General

Pity the Man Who Holds A Fired Coach’s Former Phone Number

May 26, 2010, 3:20 PM UTC

â†µâ†µAs a matter of course in journalism, you never ditch a potential source’s contact information. That doesn’t always work the other way around, where a subject might change their phone contact without alerting many, let alone anyone, in the media.â†µ

â†µâ†µWho suffers in this scenario? The reporters? Sure, it makes their job somewhat more difficult when something newsworthy happens to the subject. But they’ve got nothing on the poor sap who ends up inheriting that phone number. And so it was with 24-year-old Rajesh Kumar, who found himself bombarded with phone messages after Cavaliers coach Mike Brown was fired late on Sunday night. Just because two years ago, he acquired a phone number that used to belong to Brown.â†µ

â†µâ†µâ‡¥After Kumar first got his number and started getting a few phone calls for Brown, he Googled his name and figured out who he is. Kumar would get calls from time to time for Brown and text messages after games, but it wasn’t too much of a distraction.â†µâ‡¥â†µâ‡¥Until now.â†µâ‡¥
â†µâ‡¥â†µâ‡¥“I have gotten over 150 phone calls since (Monday),” Kumar said Tuesday afternoon in an interview with FanHouse from New York. “I took a nap and I woke up and I had 37 voice mail messages. I thought Mike Brown must have lost a big match.”â†µâ‡¥

â†µâ†µ â†µâ†µWhen Kumar gets a call intended for Brown, he politely informs the caller that they have the wrong number. A cricket fan, he doesn’t much keep up on the NBA, so he figures that when the calls spike that Brown must have won or lost a key game. Kumar said he has no intention to change his number, figuring that he can weather the storm of messages until they cease entirely. That seems possible, at least until Brown finds another job.â†µ

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This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.

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