Ian Rapoport wanted to talk to his source, while radio host Chad Dukes just burned his.
An on-air meltdown transitioned into an unhinged Twitter tantrum Monday after Rapoport, the high-profile NFL Network insider, hung up on Dukes’ 106.7 The Fan Washington-area sports talk show to answer a call from a source for a story he was reporting.
Rapoport apologized immediately — “I’m sorry, I need to take this phone call, I apologize” — and repeatedly later on Twitter, but none would be accepted by the radio personality behind “Chad Dukes vs. the World,” who was so incensed by not being Rapoport’s priority that he tested what words he could use on air.
“That is the last time we have that son of a bitch on this show, I swear to God,” Dukes railed after Rapoport clicked off, with audio courtesy CBS. “What a piece of garbage. That’s twice he’s done that — and he sucked. And he sucked! He had absolutely no … God I hate that guy.
“… In the middle of the interview — I have been doing radio interviews for 15 years now — in the middle of the interview, he said, ‘I’ve got to put the phone down.’ Put the phone down for four minutes, never picked it back up. Just a complete and total disrespectful douche. And then to do that in the middle of a live interview, after you’ve already screwed me once? Go F yourself, dude. You get stuff wrong all the time, and everybody knows it.”
Rapoport, whose job is to relay NFL news and not to entertain Dukes’ listeners, seemed taken aback as Dukes took the feud to Twitter.
“I apologize for that,” Rapoport wrote after Dukes called him an “unprofessional embarrassment.”
“An important source called on a story I just reported about. Couldn’t not answer it. I’m sorry we won’t connect in the future.”
Dukes brayed into the Twittersphere, where he shouted that Rapoport had bailed on the show twice. At one point he also accidentally took his anger out on an imposter Rapoport account.
Rapoport apologized twice more before giving up.
“I don’t know man,” he wrote. “I apologized 4 times. Don’t know what else to say. Have a good night.”
What phone call was so important that it couldn’t wait? Rapoport outlined that on Twitter.
“The interview was 5:05 pm. I had to take the call at 5:15 pm. Then at 5:20 pm:” he wrote to a Big Lead reporter, before linking to a tweet in which he clarified language on how the NFL was recouping money from Jerry Jones over his Roger Goodell attacks.