Rock bottom arrived for the Washington Mystics with a soundtrack of venomous F-bombs and twang-inflected jeers. It was June 6 in College Park, Georgia, late in the third quarter of a dreadful pummeling at the hands of the Atlanta Dream — a game the visitors from D.C. would go on to lose by 32 points — when something within Mystics coach Sydney Johnson appeared to snap. His target: the referees.
By the time his profane, snarling, vein-popping diatribe was over — with no fewer than five Mystics staffers and a couple of players attempting but failing to pull him away from the refs — Johnson was being physically led off the court by police, while his horrified players looked on and a sellout crowd roared and waved bye-bye. Johnson was so heated, had it been a “Looney Tunes” cartoon, someone would have come along and fried an egg on the sizzling surface of his gleaming, bald head.
Perhaps, as Johnson claimed later, he had merely lost his cool at what he perceived to be a glaring imbalance in foul calls.