Transcript of Michael Wilbon | Who Asked You

Then why do you need to stand around the batting cage and maybe hear what Buck Leonard said before he died, one of the great Negro League players of all time? Why do you need that? You don't, 'cause you got a hot take. What's up, Danny?

No time for pleasantries. We gotta cut right through to the content. Gotta get right to the crankiness.

Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. My wife is getting me a glass of orange juice so I can survive. And then give me 30 seconds and then you can cut to the crankiness. Well, I don't know that he has that. I'm knocking a gnat off my screen. I don't know that he— well, it's not on my screen. That's an arrow. See how old and stupid I am? So

you thought it was a gnat and it's the cursor.

It's an arrow. It's a damn cursor.

So answer this question. When we say it's over, what happened to us? Wow. It's head-spinning. Damn.

And I don't know that it has as much to do with our industry as it does with the culture. So I've become fond of saying— not fond, I've started saying frequently— we're just, we're not a literate people. We're not. And I travel a lot. And when I'm anywhere else in the world, almost, I find more literate people. I know I find it in other parts of Western Europe when I'm on vacation or going to see a soccer game or Whatever the case may be, I see people reading and I see them consuming things. And they got this, they cross streets like this and should get hit by cars too. But not like us. We're not literate and we're not ashamed of not being literate. We're not. So that trickles down through everything. We don't read.

I think sports radio, I tend to blame the corrosive acidic effect of sports radio for, for a lot of this. But where do you place the blame on that change beyond saying that people are dumber or less literate than they used to be and don't make the distinctions between, you know, somebody who has credibility earned through expertise and years and years of reporting

and somebody who just has an opinion? You know what? I had not thought of it about sports talk radio. Yes, it is largely to blame. Not entirely. Largely because you just come on. Vinnie from Passaic, what do you want to say? It's lazy. There was nothing lazier than sports talk radio. There is nothing lazier than sports talk radio that isn't well done. That is just jump on with callers. Now there's less of that, and there's some really smart people on sports talk radio, um, and now podcasts. It's all— it's essentially the same.

Well, I'll tell you that I saw a very low bar to jump over. I was sort of looking at— I had arrived at Times Square in the sports reporters, which was the top of our industry. I felt a little bit lonely and sort of looked around and said, is this really the top? This is the most or the best? And I'm like, where else can I make some changes in my career? And it just seemed really easy to jump.

So you were conscious of it already?

Well, no, but conscious of it because you guys taught me some things, right? Because I was looking at the work that you guys were doing at PTI sort of behind the scenes, some of the things that I learned on sports reporters. And I was like, wait a minute, can I jump over the very low bar of the guy who's outsourcing the work to Vinnie on a mobile calling in with just an opinion? I'm like, I could probably do something a little bit less lonely and different than that. It's really where it is that I chose to do what it is that we formed here that became my, my only job. But you're saying it wasn't sports radio. You went— How many, how many years did you How many years did it go before you were sort of confident about the giving of an opinion on television?

A couple. I was doing it, like you, was doing it at Times Square on Sunday morning before then flying off to some NFL game. And I was reticent those first few years. It took a couple of years for me. And I was doing other TV. I was doing TV in Washington where I was supposed to give an opinion, it was sort of narrowly constructed to football. It was a football show here about the Washington Redskins, and I was doing it with Hall of Famers Sonny Jurgensen and John Riggins and George Michael. And they wanted firmer, stronger opinions. And I wasn't always ready to do that. My opinions needed to be informed. I wanted to go on the road and find out what Steve Young and Jerry Rice thought before I gave an opinion on the 49ers. And Bill Walsh and the West Coast offense. I wanted to talk to them. I wanted to hear what they had to say. And instead I got, you know, what do you need to do that for? Now, luckily, I worked with somebody at The Washington Post who still valued that underpinning. So I don't— you know, there wasn't some great realization for me.

There wasn't some moment of aha. the business is going to hell. I didn't have that. I'm not that forward-looking. You are. I'm not.

Well, you're speaking— you're speaking as a writer. Do you still identify as a writer? Do you? Because I always do, even though I don't write much these days.

It's always been mostly— I think mostly, Dan, not entirely. Yeah. A consumer of information, of intel. I'm a consumer. Right. And I just noticed that we're— and we're not ashamed of it. We're okay being stupid. We are.

Well, let's, let's keep it, though, to sports media here and the changes you've seen.

Okay. But I mean, that, that trickles into that. That is more than trickles. It pours into it. Because what do people care more about than anything else? Sports. So if they're stupid in most of their lives and don't care about real information or where to get it, or wanna label everything, this is fake news or that's liberal news or this, then it doesn't change. Sports is just part of that. That's— sports is just part, a big chunk, but you cannot separate it. I can't, I don't. And so that's where we are. We're at a place where people don't read, they don't consume, they accept the dumbest things possible for the explanations. of why they believe what they believe or why they approach something in the way they approach it. We're not literate and we're not ashamed of not being literate. We're not. So that trickles down through everything. We don't read, we don't consume in the same way, whether it's hot takes, because they don't care about the information. They don't care about information, about reporting. They don't know the difference between a reporter and a columnist. They don't know and they don't care. This is not, this is not incidental to the conversation we're having.

Explain the difference both between a reporter and a columnist for those who don't care, and explain how long you had to be on beat before you were allowed to give your opinion.

I didn't think anybody should have a column before 35 years old. That's kind of where I was. As a, you know, as a person in this business. I didn't think anybody should have a column before 35 years old because you didn't know enough. You didn't know enough. You hadn't been around enough batting cages. You hadn't been in enough shootarounds. You hadn't talked to enough people, coaches and people in the industry. You hadn't done it. So that was my belief when I was 25. And I, you know, I became a columnist too early. I remember when my sports editor, who you know well, George Solomon, called me one day, I was in Denver, and he said, you gotta forget about the game story, you gotta write a column tomorrow. I was like, what? I don't have an opinion yet. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not entitled enough. I'm not smart enough to have opinions that matter on this. Reporters report despite what they may or may not believe. They go and they ask all these people what to believe, what they think, expert people. Coach, GM, owner, scout, referee, players, senior players, retired players. You— when you ask all these people what they believe and you come back, you distill it— this is reporting— and you come back with something— research, historical research, all of it— you come back with something.

Not on every day, not on every story, but you come back With that, and you try to make sense of it, and you try to stay out of it. Columnists don't stay out of it. We're in the middle of it. And what happened? What happened in the meantime is that columnists took liberties. So when I when I started writing a column, I had I had I won't name the coach. I had a couple of coaches come and say to me, "Hey." I'm reading this for your opinion now, not just extensive reporting. Like, they were annoyed with me.

Well, I got a column at 26 and it was way too early. I should not have had a column. I made a ton—

I was 29, too early.

I made a ton of mistakes because I was just learning from you guys how to do it. I was sort of trying to figure out, and I wasn't sort of formed in any other ways in adulthood. I could write about sports, but I wasn't actually an adult yet.

Dan, me either. I knew that. I knew that going in because I could look at the people who were wise in the ways of writing a column, and they were adults. They were fathers. They were uncles. They were mentors. They were failed people in other businesses. Well, whatever they were, they had full lives, fully developed lives, or more fully developed than I had. I didn't have a fully developed life. So bringing those— forming those opinions should come about because you know shit. I'll tell you a quick story. So when I was— when I first got a column, George Solomon at the Washington Post would only let me write a column on Saturday. What's the paper that mattered less than any other day of the week of a daily newspaper? Saturday. So you can make your mistakes. You could, you know, make your mistakes on Saturday. So anyway, I would get up and go out and do stuff. I would often travel on Saturday to NFL cities or back home from— or to college games, whatever. And it was back in the day of voicemail messages, tape. And you had a tape and somebody could take up like a minute of your tape time to leave a voicemail message.

Well, the person who did that who just took it upon himself to do that was Ralph Wiley. And Ralph Wiley, who was— I mean, before me as a Black person in sports media, there were Bill Rhoden and Ralph Wiley and Roy Johnson, specifically them. And that's about it.

There weren't many. There were not that many.

Wendell Smith. Wendell Smith was like decades before. Nobody knows him, which is one of the great shames in American life in sports communication. But anyway, so Ralph, Ralph would take it upon himself. He would read my column. I'm not sure how he got the column in 1990, 1989, 1990, 1991. There's no digital. I'm not even sure how he saw it. But I would come home, I'd turn on, hit my voicemail, and on that voicemail would be Ralph Wiley with like a red ink pen bleeding all over my column, telling me what was shit, what he hated, what he didn't like, what should have been better, what paragraph should have been higher than the other one. This went on. So I know Ralph. Ralph is a friend. But Ralph was ahead of me. Ralph knew what was at stake. Ralph knew that if I failed at this, Very likely somebody else wasn't gonna get the chance to do it. And that meant Brian Burwell, and that meant David Aldridge, and that meant another generation coming behind Ralph. And so Ralph bled all over my columns on Saturday mornings. And I'm like, who the fuck is this dude?

My son says, Dad, why do you wake up angry every morning? You have a great life. Look at our house. Look at our second house. Look at your life. Look at your golf course memberships. How come you wake up angry every morning? And I say to him, you know what? I'm not sure it's a good thing that you don't get it. Maybe it is. I've worked hard so that you won't feel the sting of the reasons I wake up angry every morning. Because you didn't know your grandfather. And I knew my father. And I knew what it was he went through, which was a level of life just above slavery. in post-Reconstruction Georgia in the 1920s. And so should I be proud that he doesn't know, or should I be angry that he doesn't know?

Well, you won. You, you, you won, though. You personally won.

You know what? I can't fight that. I can't. But did we— did I— okay, I won the battle. The war is still being waged, you know? And the fact that he doesn't get why I wake up angry every morning, maybe I did a poor job of that duality, of explaining, of presenting that duality that W.E.B. Du Bois called double consciousness. Maybe I did a poor job of presenting that to him. I don't know. I mean, I think most of these things don't have an answer. Like, you know, who's responsible for hot takes? I don't know that most of this shit there's any answer to.

Well, if I press you on it, how respon— you're a pioneer, okay? You made— you are a pioneer whether you like it or not. You know this. So how responsible are you, or do you feel, for instigating or an ocean of takes because everyone thinks that they can do what you guys do, even though they don't have the chemistry and even though they don't have the credentials.

Well, part of it is not just the credentials. They don't have the information. I still pick up a phone and call people and try to find out sometimes what the hell's going on. I still go to shootaround. I still go to locker rooms. Not nearly as often. Let me not misrepresent, but I still do that stuff. I still want— I, before the show, you know, when, when LeBron's decision was coming, I was calling people who were calling me right back. I did. I had to go upstairs out of our studio. You know our studio, you can't get calls down there. I had to go upstairs into the sunshine and get some information, some intel on what I was going to say about LeBron and where he was going and what he was thinking. I still do that. Not nearly as much. I don't.

All right. So how much does credibility matter, though, when you talk about this?

To me, consider the source. It matters to me. I don't know what it— I don't know what matters to other people. I feel very fortunate that I'll get calls or texts. You know how this is after a show from people who say, hey, sometimes it could be a league official, sometimes it could be an owner. Sometimes it could be, you know, a former player that I've known really, really well who thinks, hey, I know you know what you just said because I know that. And thank you for doing that. That means a lot still. That means a lot. Now, to go back to your question, because I'm thinking about it, how responsible are Tony and me? I don't know. We don't give hot takes. I told Matthew, my son, who is now 18 and a half years old, I said, if you ever come in here, he'll watch— I'm sure he'll watch Stephen A. He has no idea what I do. I told him, you come in here and say that I give it a hot take, I'm gonna knock the shit out of you. Old-fashioned father style, 1960s. Don't ever say I gave a hot take.

There's no hot takes. We don't give hot takes. I have an opinion and I will give that opinion and it will be as informed as I can make it. You say hot takes, I'll knock your ass out.

What is the distinction you're making between an opinion?

Hot takes are empty. They're bullshit. It's a, it's a marketing name that somebody came up with very wisely, wisely to promote shows like First Take and whatever Skip was on on Fox. I can't remember the name of it. So that's what they— that's what somebody came— some producer, producers, probably people I know, very smart people, they came up with that to promote it, put it in bites. And have a hot take.

It wins though, right? It wins audience and it's also the cheapest thing the media can make.

You know what? Now I'm gonna be— now I'm gonna be snippy. I'm gonna be snippy now. Then if that's the case, how come their fucking shows don't get the ratings we get?

I mean, you have a magical chemistry. You have something—

No, come on now. If all that bullshit If all of it automatically brought you more ratings, then how come the younger, fluffier-haired people can't get more ratings than the 2 old bald cats who are 20 years older than them? Seriously, if talking about the Cowboys every goddamn day is supposed to deliver you the ratings, why are our ratings higher? I love to say sometimes, Danny, we just did a show with Cowboy-free football. Cowboy-free programming. I love doing that. That's just to tweak my friends.

Well, and you're a Washington guy.

Huh? You're a Washington guy. I don't live in Washington. You know better than that. I'm not tied to Washington sports. You know better than that. I don't give a shit.

You're just historically— wait a minute. You did all of your learning.

I don't care about the Cowboys and the Redskins. If I, if I look behind me back here, Commanders with Washington. You'll see Chicago, you'll see Gale Sayers and Ferguson Jenkins and Walter Payton. You're not gonna see anything back here with Washington. I'm not gonna lie.

But hold on a second, hold on. When I say to Stephen A., okay, this is one of the reasons that he says that I can be self-righteous and sanctimonious, and he's not totally wrong. When I do what you do where I separate myself from what he's doing and he says, no, wait a minute, you're in the same trough. How is it that you and Michael get to be in a different trough than the one—

It's not quite the same. perceived differently. And when you carry it a certain way, when you decide to wear Tom Ford suits every single day— I love Tom Ford— when you decide to do that and have yourself photographed walking into Madison Square Garden, you put yourself in a different light. I don't want to hear that shit. And he knows we've done this on his show. And I was— Stephen A wants to be the show. He wants to be a show, and he's damn good at it. No, he's not good at it. He's great at it.

Well, he wants to be Howard Cosell.

God bless. Because, you know, I mean, the rising tide lifts all boats. I'm hugging Stephen A when I see him. But don't tell me it's the same. And I tell him that. He says to me, how come you can get away with criticism of the same athlete in the same way and I can't? And I'm like, because there's a difference between criticism and ridicule. And I know you know it. So don't pin that shit on me. You know the difference between criticism and ridicule. And if you don't— and I know he does, I do. And so there's a way, there's a different way that you carry it or you bring it. And he knows the difference because he did it for 20 years first.

Yeah, the

other

way he knows the difference. But I do believe that he clings to the pride of wanting to still seem like a journalist, as I do, as in some ways I imagine you do.

Right.

Well, Tony, because Tony says I'm a yodeler. now. I'm no longer a journalist. You've let go of all of that.

We're not. We're not journalists. We violate everything we learned. I'm a trustee at the— what many of us consider, I certainly do, the greatest journalism school in America, in the world, the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern. I'm a trustee there. I violate everything I learned there. I am not a journalist. It's okay. It's all right. We can let it go. And we're— I just say we're know-it-alls. We're know-it-alls every day, Dan. That's what we do. We get paid to know it all. We can't know it all because we can't research and find underpinnings for everything we believe. We try to do some of it. Like Tony and I, and you know this because you've been around the process and you've been part of the process. Tony and I, on Sunday, we must talk 15 times during the NFL Sunday about what we believe, about what we think is legitimate, about what we think isn't. We talked like 4 times last night during National League or American League Division Series. They don't even— that shit doesn't matter.

Let's talk a little bit about the people who have done more for us professionally than just about anyone. The family tree of Eric Rydholm, who wasn't someone who had any television background. He had no television experience or media experience.

A little bit. Chicago local.

He co-founded The Motley Fool, was tired.

Chicago TV before The Motley Fool.

Comes to ESPN with a few ideas and wants to reinvent his career in his early 30s and seizes upon both you and Tony and invents the, you know, television-changing graphics. really changed your life? What was useful and useless about the things that you learned through Matt Kelleher, Eric Rydholm, and that team of producers that produced our show and your show, the show I did with my father and still produces Pardon the Interruption, one, one of the greatest television sports television shows of all time?

Very kind of you. I don't think any of it was useless. There are things that frustrate me that have nothing to do with Matt and Eric. First of all, amen to everything you just said. None of this exists without Eric Rydholm and then Matt Kelleher as his lieutenant, his capable, brilliant lieutenant. None of this exists without that. And, and Mark Shapiro. Mark Shapiro said, I'm going to put you and Tony on television one day. That's going to be the first thing I do when I'm named like czar of sports. at ESPN. And Tony said, the second thing that's going to happen, you're going to get your ass fired. Well, he didn't. And,

um, he became president off of the Sports Century series, which learned that sportswriters are cheap content, that you can make documentaries just putting sportswriters on television to give you their breadth of knowledge.

Yeah, all of us away. Mark, you want to talk about people who destroyed newspaper sports sections? Mark Shapiro did more of that than anybody. I say that with a smile because I love Mark and I talk to him now still. And Mark has gone on to a different life. It's amazing. He's on the other side now, but largely. But I, you know, I'm grateful for everything Eric and Matt have done. I don't know that we went along for the ride. Tony, I didn't know what we were doing. We're sports writers. We know who we are. We know our lane. I know what my lane is. It ain't television. I don't know anything about TV now, Dan. I don't know anything about television. I don't know how ratings are kept. I don't know anything about production value. I know content. I know what makes a good story still. I feel arrogantly that I know that better than you and you and you and you and you. And that's what PTI does better. We— Tony and I still know that. And that's our lane. And Eric and Matt and the whole staff of people at PTI— we're not mentioning the other names.

You, of course, you know them intimately. They, they expanded that lane. into places that people who watch television weren't even aware. And all of a sudden they have it presented to them every day at 5:30 Eastern or 5:00 Eastern. And earlier in the day with you and your dad, I mean, those 3 shows changed the way people consume sports particularly, and pop culture to some extent on television.

But you are saying something there, a number of different things that are interesting. One of them is that not unlike the music producers who can just tell hit music. You are somebody— the gift that you have, the gift that Tony has, is not necessarily just that you know what's interesting to you. It's that you have the flawless antenna of knowing what's going to be interesting to others.

Well, thank you. I think that's because of the reporting, because of the reporting for 30 years, because of listening. And people don't know audiences. They have no idea what the audience is. This is what angers me. This is why I can't read and consume the way I used to. They have no interest in the audience.

You mentioned Mark Shapiro, and ESPN did a very smart thing by having newspapers and the credibility of newsrooms on television. You'd see the newsrooms around the horn. You'd traffic in the credibility of sports sections and opinions earned. The New York Times was the only newspaper, the only one that would not allow its sportswriters to double dip. They were— they made sure that their Their sportswriters ended up being exclusive and wouldn't go over to ESPN because they feared the idea.

With some exceptions, Roden did it.

Roden did sports reporters, but he wasn't doing the full-time stuff. They were more precious about it than anybody else. Nobody else saw the danger. Was the New York Times right and everybody else was wrong?

They bailed. They were the first to bail. Fuck the New York Times. I work for a better section anyway. You think I wouldn't take a section with Tom Boswell and Dave Kindred and Tony Kornheiser and Sally Jenkins and David Remnick and, and David Aldridge and Jay Adande? And I'm, I'm skipping a whole generation of people. Barry Lorge, the greatest tennis writer of all time. All those people, half those people went to television. Fuck the New York Times, which bailed on our profession. It bailed. It took the sports section away. Gutless motherfuckers. Did I stammer?

Nope, nope. Understood you clearly. Communicated it very clearly. I have a question for you that I don't actually know the answer to. I have some guesses, but I want it in your words. One of the great flatteries of of my life is that both you and Tony deemed me worthy of sitting next to you guys on that television show. Of course. Well, you say of course you did, but you didn't. The two of you didn't agree on many people who you deemed worthy enough to sit next to you and replace the other guy with whom you have the sports marriage for all time. Why?

Because we believe, like, now it's really hard. I just think, first of all, there are very few people who did what we do, and we arrogantly value that. We knew you'd been in locker rooms. We knew you'd been screamed at by coaches and screamed back. How about this stupid suspension of the NFL of my man Seaman, Jeff Seaman, because he cursed at a player? What? That's the dumbest shit I've ever heard. Players and referees have screamed and cursed at each other for 100 years, and the NFL fraudulent bastards that they can be when it comes to trying to be a show themselves, they act like that's a thing. Stop it. Now, I knew you had been cursed at. I've seen you and Pat Riley go at it. I'd seen you, you, you, you experienced all the things that Tony and I did. And we value that. Yes. Is it self-indulgent? Yes. We value what we did. The show is ours. We want people who did shit we did. You did. Frank, Frank, Frank does it now, you know, or he did it in New York. And so there are very few people who's left. Who's left?

So it's the reporting. It's, it's the reporting more than the writing. It's the reporting more than the writing.

It's the reporting. I mean, there were, you know, yeah, I mean, it's the experience of knowing what that's like, of going to the ballpark every day, standing around the batting cage and talking to old ballplayers about what they value and hearing— Dan, what's cooler? Think about it. We've done a lot of great things in our lives. We've been to— in 1984 in LA at the Olympics, I stumbled upon a story which carried me to Santa Monica to Muhammad Ali's gym. And in that gym, when I drove my rental car, there was Muhammad Ali hitting the heavy bag in 1984. And to go sit then, because he told me to sit and shut up and listen to Muhammad Ali— are you kidding me? Okay, so that's Ali. That's extreme. But you, you— I know you did this in baseball. We had a chance to do this with— I did this with Crusty Pete Rose and, and people that I, you know, wanted to hear. There's nobody left like that. They don't know what that feels like. And, and most importantly, and scary, they don't give a shit. They don't think it's important because they can have a hot take.

And if you can have a hot take and if you can be on ESPN on the E when PTI is not there, you can be on it and you can be on Stephen A Says, huh? You can be on that. I love this more than anything. It's over, Dan.

So, all right, so, so answer this question. When we say it's over, what happened to us?

Uh, life happened. Uh, Converse went away. So did Magnavox. So did, you know, Zenith. You know, I mean, so did, uh, you know, Ford reinvented itself with these trucks, these, you know, you know, this— every commercial has to appeal to Magnavox.

Sears, Woolworth's. They all think things have to die is what you're saying.

I used to go to Sears every Saturday when I was a kid growing up on the South Side. Sears on 79th Street. It's all— life happened. It just— it went away. And so what are you going to do? You're going to— we just named— we didn't even get started on the things that shaped our childhoods that are gone. They're gone forever. So I— did I think that this was going to go away on my watch? No. Did I think The Washington Post was going to yank a sports section that I worked for for 30 years and 6 months while I was— while I'm in my 60s? No. And I hate them, too. Let me not just— let me not seem like I'm piling on the New York Times as the competition. I got plenty of hate for both of them. But, but, but so what do you— are you— you're— this is the difference between you and me, a fundamental difference of our lives. You take things to heart and you want to find a solution. And I've gotten to the point where I say there ain't no solution. You don't want to get to that point.

I know you don't. I know it violates every, every fiber of your being.

It might be late 60s instead of late 50s that it happens to me. Because you were— but you weren't like this in 50— you weren't like this at 57 years old.

I wasn't. I wasn't. I wasn't, and I don't know what to— I'm not gonna sit here and lie to you. I don't know what to do about it. What am I gonna do about it? The Times is gone. The Post is gone. So what do we do? What do we do? I didn't cancel the goddamn newspaper yet. I should have canceled both subscriptions.

You got 3 of them coming to the house. You don't read them, but you're still supporting the industry. I salute you, sir. And as I tell you every time, I love you as well. Thank you for everything.

Thanks for taking the time to have this conversation. But people need to know— I need, I need to close this by saying people need to know that we can yell and scream and do all this stuff, and we do this with each other and Stephen A. and Tony. We do all this stuff, but yet you can do that because there's an unbelievable respect and, yes, love for the people that we're doing that with. So with you, you know, I get annoyed that we don't get to ever see you. Hear, but I understand it. Understand it completely.

Invite me back, Autonomous Guy. I'd love to come back and harass both you and Tony one time only. PTI, put it on the agenda before you get out of there. 25 years ought to earn you something in terms of autonomy. All right. I love you, buddy, as always.

You too, man.

Excellent as always, Michael. I appreciate you. Just you.

I'm sure I went too far in the New York Times.

Uh, that's 30 years. That's rivalry. That's from the embers of when you were hottest on all the things that mattered, coming after the New York Times because you knew you had the better sports section and you knew you were writing the better shit.

And how dare they quit on the game, you know?

Yes, that's right. That's correct.

Quit, man. All right, you got work to do, man.

Um, I love you, buddy.

I'm gonna go get ready to argue with an even older man.