I was trying to be so cool. The place demanded it.

We were in the very fancy Raffles Beijing Hotel, the sort of posh hangout where no SportsBusiness Journal Olympics correspondent had gone before and lived to tell about it.

On relatively short notice, Gerhard Heiberg, the chairman of the International Olympic Committee’s marketing commission, said he would sit for an interview with SBJ Olympics beat reporter Tripp Mickle and me. (It will appear soon on this very same Olympic microsite.)

Tripp and I prepared. We consulted on questions. We’d have a half hour with him. For the hot, muggy Beijing weather, I even put on long pants. I put on my lone white shirt. After all, this was the IOC. Gotta be princely.

The IOC hotel has as much security as the Olympic Green a half hour away. We navigated that.

I had met Heiberg 15 years earlier, when he was the chairman of the Lillehammer, Norway, 1994 Winter Olympics organizing committee.

So, when he arrived, I reminded him of our previous conversations, one in Minneapolis, one in Oslo, one in Barcelona. He seemed to remember me (maybe).

We sat in a corner of the lobby bar. It was straight out of a Humphrey Bogart movie: chatting with a Norwegian executive in Beijing. Very exotic.

I laid two tape recorders on the table. Tripp had one. I had a notebook and a page with my questions.

A waitress asked if we wanted anything to drink and I asked for water. Mr. Heiberg, being true to his TOP sponsor, preferred a Coke.

Tripp started to pepper Heiberg with thoughtful questions. I was taking video clips of the Q&A. We were such an impressive team, Mickle and Weiner. The same number of syllables as Woodward and Bernstein.

And then it happened.

I wanted to make sure one of my digital sound recorders was properly capturing Heiberg’s words. I moved to examine the machine and …

Splat, clunk, crash, shatter …

My hand knocked over my glass of water. The tall glass tipped and smashed itself on the tile floor. It shattered in many, many pieces. Water filled the table, thankfully avoiding total damage of my recorders. Water spilled over the edge of the table.

Nimble Heiberg had to sort of leap out of the way of the spewing gusher of water. The table drowned in it. Wetness was all around us.

The waitress rushed to soak up the aqua disaster and collect the shards of glass.

Tripp kept asking questions as if nothing happened.

Heiberg survived and was very gracious despite my complete bungling. Has Bob Costas ever been so clumsy in his interviews? It was the sort of impression I would have preferred to avoid.

But, now, I think, Gerhard Heiberg will actually remember me the next time we meet. I can say, “I’m the reporter knucklehead who spilled water all over everything in Beijing.”

I thought I was so cool. Wrong again.