Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [325]
I think what happened was, these sports reporters are ridiculous. You get a guy like [New York Post columnist] Phil Mushnick, for instance; you would think the guy was a cardinal or something, he is so puritanical, and he takes shots at everybody for everything; if he sees somebody spitting, he lambasts them about what a terrible example it is for American kids. The truth of the matter is, the guy writes for the New York Post, which—really, they’ve got to be kidding. Somebody gets their head chopped off and they’ve got a pun on the front page of the newspaper.
When somebody does something that’s way over the line, like Michael Vick, for instance, these sportscasters go nuts. They go out of their way to get up on their high horses and really let the guy have it. And I think the reason they do that is it’s a smoke screen because of all the other terrible things that these players do all year round that people don’t find out about, all these lousy things that go on. It’s like if they trumpet the big ones, nobody will notice that no one ever says anything about the little ones.
There’s a lot of hypocrisy. When there’s blood in the water, they will all feast, but no one will ever say anything about the little things. People like to make big stands over nonissues. You watch football and everybody’s got their pink shoes on, and it’s breast cancer this and breast cancer that—certainly this is a worthwhile charity, but it’s PR. You’ve got a lot of guys on the field who are flat-out criminals, and they’re wearing breast cancer scarves, so it makes it all okay.
It’s so obvious to me. I guess because they have the final word and there really aren’t too many voices that can point that out. Even your sports talk radio hosts who make their living giving their opinions, most of them work for one of the major sports providers—ESPN or some network that relies on a team to fill their programming time, so everyone is handcuffed and no one says anything about this stuff.
I think that really in the heat of the moment, Rothman said something about me that he wished he wouldn’t have. He’s an okay guy, there’s just this standard in sportscasting that is so far beyond the standards of any other area of broadcasting. I really can’t explain it; it’s very strange.
RON JAWORSKI:
I’ve always had a great advantage: I live twenty minutes away from NFL Films. I’m sitting in my office right now, looking at the Super Bowl tape. And it’s an advantage that really no one else has. And I can sit here thirty to forty hours a week and just look at football. And being at NFL Films, there are always coaches, players, coming through. And we sit and talk and look at tapes. So as a guy that probably hasn’t thrown a pass in nineteen years, I stay close to the game basically by studying the game. Fortunately I was doing preseason games, so I had the in-booth experience—obviously not the profile of Monday Night Football, but I was doing preseason games for the Philadelphia Eagles, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the New Orleans Saints. I was doing five and six preseason games a year. I did the Senior Bowl back in ’96–’97. I was doing some college football. So I was working in the booth. I wasn’t a complete novice. I was aware of the dynamics.
Monday Night Football is an extravaganza with some of the most talented people in the television business that you could ever meet. I realized at those early meetings that I had a lot to learn—the camera positions, the replays, the angles that we have, the Skycam, all those things. I never had a problem with