The point is made to him that not everyone in the stands cheered the sight of the stretcher being moved onto the field and that the reaction of a nation to the reaction of a few who painted Philadelphia as the third ring of Hades was not entirely fair.
"I saw the tape," he said in a booming voice of judgment. "It was thousands of people cheering. It was more than just a few."
Perhaps it was too many tocount, but it was too few to condemn a city, which is what happened on talk shows from California to Chicago to Phoenix this week.
Philadelphia went on trial over what happened at the Vet last Sunday - and the verdict was: guilty on all counts.
Philadelphia was a repeat offender, many voices in the national media said, with a rap sheet as long as the Declaration of Independence.
So is it true? Are we a bunch of battery-tossing hooligans with a blood lust that matches that of those who crammed the Colosseum in ancient Rome, rooting for the lions?
If so, than the same surely must be said of sports fans in New York and Boston and even Green Bay, where they once killed the dog of then-Packers coach Dan Devine. The truth of the matter - and this is not to condone the cheering of an injury to a player or the pelting of J.D. Drew with alkalines or any other wrongdoing by fans at the Vet - is that the kind of thing that happened last Sunday is not confined to Philadelphia.
In New York, shortly after the death of Flyers goalie Pelle Lindbergh - who was killed when his speeding sports car hit a wall - the crowd at Madison Square Garden greeted Ron Hextall, his replacement, with chants of "Buy a Porsche! Buy a Porsche!"
The night in 1994 that the New York Rangers won the Stanley Cup, the Garden crowd broke into an obscene chant directed at the Vancouver Canucks' Pavel Bure, offering a "doodah, doodah" at the end. At the Rangers' victory parade a few days later, the chant was: "Kill your wife, O.J., kill your wife."
