George\u00a0Gillett Jr., owner of Gillett Evernham Motorsports, speaks to the media prior to the start of the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series Checker Auto Parts 500 at Phoenix International Raceway on Nov. 11, 2007 in Avondale, Arizona.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we were in the East or Midwest, the call would come by 11 p.m. or midnight. I was waiting for the call that night and it didn’t come, so I went to bed. At 2 a.m. the phone rang, and it was a grown man who was sobbing: \u2018I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. … we beat you tonight.\u2019 It was Red\u00a0Klotz, the player-coach of our opponent, who had played for the old Baltimore Bullets in the NBA. He was a specialist in the two-hand set shot.\u201d<\/p>\n
By now, Gillett Jr. seemed ready to dribble a basketball around his conference room.<\/p>\n
\u201cI said: “Red, what happened!?\u2019 \u201d he continued. \u201cHe said, \u2018George, you won’t believe it. You guys had a one-point lead with a few seconds left and I put myself in to make sure no one would do anything dumb and you\u2019d win. But somebody threw me the ball. I was almost at midcourt and I just reacted. I let fly a two-hand set shot. Swish. We beat you by one.<\/p>\n
\u201cRed later said that \u2018fans looked at us that night like we had just killed Santa Claus,\u2019 but I think the Globetrotters won their next 8,829 straight. I can still hear Red sobbing. I told him: \u2018Red, that’s fabulous.\u2019 And then we had a press conference \u2013 and we got much, much more publicity out of the loss than any of our wins.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Gillett Jr.\u2019s view, this wasn\u2019t a loss. It was a public-relations bonanza that had wonderfully fallen out of the sky, his wheels of opportunity in high gear at 2 o\u2019clock in the morning.<\/p>\n
Top photo: Canadiens owner George Gillett Jr. cheers with team mascot Youppi! before Montreal\u2019s Bell Centre game against the Carolina Hurricanes on Oct. 13, 2007.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"George\u00a0Gillett Jr., owner of Gillett Evernham Motorsports, speaks to the media prior to the start of the NASCAR…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":907230,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-907229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=907229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907229\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/907230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=907229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=907229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=907229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}