While there’s plenty of swearing in sports, there are still some people who don’t like to hear that. That means we’ve seen lots of apologies for swearing picked up on a stadium mic, from a mic’d up player, or even from an announcer who didn’t know his mic was on. But ESPN gave us something new Wednesday when SportsCenter apologized for the language they showed in a previous clip…which was a clip from Once Upon A Time In Queens, their own 30 for 30 (which has its third and fourth parts airing Wednesday night, beginning at 8 p.m. ET) on the 1986 Mets. Here’s the clip, and then the apology from co-anchor Kevin Negandhi:
Negandhi says “We apologize for the language that was used. You will see that during the broadcast [of the film], but not normally on SportsCenter.” His co-anchor Elle Duncan then transitions into Mets’ highlights.
Yeah, it’s not super surprising that Lenny Dykstra dropped a couple of f-bombs during a 30 for 30 interview. It would be much more surprising if he hadn’t. It is surprising that ESPN, if they didn’t want to air swearing during SportsCenter, didn’t think to bleep out Dykstra’s comments there, or just to use another clip that didn’t involve particular cursing. This is an internal clip, so you’d think SC would have gotten this well in advance, and you’d think everyone involved would have been on the same page in how to handle it. But that didn’t happen here.
[Ben Koo on Clippit]
