Every broadcaster has a bathroom story eventually. Mike Pereira’s just happened to be more embarassing than most.
Pereira recounted his infamous memory this week on BetMGM Tonight with Pat Boyle on Westwood One Sports, going back to his second week as Fox’s rules analyst in 2010. And it started, fittingly enough, with him already dreading exactly this kind of moment before it happened.
“I was worried about, you know, having, you know, four games on the early kickoffs, and I was actually worried about what happens if I did have to go,” Pereira said.
Week one, Pereira held it together, both literally and professionally. Week two, his body had other ideas.
“A commercial break came, and I did a sprint to the restrooms,” Pereira said. “I’d only been at the Fox studios once, so I raced into the toilet and raced into the stall. It didn’t take me long to realize I was in the wrong bathroom.”
He had sprinted into the women’s restroom.
“Now in my second week, I’m gonna get probably fired for being in the wrong bathroom, in the women’s bathroom, and I raced out of there,” Pereira continued. “But I finally figured out that you just, if you got to, you got to, you know that. So you just tell them Mike’s gonna be gone for about five minutes and hopefully nothing happens during that time.”
The fear of being fired actually started a week earlier. In what amounted to his on-air debut for Fox, Pereira was called on to weigh in live on a ruling that would eventually become known as the Calvin Johnson rule. And had it not been confirmed as an incomplete pass — which it was — he was certain a network executive would’ve had a pink slip waiting for him by Monday morning.
He’s been with Fox ever since, becoming the pioneering on-air rules analyst in sports media and the template nearly every network eventually copied. Now 76, Pereira has said his current contract runs through the 2026 season, and he’s hinted that he’ll likely retire once it expires.
“I don’t want to outlive my effectiveness,” Pereira said.
He certainly won’t outlive that trip into the women’s bathroom, either.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.