Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [388]
STEVE BERTHIAUME:
First it was the red leather jacket we got on our honeymoon. That was a biggie. We had bought this unbelievable jacket in Florence. It was pretty Hollywood.
CINDY BRUNSON:
It has a custom red zipper up the front, it’s fantastic, and Dan Patrick, on his radio show at the time, said he could not tune away from ESPN News because I was on overnight at the time and it was re-airing. He said, “Every time Cindy Brunson pops up I just lose all train of thought. You have to see this leather jacket.” So I’m getting ready for work and I’m cursing Dan because I just know it’s going to be a problem, and sure enough, as soon as I hit the door, Rob King, who at the time was in charge of news, told me to never wear that jacket again.
BILL SIMMONS:
The week I did my book, I didn’t have a podcast because I was promoting it the whole time, and somebody’s driving home and listening to my podcast with Seth Meyers thinking that it was a podcast I had done this week or that week. But it was a podcast I had really done in July, four months before. In that podcast we were talking about soccer and I was talking about how they call exhibition games “friendlies” in soccer, and I had made some sort of joke like, “Note to soccer: if you want people to think you’re a little less gay, don’t call exhibition games ‘friendlies.’” And we joked about it and moved on. So this guy or this girl—I don’t know if it was a male or female—hears this and flips out and sends an e-mail to Norby that I gay-bashed on the podcast. Everyone flips out, and they’re listening to my last podcast that’s up, which is from the Friday before my book came out and is with my buddy Jacko.
So they listen to that whole thing and the “gay” remark is not in there. They listen to the one before and it’s not in that one either. They listen to, like, three weeks of podcasts and can’t find the thing, and the guy’s like, “I swear I heard it. It’s with Seth Meyers.” So finally they realize that it was a replay of a podcast that ran in July—a podcast that had been listened to two hundred thousand times, by the way. And nobody had said a peep, and all my editors heard it, and everybody had signed off and that was it. So now they don’t know if they should suspend me for a week. And it’s like, “Oh, shit. That came out four and a half months ago.” Finally, I get an e-mail from Rob [King], like, “Did you say something about soccer being a little too gay in the Seth Meyers podcast?” And I replied, “From the summer? I don’t remember. I don’t remember what I said a week ago.” And that was the last I heard of it. Then I come to find out that this is one of the reasons why they’ve cracked down on the content of my podcast even though I have a disclaimer—because of this soccer/gay thing that not one person had complained about. Zero. Could Jon Stewart say that on The Daily Show? Yes. Could South Park make that joke? Yes. Could Jimmy Kimmel make that joke on his late-night show? Yes. But they start cracking down. So I ask Super Dave Osborne. He finishes the podcast I do with him. He tells this joke about—it’s a little off-color. They take it out. Little do they know he told the same joke on Conan O’Brien four days before, and it stayed in. So I’m like, “Now you’re telling me I don’t have as much leeway as an 11:30 late-night show on NBC? I have less leeway than that for a podcast with a fucking disclaimer on it?”
They’ve reached a point now where they have code words, and if you hit the code word, it just comes out. And it’s podcast or dot-com or whatever. Gay? Out. Jew? Out. Hitler? Out. If Matt Berry wants to talk about his “five hottest Jews in the draft”? Out. No discussion, just out. And that’s the way it is now. It’s like the new version of George Carlin’s “seven dirty words.” I worry about ESPN becoming too conservative. Although here’s the part I don’t get: how do you explain my book? It’s a book released by ESPN that has dick jokes and porn jokes in it.