Whatever went down last night between USC coach Kevin O'Neill, his wife, and a 60-something Arizona booster at an L.A. hotel — and reports so far seem to rate the proceedings somewhere between a barroom shoutfest and Antietam — it is worth noting that O'Neill has been a unabashed prick for so long and for so many different employers and to so many different people that it's hard not to admire his awfulness, the way one admires medieval torture devices or Digger Phelps.
Gregg Doyel wrote up a thorough one-sheet not long ago. I'll only add that I was a student at Northwestern toward the end of O'Neill's tenure there, and he was an unabashed prick then, and he was also often very funny, and it was sometimes hard to tell where the funny guy began and the prick left off. I'm thinking in particular of poor Aron Molnar, Northwestern's big stiff of a center, a guy whose game was pure kazoo music. Naturally, O'Neill took to calling him "cuntasaurus." The only surprising thing about this latest "incident" is that it hasn't happened about a thousand times already.
Kevin O'Neill in Drunken Altercation with Arizona Fans & Booster [PointGuardU]