Minutes after their on-air blow up, Patrick Creighton predicted he and co-host Jayson Braddock would let cooler heads prevail, forgive and forget. And he was right. After seeing their outburst go viral, the two hosts were reunited Wednesday night for Late Hits with Patrick Creighton and Jayson Braddock on Houston’s ESPN 97.5.
Both are veteran radio hosts, having worked together for more than a year, but Monday night saw their discussion about James Harden flare up to a level rarely seen or heard on-air. Expletives and insults were exchanged and bled into the break as the show remained on its Twitch live-stream. Eventually, the producer cut the audio as the vulgarities worsened and Braddock walked out with nearly half the show remaining.
Creighton continued the show by himself, but didn’t seem rattled, even telling the audience he and Braddock would make up over the next 24 hours.
“Two minutes after it happened, we both knew we would squash it the next day,” Creighton told Matt Young of The Houston Chronicle Wednesday. “We let it cool off overnight, then we talked about it the next day. I accepted my fault in what happened and he accepted his fault in what happened and we moved on.”
While social media loved viewing and poking fun at the heated debate, the segment escalated to a point where it’s not one for the hosts to be proud of. But credit Creighton and Braddock for being able to move past any embarrassment and get right back to work. Neither host seemed concerned about a lasting impact on their relationship from the argument heard round the internet. Both comparing the incident to a fight between brothers.
“We’ve been doing this for 13 months, and we had one blowup, we’re fine,” Braddock told The Houston Chronicle. “Usually, we’ll go at it and then drop it at the end of the segment, but this time, things got too heated and we got embarrassed by it. We’re like brothers. We’re great friends. The thing I wish I could take back the most is I should have never called this man outside of his name. I would have been even more heated if someone talked to me like that. For me to do it on the ESPN brand in the fourth-largest market in the city, I apologize for that.”
Creighton and Braddock were also helped out a bit by their unique show schedule. Late Hits airs Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday for ESPN 97.5. With the argument coming Monday night, it meant Creighton and Braddock had nearly 48 hours to reconvene.
“The tagline for our show is ‘no-holds barred sports talk,’” Creighton added to Matt Young. “There are a lot of shows that will make up an argument. ‘OK, we both feel the same way about this topic, so you take the other side’ just so they can create an argument. We don’t do that. That’s fake radio. We don’t do fake radio. We say what we think, and sometimes it gets hot. This was just a bad day for both of us and we didn’t move on like we should have.”
Brandon Contes is a former reporter for BSM, now working for Awful Announcing. You can find him on Twitter @BrandonContes or reach him by email at Brandon.Contes@gmail.com.
