We’d like to offer our sincerest condolences to assholes, bullies, bitter curmudgeons, angry chair throwers, and all other people around the country who are morning the loss of former college basketball coach Bobby Knight.
Along those lines, I guess we should also offer mournful apologies to all Oklahoma sports radio listeners who have been waiting nearly three decades for Sports Animal shock jock Regular Jim Traber – not to be confused with Cardboard Jim Traber – to confront Coach Knight at a press conference.
Although the two were cut from the same cheesecloth, and both seemed to equally enjoy picking fights with coworkers, intimidating officials, and saying controversial things into a microphone, Regular Jim Traber has been a vocal critic of Coach Knight since he first mouth-breathed onto the local sports radio scene in the early 1990s.
In between talking about the Pittsburgh Steelers and instructing grown men how to break in baseball mits, Regular Jim would routinely tip off college basketball season each year by expressing his extreme hatred towards Coach Knight, vowing to attend a press conference where he could directly ask the coach why he’s such a punk and bully.
Despite Bobby Knight coaching at the dusty Big 12 outpost of Texas Tech from 2001 to 2008, and his teams playing at least 14 times in the Sooner State, big, brave Regular Jim only made it to one Bobby Knight press conference.
Instead of directly confronting the coach, he whiffed like he was facing Danny Jackson in the batter’s box and asked some weird softball question about playing zone defense or whatever.
Basically, Regular Jim Traber – just like he did 118 times for the Baltimore Orioles during his brief MLB career – struck out, and lowered his career batting average to .226 in the process.
Instead of going to a different press conference for a second attempt, Regular Jim Traber succumbed to fear and never asked Bobby Knight another question.
In fact, he grew so scared of Bobby Knight that he even vowed to boycott the OSU basketball program way back in 2008 when OSU was considering hiring Knight as a replacement for Sean Sutton.
I know this because I, a 29-year-old at the time, wrote Jesus an open letter begging him to intervene and make it happen:
When you get a moment, can you look into making Bob Knight the head coach for the Oklahoma State men's basketball program next season? By making this happen, you would be doing a huge favor to several thousand people across Oklahoma.
You see, here in Oklahoma City there is a sports talk station called The Sports Animal. The most annoying host on The Sports Animal is a guy named Jim Traber (you've probably never heard of him). Yesterday, Mr. Traber vowed to basically no longer acknowledge, address or have anything to do with Oklahoma State men's basketball program if they fired Sean Sutton and replaced him with Coach Knight. If this were to happen, we would hope that Mr. Traber would have to either quit his job and/or eat the biggest piece of humble pie ever made, which would be an amazing thing!
For whatever reason, Jesus didn’t listen to my prayer and the program hired Travis Ford instead. Although Regular Jim didn’t boycott the OSU basketball program, NCAA Tournament success sure did!
Zing!
Anyway, now that Bobby Knight has moved on to wherever people like him go in the afterlife, I guess that means we’ll no longer have a chance to hear Regular Jim Traber chicken out at a press conference again. It's a sad sad day huh?
RIP and amen.
