The 49ers legend was not having a relaxing day on the golf course.
2024 American Century Championship, Jerry Rice / Isaiah Vazquez/GettyImages
If San Francisco 49ers legend and arguably the greatest NFL wide receiver of all-time, Jerry Rice, were to have a team close to his heart outside of the Niners, it would surely be the Los Angeles Chargers. After all, that’s the organization that used a seventh-round pick in the 2024 NFL Draft to select his son, former USC wide receiver Brenden Rice.
And after this weekend, it feels like we can definitively say that it’s not the Kansas City Chiefs.
The 61-year-old Rice was competing in the celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe this weekend, the American Century Championship, and things got heated on Thursday. A pair of reporters asked the Hall of Famer whether or not he believed the Chiefs wide receiver group was good enough to win a Super Bowl.
While that might seem innocuous and harmless — and frankly, in some contexts, informative given Rice’s pedigree as a receiver himself — the 49ers legend did not take it that way, getting in the reporters’ faces and telling them “I will f*** you up” in the incedent that was caught on video.
Jerry Rice yells ‘I will f*** you up’ after being asked Chiefs question
Rice had to be pulled away from the situation by someone in his group but didn’t stop before yelling back “If you want some, come get some!”
As Michael J. Babcock of TMZ noted, they talked to Rice after the incident and Rice said that the two reporters had “smirks on their faces” and the NFL legend believed that they were trolling him after his 49ers lost to the Chiefs in last year’s Super Bowl.
Rice then made sure to add — which Babcock described as “definitely NOT apologizing” — that he didn’t have any plans of standing down in such a situation, saying, “I’m going to defend the San Francisco 49ers.”
Make no mistake, this is a wildly bizarre scene. We’re hearing Rice’s side of the story and not the reporters, so we don’t know if they said they were trying to troll the longtime 49ers receiver or not. Whether that was the intent, however, the reaction from the three-time Super Bowl champion still seemed a bit over the top.
Telling the reporters to get out of his face or just get away would’ve been enough. But to levy a threat right out of the gate and clearly get extremely heated in such a situation is nothing more than an overreaction.