Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Riley Cooper made headlines Wednesday (July 31) after a video of the player dropping N-word bombs at country music star Kenny Chesney‘s concert surfaced. A person who witnessed the incident said Cooper had a meltdown because he wasn’t allowed backstage like other NFL players.
Philly sports blog Crossing Broad obtained the video footage of Cooper saying, “I will jump that fence and fight every n-gger here, bro ” at the concert held last month. The blog also reported in June that Cooper, an Oklahoma native, was fighting outside the Lincoln Financial Field, which coincidentally is where his football team plays.
Cooper later admitted that the security person who blocked him from joining fellow Eagles players onstage with Chesney was black, thus sparking the use of the racist slurs. A tipster for Deadspin emailed and offered an account.
“Riley was going f-cking nuts because he wasn’t allowed backstage,” said the tipster. “He didn’t have passes like some of the other players and was SO pissed that the stadium people wouldn’t let him back just because he was Riley Cooper. He had been drinking since 11 AM (Kenny didn’t go on until 8).”
After being fined by the Eagles and reprimanded by the NFL, Cooper has been apologetic about his behavior. He’s also promised to formally apologize to his black teammates during a press conference held last night which followed after a Twitter apology.
“It’s going to be very difficult for me. I’m going to tell them, ‘I’m extremely sorry,’ tell them exactly what I’m telling you guys,” said Cooper to reporters. “There was a confrontation and I handled it extremely, extremely poorly,”
In an unexpected twist, Marcus Vick, the brother of Eagles quarterback Michael Vick, offered a $1,000 reward to any player who would put a hard hit on Cooper via Twitter. After being scolded by his brother, Vick deleted the tweet.
Watch video of the incident below. Hit the jump to see a photo of Cooper’s truck to hammer home the point.
—
Photo:
