Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [345]
I have an insatiable need to learn and an equally insatiable desire to share—and to provide global perspective. And I think global perspective can be really effective if you can share analogies outside of sports. So I was on Mike & Mike, and we were talking about high school basketball players, and I thought about the New York Times article before I shared it, and I said to myself, “As long as you attribute it, before you share, while you’re sharing, after you share, people will understand that this is not some opinion that you concocted on your own, it was information you gleaned from a first-person article in one of the most reputable newspapers in the world.” That’s the way I thought about it. And so I prefaced it by saying, “This is an article in the New York Times. It was a female Palestinian suicide bomber who couldn’t understand why she couldn’t fight for the nobility of her country the way her brother and father did.” And then I brought it back to young basketball players who are told not to worry about the classroom and just focus on basketball.
The analogy was 100 percent applicable. What I failed to understand was sports talk radio is simply not the forum for sharing those types of intricate analogies, because people will take a very small snippet of that and attach it to your thought processes. It’s wrong, if you listen to it—which many of the people who wrote about it probably didn’t—but that’s the way the world spins. My intentions were nothing but pure: to try to spin it to where I’m comparing high school kids to Palestinian suicide bombers is ludicrous and offensive, especially if you know anything about my background and how my circle of friends is nothing short of a veritable melting pot.
So I wanted to put an apology out there to try to set the record straight, and the interesting thing is, the president of, like, the Palestinian Journalists’ Association wrote me the sweetest e-mail. We wound up getting a wonderful e-mail exchange going—so much so that he wrote an article that ended up in the Huffington Post, commending me for reaching out and trying to rectify the situation. And while for that brief news cycle it was really disheartening, I actually felt good about it on the other side because I’d made a new friend. I thought that we were able to come to an adult understanding about it, and you know, ultimately those things live through a news cycle and we move on. Nobody’s perfect. And it was a great lesson learned for me, and I felt like I was a smarter and better person for having gone through it.
LOU HOLTZ, College Football Analyst:
Forty-seven years ago my wife bought me a pipe, and I started smoking at age twenty-six. Now she wants me to give it up. I said to her, “I don’t abuse you verbally or physically. I don’t gamble. I don’t drink, and I don’t run around. Which one of those vices do you want me to take up? I’m going to have a vice, and if you want me to run around, I’ll put the pipe down and never pick it up again.” She said, “The pipe is fine.”
It’s amazing how many people recognize me on TV as “Dr. Lou” and don’t have a clue that I’m in the Hall of Fame as a coach or had the second most wins at Notre Dame. I never thought people would recognize me for being on TV. I’m surprised by how many people not only watch ESPN but live and die with ESPN.
What I said about Hitler was taken out of context. I talked about leadership, and leadership on a losing football team. People said, “They need leadership,” and I said, “I disagree, they have leadership. Every organization has leadership.” And I said, “A good leader leads a people forward. Hitler was a good leader, for a bad cause. Just because you have people follow you and you’re a leader doesn’t mean it’s necessarily positive. They got leadership on that football team, but obviously it’s not the right type of leadership, because they’re losing.” Jimmy Jones was a good leader but nine hundred people died for a bad cause. All I was trying to say is that not all leadership is good. Maybe I didn’t express it as well as I should have. If Jimmy