Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [271]
My job was if I felt like jumping in, to jump in, and my opinion at this point in the season was that the defense of the Eagles was being shortchanged; much of the credit that the Eagles were getting was not going properly to the defense because there was almost a groupie-like approach to McNabb. When I listened to people talk about McNabb on all the networks, I had a sense they were pulling for him in an affirmative-action kind of way. I’m a political guy and I’m sensitive to those kinds of things. There was never an admonition given to me to keep politics out of this, because there was never any assumption that there would be politics in it, and I didn’t really consider the comment I made to be political. So I made the comment, and if you go back and look at the tape, there was some spirited disagreement, but Steve Young piled on and said, “Actually, I think there’s something to this.” I’m paraphrasing, but he started talking about how McNabb is not doing a good job managing a game. Tommy Jackson said, “Well, Rush, somebody’s thrown those touchdowns.” And I said, “Well, I’m not saying he’s not a good quarterback, you guys. I just think maybe you’re looking at the wrong place here in trying to figure out what’s wrong with the Eagles. Don’t you think maybe he’s a little bit overrated?” And at the end of the whole segment that caused all the controversy, if you listen to it all the way through, you’ll hear Michael Irvin say, “Rush is right.” Those are the last words. There were no other comments about that for the rest of the show.
When the show was over we always went to the room with all the TVs to watch all the games, and nobody was upset. Nobody in management. Nobody on the show. Nobody even said a word. The show was in the can. It was done. Everybody thought it was a good show. When they did a postmortem, my comment didn’t even come up.
And on the Monday following that, during the ESPN pregame show for Monday Night Football, it didn’t come up. Tuesday morning is when the firestorm happened. McNabb made his comments and every columnist in the Philadelphia print media wrote about it. When the Philadelphia media shitstorm hit on Tuesday morning, Mark Shapiro called me and said, “This is great. Can you imagine the numbers we’re going to have Sunday?” And I said, “Well, we’ll see.” But the point is he was pleased. Nobody was pissed, nobody was expressing anger to me as of Tuesday morning.
Look, I understand everybody’s reaction. My comment was a little too nuanced for a football pregame show. It was a little bit too honest. I believe in a color-blind society.
MARK SHAPIRO:
I was in Saint Thomas on vacation and did not see the show that Sunday, and I didn’t hear anything at all about it on Monday. Chris LaPlaca called me Tuesday morning and told me Rush had made some insensitive comments about McNabb, which reeked of racial overtones. My very first response was “What did everyone else on the set say?” When Chris told me no one realized what he said, that really set me off. I asked him, “Why didn’t they say anything?” I was furious. This was our Al Campanis moment and we had blown it! Ted Koppel had listened to Al when he said that African Americans weren’t as qualified as white people were for baseball management jobs, and Ted responded right away, opening up the floodgates for a national dialogue. We were supposed to be journalists! It’s our job to challenge! The guys on the air should have interrupted him, they should have questioned his position: they didn’t, so they took a black eye.
CHRIS