Olbermann Can't Resist Debunking Bill O'Reillys Athletic Career Again: "I still own your head, Bill" [View all]

[kpete]

Olbermann devoted most of the segment to fact-checking O'Reilly's accounts of his amateur athletic career. During the awkward radio interview, host Dan Le Batard brought up Olbermann's revelation in 2005 that O'Reilly only played club football at Marist College. As Olbermann pointed out, Marist didn't even institute a varsity football program until well after O'Reilly attended the school. O'Reilly dismissed the question, telling Le Batard that it "was varsity football in the sense" that Marist competed against other schools.

Olbermann couldn't hide his glee. "I still own your head, Bill," he said.

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Detailing his baseball career, O'Reilly told Le Batard about the time the New York Mets brought him in for a tryout. While at the now-leveled Shea Stadium, O'Reilly recalled brushing shoulders with another pitcher who was about 5-foot-10 and "threw twice as hard as me." The pitcher turned out to be Hall of Famer Tom Seaver.

Olbermann, a baseball maven, took an axe to O'Reilly story, noting that he got the 6-foot-1 Seaver's height wrong. But the more egregious error, according to Olbermann, came with O'Reilly's timeline of the events.

Seaver’s rookie year was 1967, when Bill O’Reilly had just turned 18. In his biography, O’Reilly put the alleged Met tryout in his senior year of college, 1970 or ’71, by which point the Mets had already won the World Series, and Seaver had won the Cy Young Award. The only part of this story he hasn’t changed was that he — ‘lifelong Met fan’ — did not recognize Tom Seaver.

O'Reilly eventually hung up on Le Batard after swatting away a series of questions about a "controversy" that may have "embarrassed" him and caused "turbulence."


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