The dumbest question you've ever asked/heard

I disagree, but whatever. My point stands regardless.

 

Just after I started as a full time reporter, the AP moved the information for a phone press conference with Bill Cowher.
I wasn't assigned a story, but thought I would log in for the heck of it. This was just about the time the Browns were coming back into the league. So the teleconference goes round and I get my shot to ask a question: Coach Cowher what are the chances of you coming to coach the Browns?
Cowher: You know the league has pretty strict anti-tampering rules, so I can't say anything about that.
Snickers and that was the end of the that.
Thanks for the contribution, now go to take a junior varsity volleyball score, rookie.

 

I was doing a feature story on Shawn Bradley when he came to my town for a high school basketball tournament in the summer. I called him to set up the interview. We agreed to meet at the gym the next day and I asked him how I would recognize him. Remember this is a 7-foot-6 high school kid. Not my best question. He laughed at me and said "I don't think you'll have any problem figuring out who I am."

Another time I was covering a high school football championship game. A couple of us were talking to the losing coach on the field when this dude from a local weekly paper walks up. The guy cuts off the coach in mid-sentence and asks "What's your name Coach?" Without hesitation the coach answered "Mark Twain." Sure enough, the guy used a quote from the coach and called him Mark Twain.

 

Super Bowl week. Chargers receiver Mark Seay, who nearly died protecting a nice in a drive-by shooting, is telling a moving story about the whole ordeal. Radio guy breaks in at one point: "So, you got shot. Nearly died. In 25 words or less, tell me what happened." Seay just looked at him and said, "I don't think I can do it in 25 words or less."

 

We had this golf reporter and I use that term regarding her completely tongue in cheek. Mark O'Meara was talking about how it was a two-club wind out there and she reportedly asked, "Which two clubs?" She got a job at Sports Illustrated soon after and I haven't read the magazine since.

 

I love that question!

 

This one was on me.

My junior year of high school in 1999, the Braves invited students from high school newspapers around the metro-Atlanta area to Turner Field for a "press conference" with a handful of Braves players before one of the exhibitions just before the season opener. Trying to remember, I think there was Gerald Williams, Randall Simon and maybe Andruw Jones among other fringe players.

One of the players was Walt Weiss, the trusty shortstop who also played for Oakland and Colorado. Those who were around Atlanta may remember that around that time, there was an e-coli outbreak at the White Water waterpark, and a lot of kids (including Weiss' son) were sickened.

I guess I thought I was some kind of hotshot and asked if Weiss bore any kind of grudge towards White Water, as opposed to asking some sort of softball. Not sure he appreciated the line of questioning from a kid nearly half his age.

My question for Gerald Williams was much more simpler -- asking him about his cameo on Saturday Night Live (skit with Helen Hunt and Chris Kattan where a bunch of mid-level major leaguers appear) with Mark Wohlers and Pedro Borbon Jr.

 

Dumbest asked by me was to Sylvester Croom. Was at a meet and greet for the local alumni association about a month before the season started, and I was asking some stuff for a feature for our football tab. I get around to asking him about his place in history as the first black SEC coach, and instead of asking if there was more pressure on him because of that than there would be for a first-year white head coach, my brain flipped on the PC switch and flipped off the intelligence switch.
I stammered out, "So do you feel there's more pressure on you than there would be for, you know ... a normal coach."
Thankfully, I think he either got where I was going with it or played it off and gave me some sort of decent answer. I don't really remember anything other than wanting to crawl in a hole and die.

Worst heard wasn't really in an interview, but to me. After a high school baseball game I'm shooting the breeze with a reporter from the major metro while waiting for the coaches to wrap up their postgame talk. He asks, "Why did they stop the game after seven innings?"

 

One of the last games of the regular season when I was covering a women's basketball game at Indiana, one of the college writers asked IU's center if she had ever played someone as tall as Michigan State's Allyssa DeHaan (6' 9"). Mind you, both players were seniors and had started for a few seasons.

The IU player gave her a dumbfounded look before saying that she had not only played against someone that tall earlier in the season (In the team's first game of the year), she had to guard DeHaan each of the past two years. I tried my hardest to keep it together for the rest of the media session.

 

That's not really that dumb of a question. Uninformed, sure.

 

Are you 18 yet?

 

C'mon Stitch. That's an important question -- from a legal perspective.