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Tired of seeing pro-sport coaches and athletes covering their mouths as they discuss strategy during a game?
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Given what happened to controversial basketball head coach Rick Pitino on the weekend, expect the practice to not only continue, but expand beyond game settings — to basically any time in public a video camera might be aimed their way.
Pitino, while spectating from the stands, was briefly captured on TV speaking with a friend during a break in Sunday’s NBA playoff game at Madison Square Garden. Big whoop, right?
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Wrong.
The 70-year-old itinerant coach — who just leaped to his 11th head coaching job since the late ’70s, at St. John’s University in New York City — while on camera was caught giving his cellphone number to an acquaintance.
How do we know this? Because lip-readers watching on TV painstakingly replayed the clip over and over and figured out what numbers Pitino was relaying — then tweeted out the number.
And they got it right.
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“Over 300-plus messages came in,” Pitino confirmed via Twitter on Monday.
Was the famous hothead livid? At first, probably. But, as perhaps only Pitino could do, he gloated about the unexpected resultant bounty.
“Here’s the bizarre news: 95% were nice (and) positive,” he tweeted. “I got a lead on seven new recruits.”
Lip-reading to glean strategy intel — thanks to TV close-ups — has been a long-standing practice in big-time sports for decades, since at least the 1990s. Probably more so in the age of high-def TV.
To prevent such practices, players and coaches began shielding their mouths during games, starting with Major League Baseball players in the ’90s talking into their gloves during confabs on the mound, etc.
By the turn of the century it spread to NFL coaches on sidelines, reading off plays behind a large play sheet. Now we’re seeing NHL coaches on the bench shielding their mouths with a hand or play sheet, etc.
Yes, lip-readers are that good. And have been for ages.
Expect more such mouth-shielding from sports figures in public. Even when they’re just spectating, etc.
That way, Ricky won’t lose that number so easily next time.
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