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Reporter involved in tirade: Dez Bryant 'immature person who needs some help'

MMQB.com and Sports Illustrated reporter Robert Klemko joined the Dan Patrick radio show Friday to discuss Dez Bryant's tirade at the media Thursday.

The Pro Bowl receiver's long-running feud with the media came to a head in the Cowboys locker room, resulting in Bryant yelling at one of the club's senior vice presidents to fix it. Bryant later leveled an unfounded charge on Twitter that a black reporter used the N-word.

If you missed the detailed play-by-play, David Moore broke it down.

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Klemko said of Bryant's anger towards ESPN reporter Jean-Jacques Taylor: "He was giving the reporter so much credit. I didn't think it was inspired by noble team-rallying cause. He just lost it."

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Klemko, who tweeted about Dez's rant and was then confronted by Bryant, said, "I never thought he would hit me. I never felt I was in danger or anything like that. ... I think he was searching for his name to see if reporters would say anything. It goes to show you how much players are plugged in and how much they care about what people say about them. ... He has a blow up like this every few weeks. It is the strangest thing I've seen in the locker room.

"You go in there to do a job and interview people for a story that actually matters, and instead we're talking about this really immature person who needs some help, and unfortunately blows up on a bunch of people."

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Klemko explains the incident in more detail:

"With a bad football team, there's usually no one around, but Dez appeared to be there waiting for people. So Taylor walks up, and Dez immediately starts laying into him for a column he wrote that Dez didn't agree with.

"Everybody is just hanging out watching because there is nobody else in the locker room, and Dez is getting louder and louder and cursing him and saying he is tried of people disrespecting the team.

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"The other wide receiver (Devin Street), who I had never heard of, comes over and he starts going off on Jacques too and, Jacques goes, 'I am not even talking to you' and then Devin is like, 'He called me the N-word,' and then everybody's like, 'What?' Then Dez Bryant just starts screaming that over and over again.

"(Dez) looks at the rest of us and says, 'I bet you all aren't going to report that Jacques called Devin the N-word. Then he starts yelling what I tweeted eventually.

"Then I thought, this has moved on from a conflict between reporter and player and now it involves all of us. He is interrupting open locker room to call all of us (expletives).

"I went to some of the local Dallas media guys and said, 'Hey, are you guys reporting this? And they were like 'No, we don't need that kind of trouble with the team.'

I thought to myself, this is pretty newsworthy, so I tweeted it. Literally a minute later, (Dez) is looking at his phone at his locker and he goes, 'who's Robert Klemko?' So I walk over and I raise my hand. He gets in my face like three inches from my face.

"(Dez said), 'why didn't you report that Jacques called Devin the N-word?' I was 10 feet away and I didn't hear it. If he used it, he whispered it. So I said, 'Because I didn't hear him say that, Dez.' And then that's when you see the cameras pan over and Dez is being separated from me by (Cowboys senior vice president of public relations) Rich Dalrymple.