A football coach in South Carolina had to fact-check a Golf Channel reporter on Thursday after she mistook him for NCAA football icon Vince Young during a live interview at the BMW Charity Pro-Am.
“Played six seasons in the NFL, arguably one of the best NCAA quarterbacks at Texas, picked up golf about four years ago,” reporter Lauren Withrow told Everette Sands ― offensive skill specialist for The Citadel football team ― as he reacted with a smile.
“What’s the biggest shift you made going from the ultimate team sport to now the ultimate individual sport?”
“Now, I apologize, you have the wrong person,” replied Sands as he awkwardly noted that he wasn’t Young, who is also taking part in the tournament.
“I’m Everette Sands over at Citadel, which I’m a football coach.”
He went on to take a swing at answering Withrow’s question.
“But the thing is, the great thing about golf is that I’m not only competing against myself but I’m competing against everybody else.”
Withrow, in an Instagram Stories update, addressed her “day 1 thoughts” on the tournament where she included a caption about learning “from the mistakes.”
You can check out the Mediaite clip of the awkward mix-up below.
Sands later explained to Scott Eisberg, sports director at South Carolina’s WCIV, that he thought Withrow was introducing herself to him.
“She said ‘Vince’ … and said ‘Can I get an interview after you tee off’ and I was like ‘sure,’” said Sands, who picked up on the error as she began to remark on aspects of Young’s football career.
“And I was like, ‘She think I’m Vince Young.’”
Eisberg, who told Sands that he handled the situation “like a pro,” asked him whether Young got a laugh out of the ordeal.
“Vince came up, I said, ‘Hey, Vince, how you doing? My name is Vince Young,’” Sands quipped.
“And he just sorta smiled and I said, ‘Well, let me tell you the story behind it’ so he did a little good chuckle out of it.”
While Sands isn’t the Texas Longhorns icon, the South Carolina native had a noteworthy football career at The Citadel where he’s described as “one of the best to ever wear” the team’s uniform.
Sands, who was inducted into the school’s athletics hall of fame in 2004, was “never tackled for a loss” and never missed a game or practice over the course of his collegiate career, according to The Citadel’s website.
