The dumbest question you've ever asked/heard

We've all heard bad ones. Many of us heard bad ones on a daily basis.

What are the ones that still make you laugh or cringe years and years later?

 

Re: The dumbest question you've ever heard

At an Alabama football game in 1994, when "Forrest Gump" was all the rage:

TV boob: "Coach (Gene Stallings), we've been hearing a lot about Forrest Gump. Will he be suiting up for the Crimson Tide any time soon?"

Stallings then proceeded to go into a tirade about how the movie's depiction of Bear Bryant was unfair, and how Bryant would never denigrate a player in front of other people, particularly a mentally handicapped one (the Bryant character had called Gump "the dumbest sonofabitch alive"). Obviously it wasn't true, but given that Stallings had a son with Down Syndrome, I could see where he was coming from.

 

Re: The dumbest question you've ever heard

Also, I don't necessarily think it was a dumb question, but the guy who asked Bob Knight about his team's "game face" probably got the best "dumb question" response of all-time.

 

Re: The dumbest question you've ever heard

My worst one?

Covering baseball when I was about 23, a player struck out four times and made three errors that cost his team the game.

Me: So this has got to feel like one of the worst days of your life?

Player: The worst day of my life was when my father died when I was 10.

I wanted to crawl into the fetal position.

 

Re: The dumbest question you've ever heard

The dumbest question anyone ever asked me? "Are you going to eat all that?"

 

Re: The dumbest question you've ever heard

The dumbest (I hope) I ever asked was to a prep football coach in his first year with a new team. They won what I thought was their first game of the season in what I thought was the first week of the season.

"Coach, are you relieved to get the first win behind you? How quickly has the team caught on to your system?"

He looks at me with a scowl and replies "First win? We won last week."

Yeah, they had played an endowment game out of town (almost five hours away) and hadn't bothered to report the score to us, apparently.

I still felt like a tool.


Was at an NBA playoff game a few years ago, Game 7 of Western semis. San Antonio vs. New Orleans.
SA made a ton of 3-pointers in the game and ended up winning.

TV guy from ESPN (won't mention his name, but he isn't one of the more recognizable talking heads and I'm not even sure he's still there) asked Popovich at the press conference if taking so bad many 3-point shots hurt his team?

Popovich just glared at him and said something to the effect of how SA made X number of 3-pointers more than NO and any time one goes in, he doesn't think of it as a bad shot. A bunch of us in the room were rolling.

Idiot.

 

I'm at a NFL training camp about 12-13 years ago. An ESPN reporter (not there anymore) walks up to the coach.

ESPN Guy: "Coach, were you surprised at the cuts that were made today?"

Coach: "No."

ESPN Guy: Why not?

Coach: Because I was the one who cut them.

 

College hoops game in which the winning team hit a school-record 18 three-pointers.

TV guy to losing coach: "Coach, were the three-pointers the killer?"

 

I was interviewing an NBA player last year for a feature about midway into the season. He hadn't played in 12 or 13 of the last games, so I asked him if he had been injured. Nope, the coach just wasn't playing him. I felt like an idiot.

 

The stupidest question ever asked at Super Bowl Media Day is an urban myth, or at the least a corruption.

http://espn.go.com/page2/s/merron/media.html

 

A few weeks ago, TV dude at the SEC championship game: "Coach, your team literally exploded in the first half..." I stopped paying attention at that point.

Fortunately, I've never asked a dumb question. Ever.