Skip Bayless feared Cowboys legend put a hit on him

Skip Bayless is the only person on earth to have separate fears about Charles Barkley and Gil Brandt causing him physical harm.

To be clear, Brandt never put a hit on anyone, but that didn’t stop Bayless’s mind from wandering. On the latest episode of The Skip Bayless Show , the former FS1 host shared his “best” training camp story from his time covering the Cowboys and it goes back about 45 years. Brandt was the vice president of player personnel for the Dallas Cowboys at the time, and Bayless was a columnist for The Dallas Morning News .

Bayless recalled attending training camp the season after Dallas lost Super Bowl XIII to Terry Bradshaw and the Pittsburgh Steelers. At the time, the Cowboys trained at Thousand Oaks in Southern California, where Bayless said he and others stayed at a nearby Howard Johnson’s hotel. Among those staying at the hotel were unsigned Cowboys draft picks.

“One day after practice, a veteran player informed me that Gil Brandt ran the Howard Johnson’s, that he was notorious for putting those draft pick players in rooms that were bugged,” Bayless said. “So that Gil could eavesdrop on the conversation between the agent and the player and know exactly how close he was and what he needed to do to drive the deal home.”

After receiving that information, Bayless started to wonder if he was assigned a room that was similarly bugged, noting he and Brandt were “at war” at the time. One morning, he received a knock at the door, and it turned out to be agent Mike Trope, who was there to serve Bayless with a multi-million-dollar lawsuit. The lawsuit was over a column Bayless wrote about Tony Dorsett’s negotiation with Brandt.

After receiving the lawsuit, Bayless said he began to question if this was all orchestrated by Brandt. The hotel, the room selection, the lawsuit. And then Bayless began to think about what might be coming next.

“My imagination, my paranoia ran amok because I started to think, is it possible that Gil will arrange for an accident to happen to me?” Bayless said. “That he will see that some harm comes to me? Because we were really going at it at this point.”

“I’m having dinner that night in the little restaurant there at the Howard Johnson’s and it dawned on me, I don’t have a weapon. I don’t have any way to defend myself.”

Bayless combatted his lack of weapon by stealing a steak knife from the restaurant that he carried around in case he needed to defend himself. Defend himself from something that would have been orchestrated by Gil Brandt.

“I’m carrying around a little steak knife with me, certainly at night. Just in case I needed to defend myself. And fortunately, and predictably, nothing happened. Because Gil Brandt was not going to go to those lengths,” Bayless said in retrospect. “But my imagination had run completely amok.”

The next time you question, ‘how can Skip Bayless really believe everything he says about LeBron James?’ Just remember, this is a person who briefly convinced himself Gil Brandt might “arrange for an accident” to happen to him, over things he wrote about the Cowboys in his sports column.

[ The Skip Bayless Show ]

The post Skip Bayless crazily feared Gil Brandt putting a hit on him: ‘I’m carrying around a little steak knife.’ appeared first on Awful Announcing .