Transcript of South Beach Sessions - Skip Bayless

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Welcome to South Beach Sessions. This is very exciting. Look at who we have here. This is Skip Bayless. Why are you rolling your eyes already? You're rolling your eyes already. I want to get you comfortable. This is a man among a few of them that set the lights on the path for me as a columnist. We have a great deal in common. He was at the Miami Herald before I was.

True.

He was at the LA Times before I was. He was on Sports Reporters before I was him. Mike Wilbon, Mike Lupica, Kornheiser. They showed me how to be a sports columnist and in some instances, how I didn't want to be a sports columnist. We took detours when we got to our 50s, and I want to talk to you about that. I've been pretty critical of you and debate culture and Stephen A. Smith. I don't know how much of that has gotten to you. I don't know how you feel about how much of that has gotten to.

You through Stephen A. Who you have grilled about ruining it all for all of us. Wasn't that your contaminated it in a.

Way that made the athlete a little less human than I would like him to be. But you guys also created a path for me where I was able to zig, where the zagging was because I became a player apologist, someone who was viewed as a player apologist because I was less critical of the athlete than you guys were. And there's great money to be made in everything that we're doing. Some of it feels like professional wrestling. I know that you don't feel like a wrestling character.

No, I am completely the opposite of a wrestling character in that, to a fault. I'm as authentic and real as you can get. And it took Stephen a a while to grasp the fact that while I loved him, I genuinely wanted to beat him. Every time we argued sports, it became known as debate, your least favorite word in the culture. And he realized over Time. I'm as real as you can get to my core, that I take it very seriously, way more seriously than I take myself. But if you challenge me with the little red light on across the desk from me, I am going to fight you to the death. To the TV death. But when it's over, I'm over. I'm done. And when we go to break and I walk away from the desk for a couple of minutes to start to prep for the next debate, I have let it completely go. I don't hate you. I won't take it home with me. As my wife, Ernestine, will attest, it's a sports debate that I took very seriously, and I probably kicked your ass in it. But now we go to the next one, and we're still good, and I still love you, and I want you to love me, but it's very real, and it translates through the camera, especially to younger viewers.

Wow. That just happened. And that felt like it wasn't fake, that it wasn't tricked up, it wasn't contrived debate. That felt real to the viewers because it was 1000% real. So that's where you and I were different from the start.

Well, I will say you're a game changer in this regard, because you basically birthed the idea of debate, television, of conflict. One of the objections, not consciously.

It just organically, it's just who I am. So I started actually being me. I don't play a character. I play me on tv. And if you know me off camera, I can be a little shy and less gregarious than others in our business. But I think for my mom, she was very outgoing and a very good public speaker. And she forced me, when I was in maybe third grade, to take public speaking lessons because her mother had forced her to take same lessons from same person, a woman who was in a wheelchair, this was in Oklahoma city, Oklahoma, named Ms. Miller. And I had to go every Wednesday to Ms. Miller, having memorized a poem or an oration or whatever to give for Ms. Miller. And then we would have recitals every six or so months at a church where all the families would come, and you would have to stand up, having memorized your work, and emote and project the way Ms. Miller taught. So I had that gear in me that when the light comes on, I can go. And it's not fake. It's actually the realest.

I'd argue it from afar a different way, because what my observation of this and this has to do with recognizing me more than you is that this version of you is actually the most confident version of you. The other version of you, wherever it is, away from the light, wherever it is that the idiosyncrasies are or the patterns.

No, I'll buy you.

Well, you grew up rough, though. Your biography, your parents. It seems like a hard household that you grew up in.

It was rough.

And those marks would be something that allow you in this space, to be the performer, the best you, the most confident you. And then you don't have to look so much at the places where you're not as comfortable inside of your identity. Because I've always thought that the reason that you think this is such a serious thing that we're doing is because it feeds you the most. It nourishes you to be good at this, to be arguing with somebody in front of people and then be a winner, feel like a winner.

Okay, I would buy that. I think it's very insightful. And not to go too deep on this, but I was the first born into a household of two parents who didn't even finish high school. My father was just a bad man. He was evil to the core. I don't know. I asked my mother many times, why did you marry him? And they just had a sexual clique from the start, as a lot of people do. And she made a mistake and stuck with the mistake for the sake of her mother, to impress her mother. And I was the first, and then my brother and then my sister came. So there were three of us stuck in a household with the father who tore us down, especially me as the firstborn, because it came across to my father that my mother started to love me more than she did him. So he constantly, physically tried to beat me down, but he couldn't because I grew. I was pretty big for my age, so I stood up to him when I was 8, 9, 10 years old. We actually had a fistfight when I was 16 years of age that he lost.

And that was sort of the end of him. He left home after that, not because of the fistfight, but that was the end of his run with us. Actually ran off with a close friend of my mother's who lived five houses down, and they left and went from Oklahoma City to Tulsa and started another little Hole in the Wall restaurant there, because we always had our little Hole in the Wall restaurant on the south side of Oklahoma City called the Hickory House, which barely made it. Sometimes we had some money, sometimes we didn't. But to your point, he constantly told me I wasn't. I Couldn't. No, you can't. No, you'll never be anything. Because he wanted me to think of myself as subservient to him and that I would view myself as a potential failure. So then sports came, and right away I was really good at sports. 7th, 8th, 9th grade. But more important, I found I was really good at school. I'm going to a public high school in Oklahoma City. It's a really good public high school. But I started making. Not even trying. I started making straight A's, and I made A's all through high school except for driver's ed, which I took in summer school.

And they did not give A's in driver's ed because they didn't want any kid to think he or she was actually a great driver because that would be a dangerous proposition. So I made a B in driver's ed. I lost valedictorian to Justine Coyle, who went to Harvard, and she did not take driver's ed. So I lost on that technicality that I took driver's ed and I got a B. So I was the salutatorian to her valedictorian. I'll never forget it. Never forgive her for not taking drivers out. Why is winning so important to you? I don't know. It's all I had because I think I'm trying to show my father. Look at this, look at this, look at this. Every morning I got up, I retrieved the paper off the front porch. Back in the days that we remember fondly, when you actually retrieved a paper off your front porch and come rain or snow, I would go out and get it and bring it in and pull the sports section out. I would fold it wide across the floor. I would get down on the floor and read it. He would come in and take the main section, sit in his chair and start to read it.

And I would devour the sports section to the point that I could remember box score numbers that would just blow my friends away. And it wasn't like I was a stat nerd, but I was fascinated with the why of sports. Why? Why did I have a ceiling? Why? At some point, I thought I would play college baseball. But then I got to the point my senior year, and I was good. I made all area as a catcher, believe it or not, because I like to control the game from the catcher position. And I needed to know what. Why was I finite? What did he have? And they went on to play this or that.

Why could they be professionals, make a career at it? Why was there a ceiling for Me that I don't get to win. I don't get to be the ultimate winner here. My body isn't. I'm not talented enough to be a professional great.

And I know what happened to me. I lettered in baseball as a sophomore and very few at my school lettered as a sophomore. So I. I was pretty good. And then I'd always been a catcher. And as a junior, I came out of basketball season and stepped right into the starting shortstop position because my coach said, you're a good enough athlete. I need a shortstop. We had a senior catcher named David Capshaw and he was really good and he wanted to play junior college type baseball, but he was a little better than I was as a catcher at that point. And so Coach Havenstriit said, I need you to play shortstop. I'd never fielded a ground ball in my life and this was called the Mid State Conference. I don't know if you remember Daryl Porter. You probably don't.

Yes, no, I do. The catcher. Professional catcher.

Thank you. Oh, was he for Kansas city and then St. Louis and he was the MVP of a World Series in 1985 for the St. Louis Cardinals under Whitey Herzog. Well, I competed against Darrell all the way up. So our opening game is against Darrell Porter's Southeast Spartans at our place. He was also a catcher and a shooter in basketball, led our league in scoring and a really good high school quarterback. Oklahoma wanted him badly, as did everybody else, and he signed with the brewers, who took him fourth overall. Anyway, so that's sort of what I'm up for.

So he's just better as an athlete than you are.

I'm looking at him and he's bigger than I am because he's 6 2, 195. And I'll quickly go to this story, but my junior year, I started at shortstop and I was a horror story at shortstop. And we had a pretty loaded team of seniors and I was the only junior who started. And I just. I had a hellacious time trying to feel ground balls I could throw. I never had any problem, had no throwing errors the whole year. But turning to. And all the things that you have to do, I just didn't. I was a good athlete, but I didn't have the skill and the know how of it or the natural. I watched last night watching the baseball playoffs and the shortstops are just flawless because they've been doing it since they were little kids. And hard hit balls that take wicked hops. They just. They're so natural with their hands. Hands Of God and of gold. I didn't have that immediately. And right away I'm getting hot shots at shortstop and I'm botching balls, and the team's pitchers are looking at me like, come on. Well, I just didn't know how to do it.

So then we also played Southeast at Southeast. It was during spring break, and I finally got moved back to catcher. At this point, we had a pitcher who was the state basketball player of the year. White guy, 6 foot 10 inches tall, named Steve Mitchell, May he rest in peace.

Where are we going with this? Where's this story taken? Darryl Porter, Okay?

Darryl Porter hit a ball out of my glove. I'm catching. He hit a ball out of my glove over the tennis court fence that served as the right field fence at Southeast High School, where Bobby Mercer went. It cleared it by 20ft, and I'd never seen anything like it before. And the sound of bat on ball, that was my flashpoint moment of, I can't do this, I can't do that. So I'm. I'm absorbed by. Who is Darryl Porter, who grew up around the Hickory House where we had the restaurant on the south side, tough side of town. And I got to know him later. He played for the Texas Rangers when I was a Dallas columnist. And he winds up overdosing on cocaine and dying in a park in Kansas City as he was becoming a broadcaster for the Royals. And it just shook me to my core. Why couldn't he be happy with something that a lot of us would have crawled to do? Right? MVP of the World Series. Okay. So that has obsessed me, possessed me to the point that it fuels me in my career. The why of it. Why is he better than him?

Why is she better than she is? Why is he better than she or she better than he? What is happening here? And so that's what I like to argue. Argue about or debate about or discuss.

I'm a little more interested in the sociology of athletes, like the roots of how they became who they became. The story that I have in writing that's like, that is that when I was in college, I was reading a story by Gary Smith in Sports Illustrated, and halfway through it, I just.

What a gift.

I threw it across the room because I'm like, I can't do that.

I used to do that with Frank Deford. Do you know Frank?

Yeah, of course. Yes. So you used to. So we were different columnists, right? You had great success as a newspaper columnist at the LA Times, Chicago Tribune and Dallas Morning News and Times Herald.

There in Dallas.

But a harsh newspaper columnist sometimes, when.

Called upon to do so, harsher than.

Most, I would say. This is when I say that you guys laid the template for me. So I'm coming out of school in my 20s, and I don't know exactly how it is to do this, but the voices who are doing this on the sports reporters and elsewhere, they're raining down pretty good judgment on the athletes. They're hitting them pretty hard in places that I'm like, okay, this is the way that you do it. And I look back at my 20s now, and I have some remorse about the things that I wrote, because there was not a compassion in the writing that I was reading. There were columnists who were getting ahead. You got. Skip, you were a columnist at 26 years old. We don't know shit at 26. So was I, by the way. But we don't know shit at 26 years old. Like to be condemning other people on what their behavior is when we're 26 years. I wasn't an adult at 26. I'm not sure I was an adult at 36. To give that role to a columnist was something that I wasn't prepared for.

By the way, quick story there. Soon after I got that column job, my sports editor in Los Angeles at the Times named Bill Shirley also wrote occasionally. So he did a think piece about all the young gun columnists around the country in various cities, including me. And so he went to some of the legends, like Dave Anderson at the New York Times, and asked them, is 26 too young to write a column? And of course, Dave Anderson, he has no idea. He has no idea what's happening around him. And I probably didn't. But I think. Didn't we at that time, as young gun columnists, appeal to younger readers who might think, gee, he's looking at it more the way I would. Even if he doesn't know sh. About what's going on around him in real life, maybe he's his younger view of that athlete or that development in and around the Dallas Cowboys might be more appealing to younger readers. I don't know. That's just.

Well, you set. You set a template in the way that you were doing it where it seemed like the tension that could be between media and athletes. If we're 26 and we don't actually know what we're talking about in terms of what it takes to be Daryl Porter. Right? What. What it takes. We're trying to figure it out. I wasn't a very good athlete. There were Times I was scared of the ball, but I was always interested in the people who were great at it. And we come in and we're critical. And I would say, so if you're leading me down a path as a columnist where you're being very critical of the athlete, and that's what I'm learning. Lupica's parting shots on the sports reporters. How do we get in front of people with our voice? It's to be critical. That's all I'm learning of how it is to do this. And then you get to debate television and you change the form there and some of that ends up being so high bar critical that even LeBron James, somebody who by any standard is a majestic athlete for all time, you're chasing him across 20 years with a, you know, a torch and a pitchfork, finding his every flaw and benefiting from it.

I wouldn't say torch and pitchfork, but I don't want to start on LeBron, but I have always said, and continue to say, still the best passer in basketball, still the greatest driver of the basketball I have ever seen. I've seen a whole lot of LeBron.

You want more from LeBron?

He just wasn't born with the clutch gene, as I nicknamed it. And I can show you time after time after time that he wasn't. And remember, I'm always on the debate tableau where I'm constantly debating, Is LeBron better than Jordan? And I don't know your opinion of that, but I got it thrown in my face again and again, laughably, that LeBron James is better than the mentally toughest athlete I have ever been around, gotten to know, closely observed. And LeBron at times in his career has been one of, among superstars, one of the mentally weakest athletes I have closely observed in big moments. And you were certainly there for his first run with the Heatles.

My point isn't about whether or not where it is that we have our criticisms of that. It's more of, I believe sports are meant to be celebrated. And where debate culture gets rewarded, that celebration ends up getting diluted. There's not, there aren't a lot of shows that you guys or that anyone is doing. It's harder to praise than it is to criticize. It's harder to do two and three hour shows around celebrate. I think around celebration than about arguing about who's right or who's wrong, about who deserves blame.

Unless you're arguing how great Michael Jordan truly was, that he was in another universe from LeBron James. I can do two hours on that right now. And I am worshiping, I am idolizing, I am on my knees, I'm genuflecting for Michael Jordan, just as I was for Tom Brady, just as I have been for Shedeur Sanders, because I think he's really, really gifted and is going to be really, really good in pro football and should be the first pick in the draft. I go that way too, just as emotionally strongly as I go negatively on whoever it is.

Lebron Stugotts, more muscular. Mm. I have lost ten pounds. Have you? Yeah, using my peloton. I've had the peloton in my house. So my daughter, she wanted me to get a peloton. I did. She used it a couple of times, but once she left the college and the peloton was just sitting there in my office and it wasn't being used, I said, you know what, I gotta use this. And I have lost 10 to 12 pounds, Billy. So I started using peloton as a bike. Obviously that's like what they're known for. But recently I discovered all of the other classes that they have. They have like a series of weightlifting classes. They have programs which for me the programs is great because I don't have to think about what I'm doing. If not, I just go and I pick a class at random. And I don't know that I'm actually accomplishing anything. I would like some recommendations on classes because I keep going to the same class. Okay. It's the Grateful Dead class. By the way, you do like a four week four program with Emma Lovewell. Right. I would recommend that one. Okay. Anyone can do that.

Any level starts out, you know, easy and then you work your way up and then there's like a Core Program 2 that you can do after Core Program 1 if you want to do that. Yeah. If you graduate. Wait a second. You have to graduate course one to get to course two, the harder course. Well, you can start a course too if you want, but I eased my way in. I did course one first. Then you can do some strength classes with Andy. Love a strength class with Andy. He really puts me me through it. I get up and I'm like a sweaty mess and I'm kind of disgusting and I love it. You know, thing about peloton Stugotts. What? Peloton coaches, they walk the walk.

Really?

Yeah. Do they talk the Talk? They have sub 3 hour marathon runner coaches. They have military trained athlete coaches, former college basketball player coaches, and so many other well rounded coaches on their team. All this experience really shows in their classes. You're never short of challenging. You can do some resistance. Resistance band classes. I got some resistance bands lately. You're my teacher. Am I? Yeah, you know, no, I'm not. Well, I just go with the program, so then I don't. Okay. Because I don't know. I don't actually know what I'm doing anyways. What's the like Mr. Olympia, right? Is that what it's called? Yes. The one where you go and you're like lifting atlas giant boulders. Yeah. Hey, we should talk to Magnus again. That's Mr. Olympia. Yeah. Yes. What? Did I say Olympus? Did I? I don't know. Anyways, find your push. Find your power. With peloton@1peloton.com.

Well, let's talk about your upbringing a little bit. Because you described your father as evil. I've read that you said both of your parents were alcoholics. And so I imagine that growing up amid that would be something that would have you feeling a lack of love or wherever it is, just lost.

Just lost. Because I was the firstborn, so I had to figure this out. And my father was what they called a functional drunk, in that I've never seen anything like it. He could get up and immediately pour himself a vodka and orange juice. And then he always forced me to work at our little barbecue restaurant, the Hickory House. And so many nights during summer days or holidays when I was forced to work, I would have to ride home with him driving drunk because he would get himself a full cup of Coca Cola and then he would pour half of it out and fill it up with vodka on the way home and sip it through a straw all the way home. I didn't know anything about driving drunk, so I'm knocking on wood. Thank you, God for getting me this far. But he could function that way. And then he sent my mother completely over the edge. And she was the opposite as a drunk of him. She was a fall down, sloppy, sappy, gooey drunk who got silly and over lovey. And she just couldn't function at all when she began to fall to the bottom of the bottle, which happened through my high school days into college.

She went to AA. See, I was two years out of school, so what was I? 24? Ish? She went to AA and saved herself, God bless her. She's no longer with us, may she rest in peace. But neither she or my father were ever there for me, as I was the oldest, trying to go out into the real world and figure it out. If you need to be picked up. You couldn't trust they were going to show up. And I couldn't talk to them about anything that I was suffering through. I had to keep it to myself. And you tend to. I had the same girlfriend all through high school who got me through high school because you have to have somebody you can confide in and lean on.

So did they embarrass you much?

Oh, my mother occasionally did because she would show up drunk sometimes at school or a couple times I had little parties, like New Year's parties at home. And she would get fall down drunk. And my friends would be like, God, your mom, you gotta do something about this.

Was there warmth in the household?

No, they were both very cold people. And no one ever said, I love you. That was not. Now everybody says, I love you. And so I try to go out of my way with my friends. I love you, man. Or sometimes women in the vein of, I just love you with all my heart and soul. And if I commit to you, if I'm loyal to you now, I will be loyal to the death with you. And that came from my upbringing because nobody was ever loyal to me.

What would you say was in your childhood that felt like love to you?

Nothing. It was as cold and dark as it can get. Reading books was love to me. That's why I was everything. I read like crazy, because it was my great escape. I could go home when it was snowing outside and just curl up with a book and just blow through it. I always won the book reading contests in grade school. I would read the most books, write the most book reports.

I've always assumed from over here. Right. I'm just doing this observationally. I can't pretend to know you, that all of this is a great hiding place so that you don't have to examine all of that. That reading and writing and escaping and imagining and debating and all of this stuff feels better than having to go and be introspective about. Well, that's the shit that shaped me. And it was cold and it was bad and it left me, you know, a bit sandpapery.

Yeah, I buy that. But I looked it right in the teeth from day one. Never went to any kind of therapy, but I didn't embrace it. I just. I got to the bottom of it. By the time I went away to college, I knew what it was and what it wasn't and what I had to do. And I got saved by the grace of God. However you want to look at. I don't know what your Higher power is, but I know what mine is. And God plucked me out of that broken home and saved me my senior year of high school because I won a scholarship to go away to Vanderbilt University, which I'd barely heard of, and talk about setting you on a path that got me off a path to hell and put me on a path to success.

I would assume, though, that if dad feels evil and it's cold, and dad is always hitting you with not good enough, well, as writer, people keep telling me that's true. I'm good enough. The things that I'm doing and being rewarded for everywhere. And the way that I'm doing this, you can criticize it all you like, but it seems like I'm good enough everywhere. I would assume that that would pass for identity shaping, that you would gravitate toward that, because it feels a hell of a lot better than anything that came before it.

I would agree. Yet it always amused me and amazed me that all through high school, as I mentioned, I make straight A's. So I don't know how your high school was, but there was a requirement that when you get your little slip of all A's, you have to take it home and have your parents sign it and bring it back. Was that something.

Oh, I recognize this. I ran away from home when I was young because I came home with all A's. I mean, it was for 12 hours. I. I had nowhere to go. I was at a bus stop down the street. But it was. You know, it was. I got all A's and I got a C or B minus in something. And my father. That's all my father noticed was, and it's all he said. So. Yeah, like, it's some of the same. It's. Look, man, our paths are super similar.

I mean, not.

I don't. Not that I do not have this darkness in my childhood where. Where my parents weren't warm. That's not what I have. But. But the path to what it is.

Your father was very warm. Yes, well, because I got to know him.

Where did you get to know him? You got to know him on television.

You felt like you as much as you can know somebody from television.

This is what I would say, though, where people are characters and not characters.

That's true.

My mother would say all the time, I would love to have an affair with that man on television.

There you go.

And it's not bingo. It's just because when the lights come on, you would recognize.

Funny, smart. I got it.

Yeah. The best you makes an appearance the.

Point was I would bring straight A's home, and no one would look at it because they did not care. And I would have to go say, could you just sign this? Yeah, sign it. Okay. And I'd say, other kids are getting paid for these grades back in the day. I'll give you $5 per a. Really? And I'm bringing nothing but A's home for four. We'd had four years of high school for four straight years. And. And you don't even acknowledge. And so I just happened, Grace of God, to have a sophomore English class, advanced English Northwest class in high school that was taught by the journalism teacher because she taught one class a day in English just to see if she could find a prospective writer for the school newspaper that she oversaw. So the first day of class my sophomore year, she said, I sign you a book report. I just want one page. I don't want five pages. I want one page. Pick any book you want, and I want to see if any of. She called us you people, if any of you people can write. And of course, I chose a sports book on a quarterback you might or might not remember, named YA Tittle, who played for the Giants.

There's a bloody picture of him on his knees. That's famous. That was on the COVID of Life magazine. So I read it in about an hour and a half, because I think it was written in an hour and a half. And I don't know what possessed me, but I wrote a scathing book report, review of the book, because I was embarrassed for the writer and ultimately for YA Tittle. And I didn't know I'd not written my name before that or more than my name.

And so you come out of the.

Box critical of the writer, But I had no guidance. It just happened. So I handed in. And on Friday of the first week of school, she called me up to her desk, and she was. She was a tyrant. She was a whore. She could be a witch, but I loved her. Mrs. Burdette. And my friends looked at me when she called me up like, God, what did you do? March up to her desk, class is dismissed, and she says, you're coming into journalism. I said, no, I'm sorry. I have no interest whatsoever. Nope, you're coming into journalism. You're going to write me two sports columns a week. Now I'm a sophomore in high school. I'm playing sports. I said, I. She said, I know you play. I've done my homework on you. You're going to write two columns a week. I said, Do I write about teams I play? Yep, you're going to write about teams you play on. And by the way, my senior year, I wrote a column criticizing, at the end of the year, my baseball coach, who nobody liked on my team. So you want to talk about an inside job?

I was the source for the story because I actually played for the team. I don't know if that's ever happened before, but she did that. She, she. And she. And to your point, she'd say, you can do this. I can. Where did it come from? I don't know where your first writing happened. Where?

No, that's where. That's how it happened for me in. In high school. It's the first time anyone ever told me I was good at anything.

Okay.

And so I just followed that because I didn't feel like I was special in any way. I had an English teacher who made the class fun and made me care about words. But when you talk about some of the things you're talking about here, it sounds like you didn't have a whole lot of people telling you that they were proud of anything that you were doing. It sounded like there was some carelessness around even the good things that you were doing. And so you get some reinforcement early on something and then you chase that because that feels good when she pushes you into the discipline of it.

Right. Okay. So I had only one quasi warm moment with my mother in my life. And it happened over something I was attempting to write because my journalism teacher said, I want you to review a movie because you can do this. So that Friday night, I had gone to see this Clint Eastwood movie. You won't know it. It's a blast from the distant past called Coogan's Bluff. About. He's a cowboy cop who goes to New York City. And I'm trying to write the review at night. And I couldn't get it to detonate. I couldn't find the thread to go to the bottom. I'd never done it before. So I said, you know what? I've had enough. I'm going to sleep. I'm going to set my alarm for 5:00 because she wants it when I go to school at 8:30. And I'm going to get up and I'm going to finish this. And my mom got up to get something. Not alcohol, but something to drink. And she came and knocked on my door and said, why are you awake so early? And I said, I'm stuck on this. And she said, well, read it to me, because I'd Never read anything to her.

So I started reading her my Coogan's Bluff review. She said, that's really good. And she was just being honest. She said, I like it. What's wrong with it? I don't know. She said, just keep going. It's great. And I blew through to the bottom. And I turned in at 8:30, and Mrs. Burdette loved it. Okay. So that was the only time I got any shred of warmth from my mother was that early morning because she knocked on my door to see what was happening. Why was I up so early?

And never from your dad?

Never? Oh, never.

So tell me about Katie Bell Henderson. What did she provide you?

So because my grandmother knew my parents were such wrecks, she often offered to have me and sometimes my siblings, but often just me. Early on, at 7, 8 and 9, stay at her house. She wasn't a wealthy woman, but she traveled for her work. And she had a black woman who helped her, who ran the household for her. And I hate to tell the story to people who think, oh, it's Deep South. It's not Deep South. It doesn't have that sort of feel to it. It's not the help. It's not plantation mentality. Katie Bell just worked for my grandmother, and she was honored as the overseer of the whole household. So I was taught from day one to honor her just the way I honored my grandmother, but not my mother, because she was lost to me. So Katie Bell saw what was happening and took me over through my formative years. And she was far more of a mother to me than my mother was. She would discipline me. She would grab me by my lapels and shake me. She would look right in my eyes and say, you can't do that. And she taught me the word hypocrite.

That was her favorite word. You're being such a hypocrite to do that. And without her, I wouldn't be me. She taught me right from wrong. She honored me. She told me I was good. She knew I was good. She knew I had real potential. And she drove that home to me and her granddaughter named Audrey. Katie Bell was from Chicago. She grew up in Chicago, born in Birmingham, Alabama, but Audrey lived in Chicago. And Audrey would come every summer and stay for like, a month with Katie Bell. So I would hang out with Audrey. This is age 7, 8 and 9. Long, hot summer. We're making up games in the backyard. And it was invaluable to me to be exposed to her as a black girl at that point from Chicago, where I would eventually work because I wanted to know all about what's it like in Chicago, what are the streets like, what's the culture like? How is your upbringing different than what I'm going through in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma? So all of this saved me. It was absolutely a gift from God for me. Katie Bell Henderson, is there any particular.

Reason that you haven't tried therapy or tried to sort through what the roots of your upbringing have to do with how you are now as an obsessed adult in your profession that cares so deeply about the doing of this and the identity that one gets from this that you've chosen. Ernestine has changed your life, but you've chosen not to have kids. You've said, I would be a worse father than my father.

I wouldn't want to turn into my father, which often happens, whether you like it or not. You're just destined to become too much of your father, and I would never want to do that to a child. Plus, I knew in our business, as you know, you often have to move to move up, even though you've been very blessed with your path, that stayed pretty much in South Florida. And I just knew in my heart mine was going to take me all over. And it did. And so I didn't want to do that to kids to keep up uprooting new friends. It's just not fair. And plus, I was. So I told Ernestine, she hates this story. But the night we met our. When? The night we met our first date, we're at a little pizza parlor on First Avenue in New York City, 2005. I just knew it was going to go someplace. So I said, hey, if this does go any place between us, just know you'll always be number two to my work, which is beyond my work. It's my life. It's my reason for being. And she says now, well, at least I became 1A.

And she did become 1A. But I don't need therapy. I'm good. I mean, I'm happy, I'm content, I'm confident in who I am. And I don't need to pay somebody, however much it is 500 bucks an hour to listen to me. You're helping me right now.

Well, I just want the tools. Do I owe you? I don't think of any of this as pejorative. Right. I don't think of downloading someone who might see blind spots that you don't see to give you tools so that you can work on things. Because when I say I recognize some of the things you're Talking about when I met my wife, the first week I happened to be off work, and so we were pinballing all over Miami. Every night was a different adventure. And I said to her that first week, hey, this isn't what my life is. Just so, you know, like, I don't. This is not the space that we are or me, I'm going to live in because I have to get back to work. And work is a very serious and important thing. But she's also helped me shake, rattle, and turn upside down what had been my worldview, because I get too much of my identity from this stuff. And so I'm not saying to you, have you not explored therapy? Because I'm judging you as something wrong or unhappy with you. Just, you do have a lopsided amount of your identity poured into this thing.

And, for example, you can be obsessive in a way that has done cardio every day but two since 1998.

Yeah, that's true. Actually.

Your eating regimen is insanely vigilant and the same.

I'm not an angel, but it's pretty strict.

Well, tell people what are the most extreme. I mean, no two cardio days missed since 1998 seems to be a level of obsession that I'm not going to say it might be unhealthy, but it's certainly obsessive.

It is. So when I was 14, my father was in maybe his third try of rehab. We would always go to the VA because he was a veteran of World War II in the Air Force as a bombardier on a B29. And so it was free to go to the rehab at the VA center hospital. And so I participated in many sessions with psychiatrists that were counseling for the entire family. So the first session I had in this certain rehab stint, it was a female psychiatrist who immediately asked me, as the oldest, do you drink alcohol? I'm 14. No. And I'd only had a taste of it because at parties when I was like, five, my parents would have their friends over and as a little party trick game that they would ask me to take a sip of their hard liquor or their beer. And of course, I would go bitter beer face and spit it out because it was horrible. And they would laugh. And I don't laugh at the story because it saved me, because I thought it was horrible. And I went through stints where I tried to sip a little wine and it was just bitter.

It didn't taste good to me. And it's miraculous how your taste buds will adapt. Sometimes devices, but okay, so the point was. Let's see what we're talking about. Your question was about. We were. Obsession with the. Okay, so obsession.

Two days of cardio since 19.

Okay. So when the psychiatrist asked me, do you drink? She said, please don't start, because you are genetically predisposed. Double. You've got double alcoholic genes in your body. And I do. So how did I defeat that? My alcohol is cardio and weightlifting. Just any kind of workout exercise or playing basketball or playing golf or. I'm obsessed with all of the above. So that's.

Those are your addictions.

Those are your addicts. I'm addicted.

Those are your vices.

And at least can we say they're positive addictions. Is that fair? I think they are.

Well, if they make you happy, and there are things that make you feel.

Happy, as long as they don't destroy. Destroy me. Because I do too much and I stay a little bit sore all the time. I'm a little bit sore from this morning right now. My knees are a little achy.

Well, no, I've seen you work out. You go like. You go at it strong. When we did PTI in Washington, we were in those same gyms. And you would.

Oh, yeah, we were.

You would go. You would go in a way that was really aggressive. Why'd you miss the two days? What are the stories behind the missing of the two days?

So I was the columnist at the Chicago Tribune in 1998 during the last dance run in the Chicago Bulls. It was their second round playoff series against Charlotte at the United Cent on a Sunday afternoon. I was new to Chicago for about. I've been there maybe three months, and I did not yet have a doctor. It was still snowing, of course, and I caught something upper respiratory and got my usual sinus infection, and I was a wreck. And my literary agent named Sherry Wink, who lives in Chicago, on Saturday night, she said, you can't run tomorrow. You just can't. You don't even have a doctor. You're. You're going to, you know, like, get. Get in some serious trouble here. So I didn't. That was the first time, and way before that that I hadn't done any cardio. I did go to the game, and I did write my column. And so that was day number one. And then I went however many years, because this was about a year ago, so help me with the math on this. I went like 23 years without. Maybe that's magic number. Jordan's 23, right? He's the real 23, not the fake 23, not the guy you knew in Miami, Right.

So I went 23 years. And then a year ago, I had a treatment on my face at our dermatologist that she wanted to try, and it required me to lean back and put my neck way back for an hour, and she treated my face for me. And I came home to lift weights after this session on a Friday afternoon, and I started getting dizzy and I got vertigo because my neck was locked back in that position for so long. Sort of stressed, like, what are you going to do to my face? Exactly. And so for the next 48 hours, I never vomit. I think I'd vomited two or three times my whole life, and I was just puking everything that I ate. So Ernestine, my wife, said, okay, that's enough. Tomorrow, off. And I didn't even fight back because I just was not capable the next day. So those are the two days that I missed.

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Do you ever cry?

Cry? I cry happy more than sad. I cry over books or movies. Moments in movies that are so brilliant, they bring tears to my eyes because they're so transcendent. And it's like you threw the Gary Smith piece. It's like a moment of that's so beautifully done. That's so Perfect. How did you do that? Where did that come from? That's like a gift from God that you did that that was wrought, that you created that moment. And it just. I don't know. We were watching. What's the. I'll think of it in just a second. The Cameron Crowe movie Almost Famous. Yes. Okay, so we're watching Almost Famous and we'd seen it before. It's a long story, but we have some sort of personal connections to it. We just started watching it the other night for no apparent reason and we couldn't stop. And we got to the end of it and I just broke down crying because it's so beautifully done. And she is so good in that part. She nails the part of the groupie. I can't think of her name. I'll think of it in a second.

It's not important to think of her.

Name, but the point is, it just works all the way home. The kid is so great as the Cameron Crow figure.

The reason I asked the question is because I imagine from over here that you're covered in armor, barbed wire, as it relates to your own personal feelings. I have friends like this who are transported by art who are also moved to tears by perhaps gratitude for certain things. But when it comes to their own feelings of. Like, wherever anger or sadness resides, they're covered in so much armor.

That's true. I buy that. I agree insightful on your part. I think I have steeled myself against crying about myself or for myself. Well.

But I. So I think this informs. Right. Because I can be empathetic in terms of how I cover sports and where I see human frailty reveal itself in sports and then probably too forgiving. I don't do very much ravaging, critical ravaging of human beings that I believe are a source of entertainment and celebration. But I think it informs your work that this stuff that you are covered in so much armor, that you believe that the people you are criticizing because they're tougher, stronger, bigger, they're everything that they are. They're people. We admire that. We are admiring their greatness. That they should be able to withstand whatever it is that you beat down on them. And we can forget their humanity in that when we're too critical.

Well said. Quick point of order. Kate Hudson played Penny. Elaine.

I knew you were going to get it.

I was gonna get it.

I knew you were gonna. You weren't even listening to anything I was saying.

I heard everything you said and I agree with everything you just said. That is true. I do view LeBron as cloaked in barbed wire. So. And he does make $50 million a year, and he's worth, God knows, isn't he gone over the B word. Isn't he a billionaire?

But, so that. Does that make you feel. Because, Skip, you've created an entire economy around the criticizing of these billionaires, right? Like you are within our industry, you are among the highest paid because it pays to have done this the way it's got great rewards to do this the way that you've done it.

But I view it differently than you do, because I would like to think I'm a truth teller. Like, I'm just. I say what I see, and if I see frailty, I will call out frailty. Because it's all fair game. Because, as you would say, it's all entertainment. Right? They're highly paid entertainers.

But where Russell Westbrook or Chris Bosh get mad at you, or where Shannon Sharpe gets mad at you, or where Chris Carter says he wants to punch you in the face, they're drawing the.

Line, by the way. That was not true. But go ahead.

Okay. We can come back to it. Wherever it is, you tell me where the greatest criticisms are that are fairest of you, but wherever it is that athletes are decrying that you're crossing a line, that you're putting in a different place than they are putting.

But I always tell, like, Chris, I love Chris Bosh. And you know him very well. I'm sure he's. He's a good human. He's just a gentle man. Right. Gentleman.

But I always, I would always, every time I would talk to him, interview him after I was done, I would thank him, okay, for, for being so uncommonly vulnerable. Because I, because I appreciate that. But you, but you, you called him Bosch Spice into his face, right?

Well, I did when he came to espn. But. Okay, so. So just quick scenario. Okay, so it's the first year of the Heatles. You're there, obviously, and it's March, they're on a five game losing streak, which was preposterous. The Heatles can't lose five in a row. And you might or might not remember a game played in Miami on a Monday night against Portland that was on television. I'm in Bristol, Connecticut. I'm watching it closely, as always. Never miss a LeBron dribble. And Chris Bosh was clearly the third wheel and not even living up to third wheel status at this moment. It's the first year together, they're thrown together and they all took little sacrifices to play together. I had no problem with LeBron doing that because I thought he needed Dwayne to teach him how to win. You know, how to. He needed a big brother to show him the ropes, and Dwayne was showing him how to do this, and you know the rest of that story. So Chris is struggling, and whether he's a nice guy or not, he's struggling as a basketball player. And they lose at home to a so. So Portland team.

And he played 40 minutes and had seven points and four rebounds. And of course, Twitter is screaming bloody murder at Chris Bosh. And it just hit me because he was playing such soft basketball, because he had a soft side to him. Gifted, but soft. That just for fun. I thought that was a clever nickname because of Victoria and the Miami connection with David Beckham, that he was playing like Bosh Spice. So just me, I don't have any problem with that.

Do you. Do you understand, though, where it is? Because you are. Start, you guys, cold pizza. All the stuff that happened with ESPN getting into the debate game, it basically started at the advent of social media. That show is ushering in.

I agree.

What becomes the acid cruelty of social media. And. And I felt like you guys, the way that you were doing it, were giving permission to the anonymous people on social media to be even crueler to these people than was necessary.

And now I don't think I'm going to stop them from being cruel. And I'm not sure I can encourage them to be crueler than they already were, but go ahead.

No, fair enough. And I. And there's nothing I can say that can soften the Internet. I'm not going to win that fight. But to see someone who had my path be involved, I appreciate that. Wherever Westbrook and his family are objecting to Skip, look, we're going through a vulnerable time. We're human beings. And yes, you can always say, well, you're making $30 million a year, and that's part of the job.

Or better still, Chris came to Bristol and we sat across from each other and discussed this man to man, face to face, eye to eye. Love him. I truly have love for him.

He's a special person.

He's a special person. And he told me all about his family members, didn't like it. I said, I appreciate that. There's one way you can obliterate that nickname. You can just play. You can just rise up and play. And by the way, he came up with the greatest offensive rebound in the history of offensive rebounds and kicked it to Ray Allen. In the corner and I was a big spurs fan and Ray Allen shot me right in the heart. Okay, so that was a play, that was a basketball play that had to be made. Why Tim Duncan was on the floor, I don't know. Don't get me started.

But do you understand, though, my objection there is I simply want Chris Bosh to be rewarded for the way that he is instead of discouraged from being that way because there's no reward in being vulnerable in a climate where the sports entertainer isn't a human being and we're just going to ravage him.

So here's the difference in Bosh Spice and West Brick. I didn't take Bosh Spice very seriously. It's just it was a period they were going through and he was playing like Bosh Spice. And I stand behind that because that's a good. That's a two word description that nailed his plight at that point. The Westbrook thing is very different because he has always from the start been high turnover and one of the poorest, if not the poorest, three point shooters in the league from day one and takes way too many threes on top of way too many wild, out of control turnovers to the point that finally Kevin Durant, going into his 10th year with Russ, just said, I can't do this anymore. I can't win with him as my primary decision maker. So Westbrook is different because Westbrook is lethal to a basketball team. And I got nothing against him or his family. His wife got mad at me for Westbrook, but his dream job was to play for his dream team, The Lakers and LeBron and AD campaigned for him to be brought to Los Angeles and he was. And it got so bad at what was then Staples center that the crowd was actually gasping when he went up to shoot a shot because everybody knew it was going to be a Westbrook.

I don't think I'm going to discourage you from your life principles as it comes to working on this. I could and would say to call him Bosh Spice is to suggest in some way that Bosh Spice is weak or that girls or women are weak, which is not something that I would be going.

You're going a little far with it, but it's just something the ring of that. I like it. I think it's funny. But I'm not here to be clever, all right?

I'm not here to dissuade you from how it is you do this.

Once he came to Bristol and we talked over. I never used Bosh Spice again. Because you want to talk about manned up man, he's the genuine article and I have so much respect for him. When I came to Los Angeles, we had him on the show a couple of times on Undisputed and I ceased and desisted because of that.

More macro. You feel because of the amount of dollars in professional sports that you are entitled absolutely to be the critic that tells the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it makes anybody.

Okay.

But it's important to you to be the truth teller.

No shock jock here. I'm not tricking it up. I'm not exaggerating. I'm going right to the heart of the matter. And that was when I tweeted that at that moment he had just finished 40 minutes with seven points and four rebounds. He's way better than that. You know it and I know it. He's a double digit a game rebounder at what do we give him? 6, 10 ish or so? You just. He wasn't living up and he was a little overwhelmed at that point. And who knows, maybe that flipped a switch for him. Maybe that was just the gasoline he needed poured on his fire.

That's one of my favorite rationalizations of yours when you take credit for promoting them.

He became a pretty great player.

He did. He was. And yes, he was absolutely a great player the entire time that I watched him play throughout his career. Let's shift a little bit here in terms of. You said that I got it wrong with Chris Carter. Chris Carter told the story of. You were talking Tebow. And the way he presents the story is that you said to him some form of. And that's why you never won a Super Bowl. And that he said afterward that if you ever disrespect me like that, I'm going to punch you in the face. You're saying that's not true?

It did not happen. Trust me. You can ask my wife Ernestine, because I would. Something like that would be so dramatic, such a flash point that I would certainly. Because everybody were miked up so the. The control room would hear that. That would be an event that would have to be discussed internally. We would have to have a meeting about it. We would have to. Chris and I would have to sit down after the show and sort it all out. And I definitely would have told my wife Ernestine about it. She knew nothing about it because it didn't happen. He told me in a break. Now, we clashed repeatedly on Tim Tebow because I was all. I said just real quick, before he got drafted, I said I would Take Tim Tebow. At the bottom of the first round, he went 25th to Josh McDaniels in Denver. And I said, if you let him run that Florida offense in pro football, he will win games for you. Mostly with intangibles, but partly with his arm, because he had a big arm and definitely with his legs because he could move at about £240. So I said, I'm taking him there.

Josh did. Josh got fired halfway through the next year, or who knows what would happen. And when Tim got his chance in his turn at, ironically at Miami, a game that went overtime, the rest was history. He took a 14 team to a division championship. They won the AFC west, and they won a home playoff game against the Pittsburgh Steelers and Ben Roethlisberger, when Tim Tebow, of all people, threw the overtime game winning touchdown pass to Demaris Thomas, as you well remember. Okay, so I don't remember actually, but I. There you go.

But you're very good at the details.

I've got what's wrong.

But I love that it's such. It's. It's so inclusive to say, as you well remember, to make my ignorance. To cover my ignorance for me and to help me out there. I appreciate the kindness and the gesture.

So I was at the right place at the right time. Not that I tricked it up, not that I tried to shock jock it. It just happened organically. And naturally I like Tim Tebow. Do you remember the game? You probably were there in Miami, the National championship game? Do you remember Florida versus Oklahoma, Sam Bradford?

Yeah, I remember them winning the championship.

Okay, so do you remember the video of Tim at halftime that I saw after the. I grew up in Oklahoma, fan. So I'm rooting like crazy for my Sooners and Tim Tebow comes out with the help of Percy Arvin. And they just took over the game in the second half and it wasn't even close. And I see the video a week later of him in the locker room saying, we're gonna take the ball, we're gonna cram it down their throats and we're gonna, you know. And his teammates will look at him like this guy's a complete psycho. But they wanted to follow that psycho into battle. So I thought, if you can just bottle a little bit of that in pro football, that will play, that will work.

But if the Chris Carter story isn't true, what do you regard?

So in one of the breaks, Chris told me straight up, he said, you're riding the wrong horse. You picked the wrong guy. I said, Chris. No, I didn't. He had just won a couple of games. I said, chris, I'm hanging in with this because he can play, he can win games. So we're doing that in the break. But he never said anything remotely like, if you say that again about me, I'm going to punch you in the mouth. Because we were good together. And he came to Los Angeles right around the time I came to Los Angeles to be at Fox and FS1. And he was my guy. We had him on all the time for the first six months, the whole first football season, we had him on at least once a week, if not twice. And then we went to the super bowl and we flew home together on a private plane so we could all get back to do our shows the next day from Houston. And Chris came to me on the private plane and said because he was going to move to New York to be on First Things first and be full time on that show.

And he said, is there any way I could just stay with you and Shannon and just do Undisputed every day? So that's how tight we were. I love Chris Carter. I was shocked at that anecdote. Maybe he just wanted to launch his podcast, I don't know. But that's not true.

Okay, what criticisms do you take to heart where you would say, that is a fair criticism? I grew from that?

I don't know. You hit me with one.

Oh, no. I'm just. Maybe if the answer can be no, like, you do seem to think you're right about things, so the answer can be no, I shouldn't be criticized. I'm doing this correctly.

I'm doing this correctly.

Do you have any regrets or remorse about anything that you have said or an interaction that you have had with people that. That you lament or that you'd like a do over on because of whatever it is that the public behavior is or was? I have one example that I. That I. That I'm thinking of from years ago. But no, I'd like. I'd like you to think for a second, if you. If you don't mind. You might not have any.

We're talking about opinions that I had.

Just things that you've done in your career that I've. I've got a lot of them that I would like do overs on because I just. I just got it wrong. You may not have a lot of them or you might not have any of them.

I work hard at what I do. I think hard about what I'm going to say. I Don't go off half cocked. I have slept on my opinion. It is in concrete and it is dried completely when I go onto the air. And as you well know, live TV is about preparation and concentration. So I stand behind every word I have ever uttered on live television. So that's all I got for you in this vein. Unless you want to cross examine.

Well, this wasn't the example that I was going to use because the one I was going to use was in one of your Cowboys books.

Okay.

And Troy Aikman asked his or says he asked his lawyers how much it would cost to punch you in the face. And they told him $5 million. And he said if they told him $1 million, he would have done it because you reported in one of your books, through some police sources who were anonymous, that he might be gay.

Okay, no offense, but you obviously did not read that passage in my book.

I did not.

Because if you did go read it right now, you would take all that back and you would come at this very differently. I'm still astounded by Troy's reaction because he's the hero of that book. He is the knight in shining est armor for those Dallas Cowboys, ironically and fittingly, the last Cowboy team that won a championship game and then won a Super bowl lo these almost 30 years ago. He was such the hero of my book, almost to a fault, because I was very close with Barry Switzer. And that book is all about the internal war between the Switzer and supporters and the Aikman and supporters. And if I may say so, it's beautifully done. And I walked a fine line of balance between the two camps, both of which I was close with and knew very well. And I felt like I was almost in the crossfire of the two camps. I thought so much of the book for Troy's sake, and I talked to him endlessly about all of the above and quoted him endlessly in the book about all of the above. I signed my first copy that I was sent from HarperCollins.

I signed it to Troy. Thank you for all that you did for me in this book. I'm paraphrasing what it was. And on the first day of training camp at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas, I hand delivered it to Troy. As practice ended, I gave it to him, and then that happened. And since then, we have worked through all of the above. And I'm not saying we're close, but we're very friendly and we text, and I text him fairly regularly and get along great with him. Especially via text. So we have worked through all the above. But the point was, the mud was being slung back and forth so hotly and heavily and unfairly that the Switzer camp kept coming to me because there had been rumors that Troy's been haunted by for years prior to 1995 in Dallas about is he gay or is he bi or what is he? And Troy poured his heart out to me about said rumors. And if you read the book, you'll get all of his knockdown quotes. And Lee Steinberg, his agents, knock down quotes. They're laughing at this whole prospect of him being gay. And the Switzer camp, headed by who was then sort of the assistant head coach, John Blake.

Knock on wood for him, may he rest in peace. He became the head coach at the University of Oklahoma thereafter. But he was one of the principals who would push me to say, hey, you know he's gay, right? I don't know anything about it. I've heard the rumors, but I don't know anything, nor do I care about anything. And he said, well, you guys in the media, you're protecting him. You're propping him up. He's fraudulent. He's not what he appears to be. He's doing all these commercials for Brut cologne and whatever. The other one was Acme Brick in Dallas. He's not that. He's not that guy. I don't know. But I juxtaposed the two camps because it got so bad that those two did not speak to each other. Troy Aikman and Barry Switzer. I remember. This is my birthday, December 4th. All the way through the super bowl, they refused to speak to each other. Can you imagine an NFL team winning a championship, winning the super bowl while the coach and quarterback refused to speak? Okay. That's how bad it got in that book. And I'm proud of that book and I'm proud of the way I wrote that book.

What are you proudest of? Not in the book, just in general.

Just in my life.

Yes.

That I've kept my marriage barely together. I didn't think I was capable. And through the again, grace of God, my wife is saintly and I love her to death. She doesn't believe that, but I do. And we've barely kept it together through thick and thin because I do. I'm so over emotional about all of the above that I just wear her out with all of this that we have discussed. So I'm barely proud. I did that because I wasn't sure I was capable of maintaining.

It's Interesting, because I want to chew on this a little bit. You speak very highly of Ernestine, but you just said you're not sure she believes you when you say that you love her with all your heart. Because this stuff can take so much of your identity that whether you're telling her on the first date or not. And I'm telling you, Skip, I recognize this because I come from a Latin household. All I saw was women living in service of men. It was in the pattern of my life. And so I thought that's what I wanted. And I did things early in my relationship that didn't even recognize where my patterns and my blind spots sort of undercut me. And I had to make substantive changes that have been for my betterment and wellbeing. And now to learn to love more correctly allows me to love myself more correctly. And chasing her happiness is something that brings me the greatest joy I've ever known in my life. So when you say you're not sure she believes you. That must hurt somewhere to say it.

I don't know I can be such a solo act, as we have discussed that, you say, what are you proud of? Well, I'm proud of that. I've barely made this work. And we have our moments. I'd be the first to tell you. We scream and yell, we lose it. I have a bad temper. Not that I would like it would manifest itself physically, but I'm capable of just getting angry. And she's Jewish mother, Italian father. That's a volatile mix also. So we can have our moments where it just goes up in smoke. And yet we've learned to work through them. She's always great. She'll come to me and hold her hand out, like, shake. Just shake. And I'm like, I don't want to shake. Shake. Finally, I shake her hand. It's like, okay, now we're okay. You know, like, it's just silliness. But that works for me is to shake. Because I'm used to. Nobody wants to shake. I'm used to, my father turned on me. My mother turned on me. They're not to be trusted. Now my wife's turning on me. Okay, I'm out. I'll go solo. I am a rock. I'm an island.

As Simon and Garfunkel once.

Well, love is not to be trusted. It's interesting because you combine these two things. Love is not to be trusted. And the general narcissism of what this is.

Yeah, that's true. I mean, it is.

This is an insanity. This the Feeding of this stuff.

It is.

Can be nourishing or can be poisoned, depending on whether or not you're paying attention.

No, that's a great point. Totally agree.

And if she's living in service of your need for this thing, this obsession, you know, she can get Bakugan out on her needs.

Yeah, I don't love hard enough. I don't give enough because I'm afraid to give. Because I learned early on you just can't trust anybody. Even maybe your wife. Like that's. That's how I viewed life for so long. But my wife is the most loyal person I have ever met. Excuse me times a thousand. She is loyal to a fault, to me. She will die for me and ultimately I will die for her. She has taught me that. So that's what I'm proud of is that thing, that connection that we have, as rocky as it can get. It's deep connection that I didn't think I was capable of having with another human being.

A lone wolf can still be lonely.

You know, Big bad wolf.

Well, a lone wolf can be strong and a lone wolf can, like. I mean, the things that you're talking about, skip, in terms of not trusting, not trusting love, not trusting people like that will harden you in a way that can feel empty. I'm not.

No, I understand. True. But you fought through yours.

Well, I had to be taught. I had to be taught, I would say, because I had to learn. I just, I had to learn what love was. I did not know what it was. I. Like I said, I got two. 50. You got married at about 50, right? Or no, you got. You met her at about 50, you didn't get married, you got married about eight or nine years ago, but you met Ernestine at about 50. And when I see sort of. Well, when I see the parallels of what it is that I'm talking about the first week of dating, I'm telling her, this ain't what it is. Like, you understand that I gotta work. And my work ethic is different than yours or comes from a different place. Exile, children. The way that you get to freedom is work. Like that. That is what I was taught in a very supportive household. And so work is the thing that I had. But work also had a lot of fulfillment in it. But the loneliness of not having someone to share it with and then having someone now who it takes me away from. Because if I fall into my patterns, this stuff, no offense, I'd rather be with her right now than what it is that we're presently doing.

And this stuff is always pulling me away, more so than ever, because now we have nearly 50 employees and we built a business. I want to talk to you about some of the things that you're doing now, because before we turned on the lights here, I was talking to you about how scary all of this is and must be, even with someone with your credentials and your resume of success, to be out on your own. The Skip Bayless show was on YouTube. You should check it out. I imagine it's one of the reasons that you're doing this, because you've got to get out there now and do some sales that I didn't think you were doing at 72 years old, because you've been supported by the mainstream media for a long time, and it's much more comfortable than what it is that you're doing now.

Yeah, it's not as challenging as this, in a good way. This is the ultimate challenge which I needed at my stage and age, and I don't know that you view it as a challenge. You are. You're winning, you're winning. And it's hard to win in this space. But from the outside in, you're a runaway success to me, and I honor that because it's been four years of this for you. And I don't know exactly how you did it, because you've. With some help from John Skipper, from above, you've created an empire of a show and shows and all the things you talked about, the documentaries and all the things that are a part of this, I'm in awe of that because I have learned over the last month how hard it is in this space and how hard it is to maintain that sort of runaway success in this space. But you are rare because you're a rare talent to me, and you always. You had rare writing talent, rare broadcast talent that was very different from mine, but it's still very rare. And you have parlayed that and enhanced it and used it as your rocket fuel into a new space.

And I can only judge by my small sample size of my friends talk about what Dan said and what Dan's doing and about. He did that and he had a conversation with so and so on South Beach Sessions. Sessions. I keep calling it Conversations, but it's a conversation. It's a beautiful conversation. And you're a gifted interviewer and a prober and. And you have wisdom of age now to go with your talent. When you were 26 and 30 and 36 and you were the young gun at the Miami Herald, you didn't have the perspective that you have now. And now you're at your most dominant because you get it and you got it and you've done all the above and now you've gone into a scary space and I think you've dominated it. I don't know how you view it, but that's what I think.

Thank you. I was pushed into it, not unlike you, where I think from what it.

Is that I wasn't pushed. I wanted to try it, but it's edge of cliff, man. And I'm sure you still feel like you're clinging to Edge of Cliff on certain days.

Yeah. When you're fighting for this stuff, it doesn't always feel like joy because there are a whole lot of young people who are doing a bunch of different things in this space. And so. And I don't know that we are necessarily aging out, but we're older now and it's.

We need to. I mean, I still think you can ask my wife. We mostly get this at Century City Mall. We live a block away. So it's out here on west side of la. It's a beautiful. I think it's the greatest mall in America. Even though there is a mall of America. That's very good. But the point is, every Saturday we take our little daughter, our dog Hazel, our Maltese, to walk in the mall because it's a parade of dog walkers in the mall. So I do get recognized. And Ernestine is constantly astounded at 10, 12, 14, 16 year old kids who rush up to me in packs. Skip Bayless, and they call me Skip. And she says, you know, you're so much older than they are, but they're. They're treating you like you're one of them. I have a young soul. I have young energy in me and they love that. They feed off that and they treat me like an equal. So they respect the fact that we've been through all the wars. I've been through all the newspaper wars. I've moved, I've fought. I've been through the politics at ESPN and the politics at fox.

I plan to write a book about all of my wild ride, which I'm looking forward to doing because it is wild. But the point is you can still connect with the young viewers, the young listeners, the YouTubers, because they know, you know, and they also know because you have a sort of a sillier side to you than I do. But they love that because you have a kid in you. I have a little kid in me still that I've clung to. And so your little kid comes through that microphone and through the visuals here, and it connects with the younger viewers because, A, you're still. You're still embracing sports the way they embrace sports. It's fun and games to you more than it is to me. But the kids are still. They know that you're viewing it just the way they do. But you do have the wisdom of not the ages, but of age. And you're not going to get aged out as long as your spirit stays. Because what it's like they always talk about, how did Brady last until he's 45? He didn't lose his spirit because at certain points, I worked with Shannon Sharp.

He said, I got to 35, I just couldn't do it anymore because I got sick of the meetings. Well, I'm not sick of the meetings. Whatever the drudgery or the dirty work is that we all have to go through because you're overseeing an entire operation. It's hard, man. And at some point you might say, I just don't want to do that anymore because that's not worth this. Because you have to do all that to get to this. Right?

I mean, it's work. All of it is work. Forgive me on if I was ignorant in saying pushed into doing something. I was pushed into something I might not have chosen otherwise. The reason I assumed you were pushed into it is only because you were working with Shannon. It was very successful. And then Shannon left under circumstances that seemed difficult for both of you. Ratings started dipping after that. And then I wanted for you a goodbye show after eight years. I thought if you've given eight years of that spirit to a company, you should get to say a proper goodbye. And so I just assumed if there wasn't a proper goodbye there, that there were more details there that I didn't know.

No, that was my choice. They wanted to do a proper goodbye. I just didn't want to do it because I wasn't retiring. I was starting. I felt like I was just beginning because I knew I was going into a scary space. But I had been planning that for at least a year because my deal was about to run out. And if you ask about regrets, I do regret that Shannon got pushed out before I left because I wanted to finish our concurrent contracts with a year to go, and then we could go our separate ways. And I figured we would because he was starting to have success in this space with his podcast while he was still at FS1. And I love working with Shannon, but. But we only had one we had one clash one day for one flashpoint moment that I think I didn't really understand where he was coming from. But we sat down after the show with our boss presiding.

I should tell the people. This was when you said to him you reduced his career in front of people. Comparing it to Tom Brady and saying, well, he was.

You want to talk about. What was your word about pitchfork and torch? He was pitchforking and torching Tom Brady. And I'm like, shannon, he only won seven Super Bowls. I know you won three, but he was the quarterback who won seven, should have won eight. Belichick stole one from him. Wouldn't play Malcolm Butler against the Eagles. I still don't get that. Gave up 41 points to the Philadelphia. To Nick Foles. Okay, so Brady should have won that. All he did was throw for a record 505 yards in that game. Playoff. All time playoff record. The point is that Shannon was so hard on Tom that I finally said, come on, man. He's like, he's way up here. And Shannon's saying, took his glasses off. Do you know I'm in the hall? Yeah, I got it. But you're not in this guy's universe. Because I told him, nobody's in that universe.

But it was disrespectful.

Nobody.

Tell him to put his glasses back on. Forgive me, I interrupted your story. You get together with your boss.

It wasn't disrespectful because we didn't need to go there. Just put your glasses back on and let's continue. Because I told you early on, as I shown Shannon from day one, there's no. My favorite line was no punches pulled, but none thrown. We can't. If we get to the point, we're going to throw punches across the table, they're all going to turn it off because nobody wants to watch that. They want to watch heated. They don't want to watch anger. You know, pure, unadulterated, let's throw punches.

Passion, not rage.

Yeah, yeah. There you go. Thank you. You're the wordsmith, right? So that was our only moment. And look, we're very different than Stephen A and I, because Shannon and I went after it every day. We were competing because he played and I didn't. But I do know football, and I'll go toe to toe with him on X's and O's or whatever he wants to go with because I worked hard at learning the game that he played. And I don't know about you, but over time, I often found that the people who Played the game at the highest level, didn't know the game as well as people who had to overachieve to play the game at a successful level. So what happened to Michael Jordan when he became the program builder, the team runner in Charlotte? He was the worst GM in the history of basketball. So the greatest player ever in any sport was the worst GM in the history of basketball. And it wasn't even close because it was a. Whatever. It was like an eight year disaster. Okay, so it's not impossible for me. Would you believe I was writing about Don Shula's Dolphins?

When you were what? Were you even born yet? I don't know.

Well, yeah, I was born in 68, but Don Shula's dolphins, 72 and 73. You were at the Miami Herald when you were early 20s?

I was straight out of school. 22. I was at the Miami Herald. So I learned some from Don Shula, but I learned a whole lot from Bill Walsh and Tom Landry and Jimmy Johnson and Dave Weinsted and Norv Turner and on and on and on. I'm pretty good at football. I'm good enough. I'll go on live TV with anybody who played football and I'll go back and forth. I don't know the jargon that Shannon would use, like 22 men and bomb Blitz and whatever the Denver jargon was, but I know what it was. I know what those plays are and I know what they look like. And so this is what you would call, quote, unquote, go for the throat debate, where we got after it day after day after day, five days a week. I loved Shannon Sharp because he came to work, man.

Oh, he works hard. He still works hard.

He came prepared and he came ready for battle.

But I interrupted you on what the remorse was. You were starting, you were going down.

I wish we could have finished together. I had nothing to do with him getting pushed out the back door, but he did get pushed out. So I was dumbfounded and I fought for him and I lost because that's way over my head. I didn't have that kind of power. And I don't know what transpired between him and the people upstairs, but he was out.

Did you trust your co hosts? Like, I don't want to pitch you Stephen A or Shannon, but who was the most. If you have troubles with trust, if you're telling me you're a lone wolf who doesn't trust many, who was your most trusted co host?

Well, I love Stephen Hay. I mean, we're brothers and I was never Brothers. With Shannon, we were more competitive, but I trusted him. I know Shannon Sharp really well, and I love that man's heart and I love that man's backbone and his character. I, hey trusted him with my life. Do you know how many race topics we did where I'm the white guy talking about Black Lives Matter? And I'm very passionate about it. But he protected me, Stephen. I always protected me on any race topic. So we had that. We listen when you go to battle that long. I lasted seven years with Shannon Sharp. That's the kind of format where you could be one and done. You could maybe make it through a year and you just burn out on each other.

He's always so grateful when he speaks of you. Always profoundly grateful. And I know that you and Stephen A. Are still very close friends and that he admires you a great deal.

Hey, I love Stephen A. Smith with all my heart and soul. He is gifted, beyond gifted. He has the greatest gift of gab in the history of television. And I fed off it. And we were such a great, unpredictably great clique from day one. We used to do Jim Rome show out here in la when it was on Fox Sports Net called the Last Word. Jim would have us on as his wingman on this half hour afternoon show. Stephen A. Was in Philadelphia, I guess I was in Chicago when we first started. It was magic from day one. I don't know. I'm from Oklahoma City, he's from Queens. Who knew? But I showed him from day one. I got nothing but respect for you and I got your back, but you gotta let me go hard at you and don't take it personally or that seriously. We are debating back and forth in front of Jim Rome, who became a tennis fan, you know, and it just lifted off and we did a pilot for a show that would have changed history. That when Jim left, had a contract snafu that I was not privy to.

But he left Fox Sports Net, Stephen A. And I, in 2002. I think PTI had just started, so it was maybe three or four months old. A producer named John Johnston, who's a close friend of mine, bright man, great heart, he said, I want you two to do a show and it'll be PTI with an edge. And he named it for the sake of the pilot, Sports in Black and white. This is 2002. We did the pilot and George Greenberg, who ran the network at that point, FOX Sports Net came flying out of the control room and said, I could put this on tonight, but we have to run it up the flagpole to the top. And it got rejected at the top because people upstairs thought it was just too edgy. Just too edgy. It's, it's just that, that attack mode that you don't like, that as I call it, extreme debate mode, they weren't ready for. But I think, I think the viewers were.

Can you explain your friendship to and with Lil Wayne to me?

He came to Bristol. That Carter 3 I think had just come out. Is this 08ish? I can't explain. It's another Stephen A. And Skip scenario. We just clicked in the pre show meeting. We clicked. We started talking about Steph Curry, who I'd said before that draft I would take Steph number one overall over Blake Griffin. I don't know if you remember that time, but everybody at ESPN was pro. Blake, he can jump out of the building. And I'd watched him for two years at Oklahoma, he State for two years. I'm an Oklahoma Sooner fan. He couldn't make a shot from 2ft away at that point. He became a very accomplished three point set shooter over time. But I said, this guy at Davidson, he's got a handle. He can play point guard. I've never seen anybody could shoot like this at the college level. Yeah, but it's the NBA three. Okay. So Wayne walks in and we start to agree about Steph. And I said, you would have taken him one overall too. Yeah, I would have taken him. And we didn't know yet what was about to transpire and the rest is history. We just clicked.

Then after the show he came up on a bus. So he took me out to the bus, showed me his little recording studio that's like a bathroom on the bus that he can wedge into. And I was hooked. And we have nothing in common except deep passion for sports. He views sports the way I do. And that man has an intellect about him, especially a sports intellect that runs as deep as mine. So when we get on text, not chains, but we, we text each other and it's some of my best writing. Seriously, I, I think about, I look at them sometimes and there'll be 15 responses back and forth. And I think, man, this make a great book, right? I don't know. So it got to the point where my wife Ernestine and I, when he moved out here to la, has it been two, three years ago, we started going out every couple of months on a Saturday afternoon when I didn't have too many games to watch. And we would sit with Wayne at his place up in Hidden Hills, out in the valley. And she would go. And it would amaze me that it would be okay if she went, because he loves her like a big sister.

And it would just be the three of us. And we would talk for four straight hours without a bathroom break. No food, no drink, no nothing. We would just talk about life and times, a little sports, but only a little because Ernestine's not a big sports fan. And she would chime in. And so that's how we got to really know each other.

I will tell the people again that you can catch him now on YouTube. The Skip Baylor show is where you go. How have the last few months felt to you? Untethered from the safety of the corporate overlords. Because the entire industry is changing. One of the things that you flatter me when you say that we're winning. We are trying to change the game in terms of showing people that they have their own individual brand power and don't have to work or slave for the corporations. They can do so in benefit and in service of themselves. So what if the last few months been like for you?

So I was very blessed to leave the newspaper business just in time. Not sure where you crossed over there completely, but I didn't see it coming. I thought once upon a time the Chicago Tribune would be the last building standing in Chicago.

Unfathomable to me that newspapers have cratered, that radio has cratered. I. I have felt. I don't know where you're going with this, but I have felt great fortune and gratitude in. I'm not going to say there was acumen in it or strategy and just being able to jump from lily pad to lily pad as calamities happened behind me. But fortune not like just lucky. Not because I saw anything coming.

I did see a year ago, linear TV ratings are starting to erode across the board. Not just the show. I was on every. I'm looking at it saying, wait a second. People I trust in the business kept saying, you gotta go digital. You gotta go into this scary new space. It's not really new to you or others. But this is the only way to fly because the other might go away. And I have a lot of close friends at Fox and at espn and I don't want to see it go away. And it won't go away as far as televising games, obviously, but as far studio shows, I'm not so sure. So I exited stage right, I hope, at the right time. And now we're taking baby steps as we try to create Our little Lebatardian empire, our little. With different sort of approaches and shows than what you have accomplished.

And it's been fun, scary, interesting.

The best thing about it is, as my wife will tell you, I don't have to get up at 2 o'clock in the morning anymore because I did for eight straight years because I was the executive producer of my show and I leaped out of bed every morning out here on the West coast at 2am without fail. And now I don't do that anymore.

I don't think people understand the amount of dedication that it took to bu. So how disciplined is the eating regimen? Because it's chicken and broccoli every day. Correct? It's the same thing every day. And you were sleeping from what time till 2am? How much sleep were you getting before getting up at 2am to do your show?

I would shoot for nine, but it was always 10ish. So I would get four hours, then I would go home and nap for an hour and a half. And so I subsisted on 5ish hours a day. And then Friday night I would sleep 12 straight hours into Saturday, often without getting up to pee. And because I was just so dead tired. But that's changed. My diet has not changed. It's chicken and broccoli and rice. And yet we do cheat on date night, which is Friday night. We have a slice, sometimes two slices of pizza.

You maniac.

Maniac. I'm out of control. Ernstein gets it from Mulberry Pizza. Not that I'm trying to plug them in Beverly Hills, but we love it. And we do have frozen yogurt occasionally, especially on Friday night.

That is a crazy lifestyle you've been living. Skip 10:10 to 2:00am I have. I've marveled at the people in morning radio who get their youth and their get destroyed by working. 6am to 10am you doing it 2am to prepare for a show that wasn't starting at 2am you had to do everything. You had do three hours of prep before you even started.

I did. And I did a lot of prep the night before. We kicked off at 6:30, but I did do a lot of radio, as you have. And the beauty of morning radio, which I did in Dallas, was you didn't have to care how you looked in those days. So you could say if you had a face made for radio, you could just go as is. And this was different because you had to look like, as Ernestine always says. She says this morning you look like who did it and ran that's her expression from somewhere. I guess that was from the Lower east side and her mother. But I did occasionally look like that because I just hadn't slept.

It seems nuts, but you have had a great many rewards from how it is that you have done it. I congratulate you.

Thank you.

And I thank you for sharing this time with us. I will tell them again. The Skip Bayless show is on YouTube as he tries yet another reinvention. The reinventions can be difficult, but I wish you well, sir. Thank you for spending this time with us.

Thank you for doing this.

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