A Knoxville sports radio personality apologized on Wednesday for disparaging remarks he made about Kentucky star Makayla Epps earlier this week on his show.
The morning after the Cats’ 64-63 comeback victory over Tennessee at Memorial Coliseum, WNML “Sports Animal” host Jeff Jacoby went off on a rant about Epps, who scored 14 points in the third quarter to help UK get back in the game.
Within the rant, Jacoby said to his co-hosts that Epps is “one of those players that if she plays for you, you love her, and if she plays for the other team, you just want to put your fist through her face.”
The self-proclaimed “Tennessee homer” on the four-hour sports talk show told the Herald-Leader on Wednesday that he made a mistake.
“It was a very poor choice of words to get the point across,” Jacoby said in a phone interview, noting that this was the first major controversy he’d had in nearly 40 years in the business.
“She’s a very self assured player and she’s very good at what she does and I used a very poor choice of words to say what I was trying to get across.”
When Jacoby saw a series of tweets from Epps’ father, Anthony, about not taking kindly to comments about Makayla, Jacoby said he reached out to the former men’s basketball star at Kentucky to apologize.
“I don’t blame her father for being upset,” Jacoby said. “I probably would’ve reacted the same way it if it was my daughter. I just wanted to make sure I very quickly put that out there to him and to her.”
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Jason Barrett is the President and Founder of Barrett Media since the company was created in September 2015. Prior to its arrival, JB served as a sports radio programmer, launching brands such as 95.7 The Game in San Francisco, and 101 ESPN in St. Louis. He also spent time programming SportsTalk 950 in Philadelphia, 590 The Fan KFNS in St. Louis, and ESPN 1340/1390 in Poughkeepsie, NY. Jason also worked on-air and behind the scenes in local radio at 101.5 WPDH, WTBQ 1110AM, and WPYX 106.5. He also spent two years on the national stage, producing radio shows for ESPN Radio in Bristol, CT. Among them included the Dan Patrick Show, and GameNight.
You can find JB on Twitter @SportsRadioPD. He’s also reachable by email at Jason@BarrettMedia.com.
