Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [386]
This summer, I was driving, and Roddy White didn’t show up for a 6:30 meeting with the Atlanta Falcons. He was a holdout. And literally at 6:31, I got a message about it; at 6:32 it was on Twitter, and at 6:35 it was on our website. You get the idea.
So you have to be very careful about everything. You’re always at the mercy of where you’re getting your information from, so you have to try to get the best information from the best possible people and confirm it as many times as you can, but even then, you never know. You just try to do the best you can to get your facts right, and when you don’t, you apologize to the people. It’s one of the most uncomfortable parts of my profession, because I don’t like to make anybody mad.
Sometimes you fly into patches of tumultuous turbulence with no warning whatsoever. On an otherwise normal day in February 2010, Tony Kornheiser, one of the most popular personalities ever to emerge from ESPN—and one of the most controversial—thought he was being the playfully outspoken scoundrel that his audience expected when he took time on his radio show to offer an impromptu and unsolicited commentary on the outfit that SportsCenter co-anchor Hannah Storm had chosen to wear that day.
“Hannah Storm is in a horrifying, horrifying outfit today,” he began.
“She’s got on red go-go boots and a Catholic-school plaid skirt way too short for somebody in her forties—or maybe early fifties by now… She’s got on her typically very, very tight shirt. She looks like she has sausage-casing wrapping around her upper body… I know she’s very good, and I’m not supposed to be critical of ESPN people, so I won’t… but Hannah Storm, come on, now! Stop! What are you doing?… She’s what I would call a Holden Caulfield fantasy at this point.”
Kornheiser’s brief career as a fashion critic would bounce back and smack him right in the face—and with a severity he couldn’t have expected. He didn’t just stick his foot in a hornet’s nest; he somehow managed to get his entire body in there. Hannah Storm just happened to be one of Norby Williamson’s favorites, and John Skipper had been through a veritable Southeast Asian ground war with Kornheiser since his promotion over Monday Night Football. But it was ESPN president George Bodenheimer who scored the highest on this Richter scale. Bodenheimer was a big Storm fan as well, but more importantly, the principle behind Ronald Reagan’s eleventh commandment—“Thou shalt not speak negatively about another Republican”—was the same for Bodenheimer and ESPN. Bodenheimer’s favorite indoor sport is discussing “the culture” at ESPN, and the notion of one employee speaking ill of another got him about as mad as he had been in a long time.
It was left to Skipper to hand down a punishment that included a two-week unpaid suspension from PTI. Given that Kornheiser earn between $900,000 and $1 million annually, the suspension cost him almost $40,000. More painful perhaps was being banned from the airwaves, for Kornheiser is a guy who loves, and lives, to talk.
Those who felt that the penalty was as inappropriate as the original remarks theorized that ESPN was making a scapegoat of Kornheiser as transparent recompense for the network’s dreadful record on sexual harassment. Kornheiser spent fifteen minutes on the phone, it was subsequently reported, apologizing to Storm.
TONY KORNHEISER:
I understand that I was suspended for saying bad things about a colleague. I was not suspended for saying, “Fuck Jesus,” okay, like somebody else was suspended for; I was not suspended for some drunken episode; I was not suspended for taking a picture of my dick and sending that around to employees; and I was not suspended for sexual harassment. I was suspended for saying something about a coworker that I shouldn’t have said, and I apologized.
DIGGER PHELPS, College Basketball Analyst:
Tony’s the worst dresser in America,