John Clay’s Sidelines

Fox-41 in Louisville caught up with Terry Meiners to ask about the controversy today over Rick Pitino taking a year off from his TV show, and Meiners being told he was no longer part of the TV broadcasts.

Terry Meiners

Update: Rick Bozich is tweeting from Big East Media Day that Pitino says he is taking the year off from his radio show. Says he was not happy with WHAS, but claims that was not the reason for the change.

Update No. 2: Lachlan McClean of WHAS radio wanted to make sure that I made the distinction that Pitino will not be doing his TV show on WHAS. Pitino is expected to do his WHAS radio show with Paul Rogers.

Via twitter, Terry Meiners has confirmed he’s been kicked off the U of L broadcasts.

He tweeted “true and correct” with link to my earlier blog post.

Then he tweeted:

terrymeiners Terry Meiners
Pitino TV show format fractured. I’m no longer host. No more farce halftime interviews, either. Read my wiki for details.

So we read his wiki:

In 2010, the University of Louisville switched from Freedom Hall to a new downtown arena, tossing out familiar seating assignments for longtime season ticket holders. Meiners publicly criticized[20] school administrators, saying that decades of fan loyalty had been ignored in the re-seating process to accommodate late line jumpers making fresh donations to the athletics department. In a live radio interview[21], Meiners asked a university fundraising spokesman about the number of prime seats school officials kept for its own use, whether school employees who received those free tickets were allowed to resell them “to enhance their compensation packages,” and about advance block sales of seats to ticket brokers before seats were made available to common fans. Meiners was soon removed from an upcoming charity golf tournament where University of Louisville athletics director Tom Jurich was slated to play in Meiners’ foursome. Meiners responded[22] by offering to buy two foursomes in the charity tournament, stocking the one in front of Jurich with four slow-moving octogenarians and the foursome behind Jurich with four long-hitters having “a delightful day of methodical shot selections.”

Shortly thereafter, a university official notified WHAS-TV of changes in the coach’s show[23] show format for the fall of 2010, resulting in Meiners no longer continuing to host the program[24]. WKRD-AM and WHAS-AM sports radio host Drew Deener[25] was selected to replace Meiners on the weekly Pitino television show under whatever format the university approves. Deener’s radio shows are consistently friendly to University of Louisville athletics.

To be fair, news was broken by  a tweet from KSR’s Matt Jones.

Update: Meiners confirms he’s out.

Our friend over at KSR is tweeting this morning that WHAS personality Terry Meiners has been replaced on all U of L broadcasts because of criticism of the school administration.

Matt Jones is also claiming that U of L is not giving access to Rick Pitino because of the station’s coverage of Karen Sypher.

Don’t know if this is true, but do know that Jones is friends with Meiners, and does the UK post-game call-in shows on WHAS. So it stands to reason he has his sources.

And thanks to @BigBlueBass, who led us to this Meiners-Pitino interview from years past.