels or see some exaggerated Cleveland Cavaliers team bonding before games. In the case of the Cavaliers, the funniest thing is how many times the clip of the team having fun together before the game is shown throughout the actual games. Some things that can be much more rewarding in respect to humor are the press conferences that athletes and coaches participate in. Coaches at the university and professional levels often go through several press conferences each season. Many of these are routine, but occasionally we are blessed with the gems that are meltdowns.
Meltdowns come in many varieties from slow burnouts to sudden outbursts to illogical explosions. They rarely come in ways that seem respectable or serious (although they certainly have serious elements). Meltdowns are those times when coaches and players become flustered while they are the center of attention and the cameras are rolling. Dennis Green had a meltdown so memorable it even made it into a commercial series based on its ludicrous content.
We at Miami University were recently given two gifts from the basketball team - an excellent performance against the fourth-rated University of Kentucky Wildcats and a hilarious meltdown by our noble coach in the postgame conference for that performance. Charlie Coles was asked a question after the game that he could not believe. I would describe this as a casual questioning meltdown. Charlie, who has a reputation as a solid basketball coach, is reduced to repeatedly questioning the reporter to try to figure out how he could be capable of asking such a question.
The basic question asked was, "How did the game get away from you?"
Anyone would infer this was not a question Charlie would deem worthwhile. He spent nearly two minutes responding to this query while putting little effort toward being polite or acting pleasantly. What Coles is most concerned with throughout the interview is how inept the reporter is. This concern and focus results in a very rewarding meltdown wherein the Redhawks coach berates a reporter who couldn't have seen it coming. This career question-asker may have been guilty of the wrong question, as Charlie seems to suggest. There is another possible explanation for the outburst: perhaps Miami's coach was fired up from the intense match and was primed to go off on any question. Whatever the details involved in getting the meltdown were, they resulted in something that achieved more than 60,000 views after being on YouTube for a single day.
Coles led the RedHawks to a very nice, albeit not victorious performance. He wasn't done giving Miamians something to watch, though. In his postgame meltdown he continued the show and probably got Miami just a little more attention added to what the team earned us on the court. Coles was able to up the entertainment value of Miami basketball this week in his own way.
