To make good on an on-air guarantee, Alexi Lalas won't exactly be daring Sunday.
As an ABC studio analyst for Major League Soccer's New York Red Bulls-Columbus Crew title match Sunday, Lalas will "shotgun" a can of an energy drink because the long-shot Red Bulls made it to the final. At least it will be good on-air product placement: Lalas, a former World Cup player, will slurp Red Bull -- the brand that owns the team.
He says shotgunning -- "for those of you who did what their parents told them and were doing their homework during high school" -- means puncturing the bottom of a can and leaning back and popping the top for high-speed drinking.
Ho-hum. TNT's Charles Barkley once promised he'd kiss colleague Kenny Smith's posterior if then-NBA rookie Yao Ming ever scored 19 points in a game. Yao, in his next game, scored 20. Smith bought a donkey for Barkley to kiss on-air.
In 2001, ESPN's football analyst Lee Corso rode a mechanical bull to make good on wrongly predicting Oklahoma would beat Nebraska. In 1996, then-ESPN announcer Tony Bruno promised to walk from ESPN's Bristol, Conn., offices to Syracuse if the Orangemen made the NCAA Final Four. They did. But he didn't take the hike.
Lalas said he never could have imagined he'd be slamming the drink, given "the Red Bulls' Cinderella run has been amazing to me and probably everybody but a handful of players on the team." And Lalas, who's been the general manager of the Red Bulls as well two other MLS teams, says he doesn't have anything against the team: "Since I played for a bunch of teams and run a bunch of teams, if I had an ax to grind I wouldn't want anybody to win."
--Michael Hiestand
