Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [368]
I had watched all of those Kornheiser games thinking, “If I was in that spot, and the expectation was that I was supposed to entertain, and I had this guy with me who was subtly undermining me, changing the subject on me and greeting my jokes with dead silence, I would eventually strangle this person on live TV.” Kornheiser is a better person than I am, apparently.
RON JAWORSKI:
Usually around April, Tony and I would begin talking for the next season and play some golf. It was funny; when the schedule came out, I called Tony and said, “Oh great, man, we’re going to be in San Francisco; we can play Olympic. We got San Diego; we can play Torrey Pines.” I’m naming all these golf courses we would be getting a chance to play at, but I could sense his anxiety. So he says, “Ah, ah, I don’t know if I can do this again.” Well, obviously Tony’s always kind of whining a little bit in a fun way, but I really sensed he had some reservations about doing Monday Night Football again.
Then a couple days before my golf tournament in Atlantic City, which he was coming to, he said he’s not going to do Monday Night Football again, that it was kind of his choice and ESPN’s choice to move in a different direction. I really don’t know whether it was Tony’s choice or that [Jon] Gruden became available—I’m not sure how that dynamic worked out—but clearly Tony was looking to leave maybe six weeks before the actual announcement.
Historians will debate which came first, Jon Gruden losing his job coaching for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers or Tony Kornheiser—Mr. Fear of Flying—looking at the new season schedule and realizing he couldn’t do it all by bus. But even if all the Monday Night Football games had been scheduled to take place in a twenty-five-mile radius, Tony’s time was up once Gruden became available. They had all tried—some harder than others—to make it work, but this dog just wouldn’t hunt.
In Kornheiser’s announcement, he said, “My fear of planes is legendary and sadly true. When I looked at the upcoming schedule, it was the perfect storm that would’ve frequently moved me from the bus to the air.” Chris Berman and his “Boomer” buds reportedly celebrated with a chorus of “Ding dong, the witch is dead,” and competitors at other networks began the countdown for when Gruden would get his next coaching job.
BILL SIMMONS:
Tirico doesn’t sell Tony for three fucking years, then has the gall to say nice things about him after Tony leaves? Come on. What kills me is that Tony got the rap for blowing this when nobody on the planet can succeed in TV if their play-by-play guy isn’t selling them. Period. Five minutes into their first regular-season Monday night game, Tirico had already laughed at more Gruden jokes than he did for three years of Kornheiser. I never thought he wanted Tony in the booth, and that became obvious during the 2009 season, as he turned into Mr. Gregarious and sold Gruden and Jaworski the way a play-by-play guy is supposed to sell his partners. He failed Kornheiser.
Sports Business Journal ran a whole long story about how our ratings are up since Tony left and we’re back to the basics and all that shit. It was all designed to make Kornheiser look bad, and to trumpet how they went in a different direction and “How great are we?” Meanwhile, the reason their ratings went up is that they had two awesome matchups, including the Favre-returns-against-the-Packers game. Of course your ratings are going to go up. We’ve also had a number of other good games. But that’s the only reason the ratings went up. Nobody on the planet watches a sports game for the fucking announcers. And that’s the thing we have never understood. Mike Tirico could leave tomorrow and we could replace him with Mike Greenberg