It didn’t take long for WFAN’s Mike Francesa to offer an unflattering commentary of the sixth-round pick of the Giants, Corey Ballentine, who was wounded in a shooting that killed his Washburn University teammate and friend Dwane Simmons over the weekend.
The New York Post showed hustle and reached out to Ballentine’s dad, who hammered the radio host.
“This is the kid that that guy [Francesa] wished he had as his son,” Ballentine’s dad, Karl Vaughn, told The Post.
Ballentine, a 23-year-old defensive back, was celebrating being drafted on Saturday with his friends at an off-campus party when the shooting occurred.
Francesa spoke of the incident on his radio show Monday:
“When you finish your draft and stress how you went out of your way to take the right kind of guys, guys that you want on the team, guys that are going to be great character guys and you stress that as strongly as the Giants did, it looks pretty bad when one of them gets shot on a Saturday night. It does not look good. It’s just more of the same for the Giants, who just can’t get out of their own way, no matter what they say.”
“It’s sad to see the Giants become a laughingstock that they have around the league,” the radio host added.
Vaughn defended his son vehemently:
“I tell you what. You can pick up every stone and every rock on the ground, and you won’t find a smidge of dirt tied to that boy,” Vaughn said of his son. “He never had a discipline referral, never been suspended from school. He was an honor-roll student.”
Vaughn added that Simmons was just as stellar a person.
“Those two kids were best friends, peas in a pod, kindred spirits. None of these young men had been in any trouble,” Ballentine’s dad said.
“It’s senseless violence.”
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