The Bill Simmons Podcast - William Zabka on 'Cobra Kai,' and a 2020 Sports Repodders Recap With Bryan Curtis and Jason Gay

Episode Date: December 25, 2020

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons shares some early NBA reactions before giving out his Million-Dollar Picks for NFL Week 16 (3:00), before he is joined by actor William Zabka to discuss Season 3 of ‘Cobra Kai.’ They talk about making the platform switch to Netflix, successfully rebooting a classic franchise, Zabka’s character (Johnny Lawrence) switching from antagonist in the film franchise to protagonist in the TV show, Season 3 excitement, and more (23:00). Finally Bill talks with The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis and WSJ’s Jason Gay for another edition of the Sports Repodders. They discuss COVID-19’s major blow to the sports media industry, how sports media innovated when there were no sports to cover, a look back at the 2020 NFL draft, sports gambling permeating mainstream sports culture, the evolution of the relationship between athlete and journalist, and more (56:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Coming up, Cobra Kai, the sports reporters, million dollar picks. It's one of the goofiest podcasts of the year. It is a holiday present to you. It's all next. This episode is brought to you by my old friend, Miller Lite. I've been a big fan of Miller Lite, man, since college days when I was allowed to have beer. I think nephew Kyle is a fan too. Miller Lite keeps it simple for us.

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on million dollar picks this year. I love the first month of the season because you have to go into the season thinking, I think Pittsburgh's going to be good. I think the Chargers are going to be good. I think Seattle's going to be good. And then trying to back what you think in those first few weeks and then zag the other way, if you were wrong, you could bet on new and fun markets on FanDuel, like to catch a pass, same game parlays, highest scoring game across the Sunday slate, offensive TDs in the next drive. They have so much stuff, it's crazy. The app is safe and secure and easy to use. And when you win, you'll get paid instantly. Plus, look out for FanDuel Squares this season. Here's what you have to do. Visit Fando.com slash BS to download America's

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You must be 21 plus and present in select states. Gambling problem called Win 100 Gambler or visit rg-help.com. We're also brought to you by the Ringer network, where I put up a new rewatchables with Chris Ryan. This week, we did the born identity and action classic.

I also on the ringer dish podcast, Wednesday nights, Dave Jacoby and I break down the challenge double agents, the, uh, iconic MTV show, the fifth American professional sport. I promise you there's no better challenge recap. I rarely say things like that, but it's 25 minutes. We make a ton of jokes. We break it down. Like it is the game seven of the NBA finals. And it is just the peak, the pinnacle of challenge recaps.

Nobody's doing better than us. It's just not happening. Why are we doing it? I have no idea. I just missed Jacoby. That's it coming up. Billy Zabka. Finally, it took 13 years. We finally got him on a podcast. He's going to talk about Cobra Kai, which is premiering on Netflix season three. We are breaking that news season three, repeat season three of my Son's Favorite Show will be premiering on

Netflix on January 1st. They are dropping it. It is going to be a binge watch extravaganza. We're going to talk to them about that and how the character of Johnny Lawrence evolved over the last 35 plus years. And it's a really fun one. And then we are going to talk to Brian Curtis and Jason Gay, AKA the sports reporters breaking down the year in sports media. And at the top, we're gonna do some million dollar picks. It's all next. First Pearl jam. All right, Billy Zabka and the Sports Reporters

coming up in one second. I wanted to talk a little NBA and some million-dollar picks here. At the top, I watched the NBA for two straight nights. You never want to overreact to the first games. But, you know, the basic reactions. Brooklyn's going to be awesome. We try to tell you that during the mega preview with Rossellon House. John Moran is going to be awesome.

We try to tell you that one too. The Wizards are going to be a playoff team. I was really impressed by their battle with the Sixers, which the Sixers ended up winning because Embiid just took over the game and Scotty Brooks wouldn't bring Robin Lopez in. But in general, the Westbrook-Beal combo was as advertised. Beal looked like he's going to be a top 10 guy this year

and Westbrook did all the stuff he usually does. Philly, the encouraging thing for them is they actually had some movement and some offensive know-how at the end of the game, which was something that did not happen once during the Brett Brown era. So in general, I thought that was a really fun game. And I love the chemistry of the Wizards. I loved how intense they were.

The whole bench was into it. And I like their team. I really do. I think that has a chance to be a top six team in the East. Buck Celtics, the holiday addition to the Bucks, you could see it. He was really good, and the Celtics had an impossible time matching up to him. Whether they should have given up 40 picks for him, I guess we'll know in June and July whether that was a good idea, but he's a problem. And when Giannis is playing like the way he played in the fourth quarter, they feel like the most unstoppable team in the league, the Celtics held on some really shaky, weird lineup choices. And just in general, like the bench is still spotty, but the Thompson edition, Tristan Thompson, who didn't have a preseason, but you could see during

that game, how important he's going to be from a defense rebounding standpoint. It was even guarding Giannis a few times, but he is a crunch time guy for the Celtics. And I just think he's more valuable to what the Celtics need to be as a playoff team than Gordon Hayward was. So, and Hayward had a good game on Charlotte. You know, he had 26 and I'm sure he's going to have a good fantasy basketball season. That team will win 25 games. But for what the Celtics need, they need Kemba to come back. And they need this to be Tatum and Jalen's team.

And that's what it looked like in that first game. The only two other ones really jumped out at me. I'm not going to overreact to the Jazz killing the Trailblazers. I just think the Trailblazers are going to have games like that where they just look terrible. King's Nuggets was fun just because Tyrese Halliburton played so many minutes and was so important on both ends. And it's not like he had an awesome box score, but if you actually watch the game, he looked like a five-year veteran. And now Buddy Hill's getting more minutes. Fox is out there. Bagley seemed relatively healthy and they ended up upsetting the Nuggets in overtime,

a game they should have won in regulation. But the Halliburton and James Wiseman, those two guys, I thought they were the two best guys in the draft. I would have had Wiseman first and Halliburton second. And I think that's how it's going to play out over the course of the season. I think those two,

if you saw Wiseman on that first game, you'll see him on Christmas too. He's just a big athletic guy that doesn't really exist that much in the NBA. And the fact that he didn't go first and that Minnesota decided to take Edwards over him, Edwards was fine in the first game, looked pretty good.

But the fact that they kind of veered away from the possibility of a Towns-Wiseman combo, the whole NBA should be sending them thank you notes. So I was excited for the Kings, though, because I thought that was a fun one to watch. And then the other kind of takeaway was just the Suns doing what we thought on paper that they might do with Chris Paul and that team.

Close game, back and forth, crunch time. we thought on paper that they might do with Chris Paul and that team close game back and forth crunch time. And they got really good shots down the stretch and Chris, Chris had hit his patented shot, set up Booker for another one. Booker made a couple of clutch ones. Uh, bridges was really good in that game too. But, um, in general, Phoenix just looked like a playoff team in that game they down the stretch were able to execute the stuff they wanted so I thought

that was encouraging if I'm Dallas you know you got an awesome Luka game you still lost and it's just going to be tough for them without Porzingis because they don't really have another elite player on that roster so my fear for them is if Porzingis is a while away,

this puts a lot of pressure on Luca early. Um, Luca is going to have to put up huge stats and carry a huge workload. And if he gets hurt for even two weeks, that team could be in trouble with the playoffs because the West is, is much, much better than it used to be. So anyway, um, looking at the Christmas Day games, Miami is minus four and a half at home against New Orleans. I think it's a stay away. New Orleans is one of those teams, if you catch them on the right night,

they have so much offense, they look great. Who knows with Miami how long it's going to take for them to kind of click back into bubble mode. I would stay away from that one. Brooklyn and Boston. Brooklyn is favored by three in Boston. And I actually think there should be a pick them. I would not bet it, but Brooklyn beat the hell out of them in the preseason.

And in general, Brooklyn just looks like one of the three best teams in the league. I think it's a stay away. Dallas and the Lakers. I didn't like the energy of the Lakers on the first night, but when you get the rings, that screws you up. I also really didn't love what I saw from Dallas last night.

The only one I would think about here is doing Dallas with the over. Dallas plus 205 and the over 227. But stay away from that one. And then Clippers Nuggets. You know, the Clippers looked really good on that first night. They also had three months rest, and the game was ultimately meaningless. Denver is a team. This seems like it would be a revenge game for the Clips.

But I just feel like that's a stay away, too. The only one I like, the Bucs to beat the Warriors. They are minus 560 just to beat the Warriors. The Warriors without Draymond and all the weird pieces they have. No chance. Plus the Bucs can put Drew Holiday on Curry and take them out. I don't see any way the Warriors win this game. So we are going to carry the Bucs over into a parlay for million-dollar picks.

Very excited to do this. We had a tough week on million-dollar picks. We lost $449,000. You know why? Cause the freaking Steelers, what dickheads they blew that they blew my giant parlay. All they had to do was win by three and freaking Ryan Finley beats them. And Ben looks like he's a hundred thousand years old and it was really frustrating. We're going to make our money back on them this week. But, uh, from parlays, we're down $250,000 for the season. We're making it all back.

I'm looking at a million-dollar parlay for week 16 NFL that involves an NBA team. And here's what that looks like. I already mentioned the Bucs are minus 560 just to beat the Warriors. So we have them in place. We have the Arizona Cardinals are playing the 49ers who have just been completely ravaged. And now we're down to CJ Beathard with Josh Rosen as his backup at QB and are just trying to make it to the finish line. Now they have had the all time year from hell, Arizona, only five-point favorites. I don't totally understand it, but minus 230 to win the game. I kind of hate Benny and Cliff Kingsbury, but I just think

Kyler can win this one by himself. Kyler's back. I think Kyler is going to be a major fantasy football wrinkle this week. So mark that one down Arizona minus two 30, same thing for the bears minus 400 against the Jaguars. This is just a fade of the Jags. The Jags now have a chance to have the number one pick. All they have to do is not screw up the last two games. I'm sure they'll play the worst quarterback possible. Um, I'm sure there'll be scratching dudes with minor injuries and they just, the jets did them such a huge favor. Plus Trubisky has reactivated the Trubisky truthers. Now it would be hilarious if,

if Trubisky lost to the Jaguars and then on top of it gave the Jets the number one pick back. I'm noting that, but I'm not afraid of it. I, uh, I'm throwing them in. And then the last one is the bills minus three 330 on Monday night against the New England Patriots. They're seven point favorites. The Patriots lost Stephon Gilmore. The Patriots cannot score. The Patriots have Cam Newton, who's working on five TDs and 10 picks this year and can't

complete a nine yard pass. They just defensively have looked like they've passed the point of no return with Gilmore plus all the guys that opted out before the season. Their front seven has no chance of containing Josh Rosen. And this is a little bit of a revenge game for the bills too, because they they barely beat the Pats the last time. I think they were surprised by the Pats completely run heavy game plan and all that stuff. But, um, I'm all in on this bills team. We've been riding them the last couple of weeks

here on a million dollar picks. I just feel like this is a team that knows they have a chance to win the super bowl. They're not fucking around anymore. They have a chance to get a two seed and they're going to try to lock that down. And I'm not worried at all about throwing them in. So if you put the Bucks to win, the Cardinals, Bears, and Bills to win, all four have to win, it is plus 273. So if we bet $367,000 on that, you win $1 million exactly. Mark that one down. Next one. Indy, minus one and a half over the Steelers. Normally, I would say, watch out for the Steelers here. They're home. They're home dogs. That's ridiculous. Everyone's overreacting to the last four weeks.

This is a kitchen sink game for them. Get ready for some reverses, some flea flickers, some fake punts, all the stuff you do when your back's to the wall. Here's the problem. They're not very good. Somehow, they're eighth in weighted DVOA. But here's the wall. Here's the problem. They're not very good. Somehow they're eighth in weighted DVOA, but here's the thing. They played the easiest schedule in the league by DVOA. They're first in defensive DVOA, but they played the 31st ranked offenses in DVOA and they've lost two of their best defensive players just over the course of the season.

Then on the rushing side for their offense, they're 30th in rush DVO and the eye test backs it up. They just have no danger guys at all. And then on top of it, Roethlisberger's falling apart. Now, forget the last four weeks. Last nine weeks, he's under six yards per attempt, which basically is a cry for help because that means you're getting no big plays at all.

That means it's all short stuff. And that, that is like Cam Newton territory. His last four games, he's 5.18 yards per attempt, which basically means screen passes. And you hiked me the ball and I immediately threw it to somebody. We get no deep plays at all. I test backside up as well. He can't throw the ball deep anymore. Six touchdowns,

six turnovers. I don't know how they're going to move the ball against Indianapolis. Last four weeks, they beat Baltimore in 1914. It was Robert Griffin who gave them a pick six. They scored 12 points otherwise. Next five days later, Washington gave them a pick six. They scored 12 points. Otherwise next five days later, Washington, they score 17 points. They lose to them next week, 15 points against Buffalo, lose to them next week, Cincinnati, 17 points. They lose to them. Then you go on the flip side with Indy Indy's last six weeks. They've been really explosive. 34 points against Tennessee. They won. They beat Green Bay and OT 34, 31 scored 26 against Tennessee, but got killed. Um, beat Houston,

26, 20 B Vegas, 44, 27 beat Houston, 27, 20. I just don't think Pittsburgh can hang from a points standpoint with Indy. Indy's just in the mid twenties are higher every game. Now their offense rivers, his last six games, 12 touchdowns, two interceptions, one Oh eight QB rating and almost eight yards per attempt. He's been really good because he has good tight ends. He's got Heinz and Taylor, both who can catch the ball out of the backfield and are pretty good when they have the ball. And then, uh, and then his receivers, TY Hilton's a little rejuvenated the last few games. It's become a fantasy wrinkle.

I just think he's better. And if you're making the case of, oh, Stewart's bounce back game, nobody thinks they can win all that stuff. It's like, great. They're not very good. So the other thing with this Pittsburgh game, it's not totally a must-win game for them. The game next week is the must-win game with the

Browns. So you can talk yourself into, hey, if we, you know, they're obviously trying to win every game, but they could talk themselves into, hey, if we lose this one, we could still beat the Browns and win the division title next week. So I just like the spot for Indy. I think they're better. I think the line should be three. Mark that one down. Indy by one and a half. Next one is Rams, Seattle. Rams looked horrendous last week. Youy by one and a half. Next one is Rams-Seattle. Rams looked horrendous last week. You're getting them on a bounce back where the worst loss of the year. If you can't get fired up

after you take a giant shit like that against the Jets, then you suck and you shouldn't make the playoffs. I think the Rams are a playoff team. Every once in a while, golf's awful. Sal and I talked about it

on Sunday's pod. He's the parlay murderer for a reason. When things go bad, it's usually because he's playing awful and then they fall apart. So,

I don't think that happens two weeks in a row. I don't think Seattle's defense is good enough to eek that kind of performance out of him. Then you look at Seattle. The Rams are sixth

in DVOA. Seattle's ninth. Seattle's a much, much worse defense than the Rams. Seattle has a tendency to just let these teams hang around. It even happened last week with Washington, with Dwayne Haskins, who ends up in a strip joint that day with no mask somehow almost lead Seattle, uh, to a loss because he has this big comeback thing happening and it's Dwayne Haskins. What are you doing? So, you know, Seattle scheduled this year 25th against DVOA. I don't think they've looked that good for really two months.

And I think the Rams are better. The Rams already beat them. You're getting the Rams plus one and a half in Seattle. And the line really should be a pick them because I think the Rams have more talent. I am ready for like a ferocious defensive effort from them. And then a comeback game for God. But the thing with the Rams, they can run the ball. Acres is good.

They just need to go back to run the ball, run the ball, play action, run the ball, play action, run the ball, run the ball, run the ball, play action. Just go back to who you are. I don't know what happened to them in that Jets game. Run the ball, run the ball, play action. Run the ball, play action. Run the ball, run the ball, run the ball, play action. Just go back to who you are. I don't know what happened to them in that Jets game. I think it's hard to get fired up against a winless team in December. So I don't think it happens again. Then the next one is Philly. Minus two and a half in Dallas.

Dallas is catching this tailwind where they actually looked okay last week. So maybe Dallas, who knows? Their defense is awful. I think Hertz is legit. I watched that whole Cardinals-Eagles game. I'm in on Hertz. I think he's a legit game-breaker quarterback. Really like him.

And I thought he energized the Eagles in a pretty unique way. You could see on the sidelines and even their defense looked livelier. I just think they like playing with him and for him. So, um, also think the NFC East, I think it would be hilarious if this came out where, uh, week 17, you could have a situation where this is a loser leaves town match, by the way, whoever loses this game is out. But in week 17, you could have a situation where the Eagles, who we all gave up on, who we all thought were dead. That was it. We wrote them off. Now, all of a sudden they could be alive. Right now they're four, nine and one. Washington's six and eight. And if Washington loses today, Washington would be six and nine and the Eagles would be five, nine and one, Washington six and eight. And if Washington loses a Washington would be six and nine and the Eagles would be five, nine and one. And then you look at week 17, guess who plays

each other, the Eagles and Washington. So, uh, you know, a loser leaves town match, but they just have more talent than Dallas. And, uh, I like, I like the spot for them. The only question for me is whether you mess with the Eagles minus two and a half and open the door open for Doug Peterson doing all his dumb two-point conversion shit and missed extra points and all the things that always happen to them, or you just grab the minus 142 with them. So potentially you can do the Eagles minus 142, and then you could bring the bucks

back into it. Bucks minus 560. And that's plus 101. I think I like that one. Eagles box, putting the bucks in two parlays. All right. So mark that one down. Last one.

Long shot parlay of the week with the Falcons plus 440 against the Chiefs. And we had the Vikings plus 260 on Christmas day against New Orleans. And Drew Brees, who looks like he's going to keel over at any time. I am going to recommend this as a minor spreading because it's plus 1844. So you can put a hundred dollars on this and win a thousand, eight 44. So mark down some scenario with that Falcons Vikings. All right, it's time. The million dollar picks for week 16, including NBA. First one, Indianapolis minus one and a half over the falling apart Steelers.

We're putting $300,000 on that one. We're also putting $200,000 on the Rams plus one and a half over Seattle. And we're putting $200,000 on Philly just to win parlayed with the Milwaukee bucks to beat gold state. We're putting 200,000 on that to win $201,000. We are doing a long shot parlay of just a sprinkling $10,000 Falcons plus 440

Vikings plus two 60 to win, uh, to win $184,000. And then the big one, the big million dollar parlay, your big million dollar holiday parlay. We're putting $367,000 at plus two 73 odds on the bucks, Cardinals, Bears, and Bills. All four have to win a million-dollar parlay. Bucks, Cardinals, Bears, Bills. So we're down $250,000 for the season. We're winning it all back this week. Happy holidays.

I hope you enjoyed my million-dollar parlay. All right, we're going to take a break and get to Billy Zabka. This episode is brought to you by Movember. The mustache is back with a vengeance. Look at Travis Kelsey. Before he rocked that Super Bowl ring, he rocked that super soup strainer.

Grow a mustache for Movember. You'll do great things too. You won't win the Super Bowl, but your fundraising will support mental health, suicide prevention, and prostate and testicular cancer research. And if you don't want to grow a mustache, you can still walk or run 60 kilometers, host an event, or set your own goal and mow your own way. Do great things this November. Sign up now. Just search Movember. All right. I am joined by the ageless Billy Zabka. I don't know what your exact age is at this point. You look almost exactly the same. I don't know how you pulled it off. You are one of the stars of a show that has become my son's favorite show of all time.

I was really nervous when it came out that they were rebooting it, that they would screw it up, that this would be bad. Cause I love the karate kid. I love the franchise. And yet this show is a phenomenon when it went to Netflix, this show went to another level. I felt like it was beloved, but, but just explain what it was like the shift being on the Netflix page and all the people that streamed into it. Yeah, it was, it's still happening. It was like, you know, surfing a wave and all of a sudden behind it came this, you know, monster tsunami rave. And all of a sudden it's just been, you really couldn't see it happening. It was kind of almost like a tsunami in a way, kind of sucked out. There was this kind of funny analogy, but it was like, you know, after,

after we had a break from YouTube and we were shopping and around to find a new home, there was this kind of downtime when it felt like maybe it's, you know, is this going to land somewhere else? And then Netflix grabbed it, which is where we always wanted it to be from the beginning. Um, we were so thrilled just like that. I was happy to see, you know, if it would show up in like the family category or the comedy category or the action category, like I was just excited to scroll through Netflix and find it somewhere. Right. And, uh, it came out and it was, you know, and there was season one and two, which has already been out for a while. So, you know, but they knew what they were doing on that and they grabbed the

world, man. And all of a sudden it was, it was, it's overwhelming. It still is. I mean, I'm still seeing how the echoes of the show are reaching all corners of the earth. And, um, it was, it's overwhelming. It still is. I mean, I'm still seeing how the echoes of the show are reaching all corners of the earth. And, um, it's, it's a new stage for sure. Yeah. And you had right after it got, or maybe right before it got released or somewhere around the same time, they had changed the main page to have the trending thing. Yeah. And Cobra Kai was trending for just weeks on end.

And, uh, I think my son's watched it five times from start to finish. She just loves it. And it's, it's a super bingey show, but I think the part that amazed me and, and I really feel like there's a blueprint for how to reboot franchises now, where normally like, you know, like a good example is the bad news bears movie. And they just make it again, 30 years later with Billy Bob Thornton. It's basically the same movie. And it's like, well, why'd they do that? Bad News Bears is still a good movie.

So in the reboot in Karate Kid, which they did with Will Smith's son, you know, they change it, they put it in a foreign country, but it's basically the same premise. Rebooting it this way, but I'm catching up with these characters that I liked 35 years ago was kind of genius.

Did you, when they pitched this to you, what was your reaction? I was, they hit me like a three-headed dragon, man. They took me to a Mexican restaurant, told me they had a pitch for a new show they wanted to meet me with, meet me on. Josh Heald, I worked with on Hot Tub Time Machine. I knew John Horowitz and Hayden Schlossberg from Hildenkumar's. So I knew they were comedy writers. I knew their style. So when they pitched me an idea, like we want to talk about a show, I was ready for Harold and Kumar six or something like that. And then we sat down and they just spit fired Cobra Kai. And my jaw was on the table. I said,

this is fantastic. Just the idea of this. I said, but you know, for this to happen, you have to get a lot of people to sign off. You just can't imagine, you know, booting, rebooting a franchise like this. And then they said, we have everybody, Sony's on board, Overbrook's on board, everybody signed off. And then it became, started to dawn on me that, wow, this could be real. Yeah. You know, and then I, then I wanted to know, like, wait, then I, their pitch was exactly season one. Imagine season one in five minutes. Okay. And you haven't heard anything about Johnny Lawrence or Daniel for all this time. So I was grabbing onto everything I could with what it was familiar to me, which was Johnny and Daniel and that story. But then these guys had Miguel and Robbie and Sam and this whole other world

that was completely foreign to me. And I couldn't grasp all that. My main thing was what's wait, what's the tone, you know, Karate Kid's a family movie. It's a beloved family movie. You know, how far does this go off? You know, and so, but by the end of it, I said, you know, as long as you don't, what I don't want to do is I don't want to double down on my dickness. Like I don't want to end up being the worst bad guy of all time and take a proverbial crane kick to the face at the end of this thing. Yeah. So everybody hates me for all time. No, you're going to be more of an anti-hero. And then what they said, which really helped me understand the tone, they said, if there was no Karate Kid, we could call this Bad Sensei in the same way that Bad Santa.

And then it clicked in and I kind of got it. So I walked away feeling stirred and hopeful and reluctant a little bit. I think like, you know, all the fans, when they first saw this, it was a little bit like, don't mess with that. And I had that check in my spirit. I know Ralph did as well. Um, but there was, it was the guys. I love the guys. Their pitch was so solid. They really were so passionate about Karate Kid. So passionate about these characters, passionate about me as a bad guy. They follow me, you know, just one of the guys in the back to school. Yeah. And, you know, and that they wanted to give me a chance to have a little redemption. And all that was super exciting, whether it was, you know, Karate Kid related or not. And so I said,

so they said before the half hour was up, they're like, you in or out? And I said, well, I'm in, what's next? And they say, we got to get Ralph Macchio. And I said, you know, so that's it. Well, they did a nice job sketching out the kids. Cause obviously my son's 13. So he's going to gravitate to the kids characters. They're near his age and all of those are really well drawn, but I don't know if you remember this, but I was on Corolla show. I remember. We did it together. Mid-2000s. Yeah, and you came on. And we did a whole thing about Karate Kid. And it was one of my favorite movies when I was certainly in high school. And I just feel like it's exceptionally rewatchable.

So we had a lot of questions. I think one of the things we talked about was, did Johnny Lawrence get a bad rap in that movie? Like, Daniel-san was kind of an asshole. Like, like why haven't we shifted it? And that kind of became a thing on the internet, I think over the last 15 years.

And the show really tapped into that where it's like, yeah, are we sure Johnny Lawrence was that much of a villain? Uh, you must've loved that part though. I did, man. And listen,

I, I've been a fan of yours for years and you kept this, like when you came out, I don't know what year was it? 2005 with the best sports movies or something. Yeah. Like, you know, you had this platform and, you know, it was in my it was in my peripheral Karate Kid and all this stuff. But the guys like you and Carolla and all these Patton Oswalt, you know, who just kept Johnny Lawrence and the Karate Kid, like just kept kind of like tipping the rock up a little bit.

Yeah, man. It means so much. Like when they said, you want to, you know, would you want to do Bill? I said, a hundred percent because. Oh, that's good. Yeah, because, you know, guys like you are the guys that started some of this conversation

and all that. But yeah, we did. We talked about that on Corolla. And I always felt that way because I always felt that Johnny was, you know, listen, to play a character like that, you can't go in and think of him as evil. It just doesn't fit with your body, right?

So I went in and I saw the goodness in him. I tried to find his vulnerabilities. I tried to find, okay, at the end of the movie, he hands a trophy. And so he's not all bad. He's a little redeemed. Kreese chokes him out. So I always felt like, you know, he had a little bit of a redemption at the end. And at the beginning of Karate Kid 2, he's choked out of the franchise.

And I was at peace with it. So I always felt like, yeah, he was tough. Daniel, you know, instigated it. Maybe Johnny overreacted a little. Maybe his training kicked in and he took things too far. But overall, yeah, he wasn't a bad guy. So, you know, for the years that he was, you know, labeled the biggest asshole and the worst villain and all those things, I'm like, sure. I was the antagonist, but I never saw him

as a pure villain. I saw Kreese more as a pure villain. So, so that conversation definitely happened. Like people start out on the replays over and over again, you know, you start going, wait a second, you know, the magic's wearing off. Bill Conti's music is the crescendo of the crane kick and the motion of Daniel and Miyagi and all that. But when you scrape it all away and you see this is a human story, maybe Johnny got a little bit of a bad rap as far as how, you know, how he's been characterized for these three decades, you know. Yeah, there's definitely, I don't know when it shifted, but I think the next two Karate Kid movies didn't help the Daniel San case where it's like, this guy's a hero. And then by the time you get to Karate Kid 3,

you're kind of hoping he gets his ass kicked. So it makes you reconsider the Johnny Lawrence piece of it. But I also think it's a credit to, you know, Rossella and I did a Rewatchables about Karate Kid on the Rewatchables pod, I don't know, six months ago. And we were saying like the Johnny Lawrence character is just a really good character.

You know, you're talking where the eighties where you had these villains and they're always like super cartoonish and completely over the top. It's like the Ivan Drago era of just sneering Russian who has three lines and it's taking steroids and it's totally doesn't care if Apollo Creed dies. It's just completely over the top. And Johnny was a little more nuanced, especially as an 80s character

where you have so many different high school movies and the villain in the high school movie is always just the worst, most unredeeming asshole. Right. They're just always set up to take the punch. They were there for the hero to conquer. He was written that way too. I think know robert cayman who wrote karate kid i don't know how much he thought about you know johnny handing him the trophy and having good sportsmanship at the

end it reminds me a little bit of bad boys with sean penn and uh oh that's a classic yeah morales remember like i think they kind of became friends at the end or there was a redemptive moment of isai and he doesn't kill him yeah he doesn't kill him. You know, it's like there was a little bit of that somewhere in the script. And so, I mean, I had to build the whole character on that moment for me as an actor, as a person, as an 18 year old kid, you know, reading the script, it was like, you know, he's a badass. He's kicking everybody's butt. He's got karate black belt, but nothing I connected to until the end. And I'm like, oh, OK. So at his core, he's maybe not all bad.

So I played that, you know, and yeah, I think there were a little more two dimensional villains that, you know, you just hate to hate. And I was just trying to make him human. You know, I just did my thing. And then, of course, credit all goes to the cutting and John Appleton and the storytelling and, you know, Miyagi saves Johnny in a way at the end and all the Cobra Kai's. And there's that moment at the end of Karate Kid where, you know, we see Kreese directing Bobby to go sweep his leg and all of a sudden we're having second thoughts and there was all this kind of angst and stuff. And that kind of happened on the day. I remember like when we were filming that stuff, we didn't rehearse all that inner turmoil. It sort of happened live. We rehearsed those scenes, but it was happening for us. I remember Rob Garrison, who played Tommy, came on the set

one day and we were both really in the dumps. And he's like, we couldn't figure out why we were so down. We're like, are we down because the show's coming to an end and we're going to Christmas and we're finishing the movie? And he said he called his acting coach and said, we're all going through some, you know, some kind of sadness right now. You know, is there any, what do you think? He said, what are your characters going through right now? And he said, well, you know, we're realizing our teacher is teaching wrong kind of thing. And he said, well, you're living it. You're living it. So all that stuff that happened at the end and John Avildsen had cameras pointed from every direction. And it wasn't like they set those shots up to do. It was just, he was videotaping like live theater of what was happening and then put all that together. So you, I remember when I did the research for the rewatchables pod, I learned a lot of stuff about the movie. You know, it's amazing how much stuff's out there. There's been oral histories, magazine features, all this stuff. And you threw yourself into learning karate for like three months and you, and you became really good at it. Then this movie hits, but, and this happens

sometimes in the eighties. And I can even sense when we talked about it 15 years ago, the character becomes so distinct that as an actor, you're almost trapped by the character, right? So you go and you do just one of the guys and you do Can't Buy Me Love. No, Back to School. Back to School. So you do those two. I can't believe I screwed that up. I knew it was Back to School.

Back to School, I felt like was him in college, basically. But you do those two and now you're typecast as the, uh, as the 80s villain. And yeah, right. But it was still the 80s. So you don't think that's happening. You know what I mean? Like 10 years then on the 90s, I'm like, wait, I'm the 80s villain, you know, in the 2000s, you're really starting to see that. Um, for me, I was just, man, I just loved acting. I love being on set and you know, all of a sudden, you know, back to

school, I almost didn't do. And, and funny enough, just one of the guys I signed on to do just one of the guys. And then day after I signed that they offered me the bad guy in better off dead. And I was already committed to just one of the guys. And I'm like, man, I want to go skiing with Cusack. That sounds fun. Yeah. Instead I'm in the baking hot Arizona desert playing Greg Tolan, who really wasn't redeemable. I mean, there was nothing I could do for that guy. I just felt like that was like a parody of a Johnny Lawrence character. Yeah. You know, and there was a lot of like Karate Kid references within the movie.

And I complained about that. And I love it. It's an 80s, you know, kind of timeless film now to find to look back on. Wait, hold on. I have to interrupt. I think that worked out better for you just for the IMDb because I think that's a better movie than Better Off Dead from a

as 35 years later. I think it has better legs. That movie's really good. And it's actually kind of shocking that the whole theme of the movie is the journalism teacher basically doesn't think she has what it takes to be a reporter because she's a female.

So she has to go to another high school as a guy to prove she has the chops. It's never come out now in 2020. Right, right. Yeah, no. Yeah, it was definitely a piece of time there. It was fun. I enjoyed doing the movie. And it definitely has better legs.

Back to school, I was doing The Equalizer in New York. And I was working with Edward Woodward and doing some real kind of drama. You know, Robert Mitchum and all these great classic older thespians that I was, you know, just professionals, you know, older seasoned actors. And I was just learning so much from them and felt like I was kind of getting away from the teen movie thing. And while I'm on set, I get an offer for back to school and it's to play the bad guy diver. And I loved everybody that was involved, but I was like, man, this is like the third one. And so I asked Edward Woodward on the set, I said, you know, I just got an offer to do a movie. I've played two bad guys. And he gave me great advice. He said, you know, there's three reasons you take

a movie. He said, either the part's so good, you do it for free. Number two, the people are involved are so great. You want to work with them or three, it's the money is if not one of those, don't do it. And it was more than one of those. So I said, okay, I'm going to go do it. But with, uh, with back to school, I'm like, okay, I just played two tough guys. So what for me as an actor, what I have to do is I have to turn this guy and make him, uh, I made him the cowardly lion. I just found he's just gotten to, at the end, he gets a cramp, you know, I grew my hair out and had this kind of walk, you know, and, um, and made him try to make them a little funnier and a little more, you know, but they pulled me aside halfway through shooting and said, you know, you're coming off too quirky and funny. Can you be more of the tough guy from Karate Kid? I said, I already did that. So, um, you know,

but I loved it. I mean, honestly, back to school, if I had to film a movie right now, anything I've ever done, if I had to be on another set for a day, it would be that. It was such a party. It was exactly the movie in real life. And that was a major, major, major movie.

Dangerfield, you know, because he had had the Caddyshack pedigree and that movie was so beloved in the 80s. And then I felt like Back to School was just as successful in the time. It was a moment it had. Yeah, I think so. I think it showed, uh, Rodney's best work. I mean, he was great in that. He really carried that whole thing. Did he ever roast you during that on the set? No, but here's my first meeting with Rodney in Madison, Wisconsin. Um, I get to the air, I get to the hotel with my suitcases. I roll into an

elevator, goes up a floor or door opens up. Rodney steps on the elevator, hair sticking up in a robe, crusty eyes, you know? And I said, Hey, Rodney, I'm Billy Zapka. I'm playing Chaz. He goes, yeah, yeah, I know who you are. How you doing? I said, good. And I said, what are you doing in your robe? He goes, Oh, I got to get to the sauna. I got to get the pot out of my lungs. He goes, you're young, you can handle it. That's how I met Rodney and then uh we became friends really on that we talked a lot in the trailer I gave him a Christmas card which I think he thought was charming you know I went to his trailer put a Christmas card in there and he told me a lot about his life and his family and uh the wrap party I'll never forget you know he was at the

the head table and I was over with a bunch of the other cast and he came all the way across the room and tapped my shoulder and said I just want you to know how much it meant to me that you gave me that Christmas card. Right. And it was really cool. That's cool. Yeah. When did you feel like, uh, as you head into the nineties that the hanger of, of those three characters are just how like casting directors are looking at you? Yeah. Yeah. You know, you don't expect that you expect as an actor, you're like, well, they know you're an actor, you can play different things, but you know, listen, it's a business. So they're, they're finding, you know, which actor are people going to have an emotional reaction to? And there's a preexisting one with this guy. So I got a lot of, a lot of different roles. I said no more than I

said yes. And I took things that were more creative for me than they were going to be great films. You know, there were just things that were fulfilling to me as an artist. Um, but I didn't really realize that it's kind of changed. Listen, the karate kid at the same time was gaining more and more steam. It's not like it happened and it lived there. It's like, you know, HBO comes out, cable TV and internet, and this thing is playing constantly gaining new and new fans. And so this kind of shadow of Johnny Lawrence is like growing on my side and casting directors had a hard time getting around that, you know, they would say it flat out, you're like, or do you're too identifiable as this character? And, and, you know, and I always thought this and I did this music video. I don't know if you ever saw sweep the leg. So, okay. So

I remember putting stuff on my column about it. I was excited to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was my first time kind of like meeting this whole thing head on. This band wrote this song, Sweep the Leg, and the great guys, the head of the label, great guy, took me out on a boat, played me this song, wanted me to be in the video. I wanted to jump off of the boat into the sharks. I said, no, I'm not jumping around with a headband. But if you give me, if you let me write it, direct it, and have creative control of it, I'll try to get all the guys back and I'll try to do something really special. And they said, go for it. And that's what Sweep the Leg came together. I wrote it, we shot it, the Cobra guys came, Ralph came in. And then hitting the button to upload on

YouTube, I think I was like 2007 or something. Um, it just took off. People loved it. It was picked up by news channels talking about this thing. And, and that was the first time that I realized what a fan base there was out there for, there was Cobra Kai knitting clubs and volleyball teams and Cobra Kai everywhere. And it was nice, you know, I got to kind of look and so that, but I also kind of felt like, man, the way I'm going to get out of, get to the other side is go through the eye of the needle. Like I gotta, you know, hit this on the head. And so when Cobra Kai came along, it was like the perfect storm of all that was happening over there and all was happening in my career. And now I get to dive in right to where I started

and like turn them inside out. They're writing the incredible stuff to show many colors, layers. And in many ways, he's a completely brand new character because he has 35 years of life that's been written for him. He just has the history that everybody's familiar with. So it's an exciting time with that, you know?

It's like, it's nice. I feel like it all happened this century because I remember I got to page two in 2001 on ESPN.com and maybe within like the first nine months I wrote about the Karate Kid trilogy and it was just the entire column. It was like 4,000 words breaking it down. And I got so many emails about it and people were just like, holy shit, somebody wrote it. Somebody did it. And it just, it just kind of kept going. I remember two years later, the OC launched,

or one year later, whatever it was. And they had the obvious Johnny Lawrence ripoff character who's like starting shit with the new guy. I was like, oh my God. Yeah, that's right. So blatantly, the Johnny Lawrence thing just kind of kept going, kept going. I think the thing that, I got to say, surprised me about Cobra Kai as a show

was how good you were in it. And it made me kind of be like, Jesus Christ, like what other stuff could this guy have been in? It actually kind of made me mad because I don't think a, it's not an easy character. B you've got to, you've got to basically shift somebody's perception of what the Johnny Lawrence character was from 1984 and buy you as kind of this antihero, but also somebody that you don't get to see in a TV show a lot. Like his life's not great. He doesn't have a great apartment. Um, it hasn't really worked out. He's, he's not a great dad. Um, he's, what is he pushing 50 at this point, or maybe even a little past that. And he's just doesn't have a shit together.

These are people that aren't normally on, you know, as the lead of a TV show. And it got pulled off. And then at the same time, they're flipping Machio where I'm kind of like, I don't really like Machio. I feel like I'm gravitating to Johnny. It was like a mind trick.

I don't know how they did that. As you're reading like the scripts for the first season, are you like, holy shit, they, this is actually like, they pulled this off. Yeah,

it was, wow, man, it on paper is one thing. I think, you know, they, they definitely wrote it that way.

Um, but it's the way into the universe. Cause now here we are in season three, going into season four. And like, so that's, that was the smart way to, to grab everybody and to grab, you know, and let everybody sync up, you know, and realize, okay, let's take Daniel down a few pegs. He's a little human, maybe a little fallible. He's not the superhero, um, which is fun. And then let's

beat the hell out of Johnny and give him a Coors banquet, throw him on the floor. You know, don't even give him a friend. He doesn't even have a fish or a dog. You know, he's, he's trying to make things work. Um, is a great, is a great way to come in, you know, cause you would think it might even be the other way. Johnny owns a nice car dealership. He's a successful guy. You could have gone that way. And Daniel's still toughing it out in the Valley with his mom. And, you know, so it was really the storytelling, the writing on that. I love that. Um of the lines and some of the things I'm like, wow, he's really kind of, kind of still tough and a jerk. And I, but you know, it was about diving into the soul of, of Johnny and the heart of him and then putting the heart into the words coming out of his mouth and the actions

coming out of his body. And then realizing this is stuff that was programmed from crease way back. And so it was like, it was a great, it was a great acting experiment. Listen, as an actor, you want to build up your back path. You want to build your backstory. So much of that was filled in already. And then to just fill on top of that, but how people responding to it. And, you know, it was a thrill for me to have fans go, wow, we liked the character to have people rooting for Johnny Lawrence right now is it's a thrill because for 30 30 years they weren't, you know, well, the best episode is when it's near the end of season one. I thought the key episode, which made me think the show was going to have real legs was when

him and Daniel actually like hang out and they go get drunk at the bar. And just that episode is just really fun. And it's like, holy shit, this is kind of like mind blowing. I don't know where this is going. And I, it was weird because watching on YouTube, you know, which is where the show premiered,

as we discussed before, like I just wasn't used to watching things on YouTube and having like it finished and the next one come up and, but you're, it was kind of hard to stream on your TV and to get the app. And I don't, I don't feel like they did a great job in general, just with the app. It was sometimes a restart, stuff like that. And then when it got on Netflix, especially when it had the two seasons together, it was

just so easy and so bingeable. And you just, they always had like a little tiny cliffhanger at the end of each one. So they only did what? 16, 20, 20. Yeah. only did what? 16? 20. 20? Yeah. 10 and 10 and 10. Yeah.

And it just, they fly by. So like, I look at somebody like my son is just like, I have nothing to watch. I'll just watch Cobra Kai again. And you're banging it out. And like, I don't know how many hours,

but yeah, well, that's written like a five hour movie carved up into turning points. Yeah. You know? And it's, so it's really that it's just, you know,

it's a page turner and reading the scripts is the same way. You just keep going to the, I just never ends, you know? Well, but with a couple, couple big ones, like crease coming back,

crease coming back was like, Whoa, what? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then the end of season two where,

you know, and now I know, I know I don't want to step on season three because I haven't seen it yet, but everybody listening to this will know it's out and probably at least knows what happens in the first one.

But that was pretty aggressive. Yeah, very aggressive. It's a pretty aggressive ending to season two. Season two, we all got that script because we didn't know really what was coming.

We knew something was going to happen. But when we got that script, the entire cast and even the makeup trailer, the stunt department, it was like someone died in there. It was like, can you believe what's about to happen? And I was like, I'm emotionally invested in Johnny. So I felt very proud of the new Cobra Kai Johnny built

and here comes Kreese and they have a fight, but I don't really know where that's going. And then he starts to betray me. And the end of season two, you know, everything that the show was built on is just sucked and pulled away. You know, Johnny doesn't have Cobra Kai. Kreese is in there.

His kid's in the hospital. It was a punch in the gut. And if it didn't have a season three, I'm like, if it ends here, this is the worst ending of all time for Johnny. So you had no idea if season three was happening? No, we didn't know. Because YouTube basically got out of the content business

and then you're kind of keeping your fingers crossed at that point. Well, yeah, but they produced season three. So season three was produced by YouTube, but they waited for their analytics and all the whatever they do to figure out if they want to do another one. So we got, I think, a green light on a shooting of season three pretty soon after it

aired. And then we went and shot season three and then Netflix acquired one, two and exclusively three. So, um, and nobody's seen three. This is why Netflix is stock is like 500 plus dollars, whatever it is.

Cause they're smart. They're like, Hey, this is Cobra Kai. Do we put this in 200 countries. Were you worried? Did you film this during COVID or before COVID? What was the schedule?

No, way before. Season three was completed last November, almost a year ago, over a year ago. So yeah. So we were done November, December, and then went into post-production throughout the year. Yeah. So no, we weren't there for that

is Ali in season 3 or no? who? Ali? Ali with an I? I don't know man I haven't seen this season I hope so but I can't you know you don't want to spoil it for me alright I don't want to spoil it for anybody well you know listen there's a phone on the beach

and it was it appears to be from Allie. But who else has access to her Facebook account? Good cliffhanger. Just promise me there's not going to be like a season nine where there's a financial role reversal and then Johnny is super rich. Daniel's in the apartment and they do that. By that time, you'll want it.

Bill, by that time, you'll want it, man. You'll be like, yeah, turn this thing again. Let's flip it upside down again. Johnny's adopting children all over the place. He's got this whole family. How much has your life changed since this one on Netflix? A little bit. It's been a little bit of, you know,

I've got kids and a family. The privacy is a little different right now. You know, I'm a little more, you know, people coming up, you know, to me, this and that. But, you know, my, my, my life is my family and my friends. So, you know, that's what I focus on. It's great that I'm doing this work and people are responding to it. You can't, can't look at it too much, you know, otherwise they'll take you out of it. It's like the natural baseball, you know, like you got to block out the whole stadium. So, you know, as far as I'm concerned, it's, it's, it's thrilling, but it, you know, uh, I, I keep my, uh, you know, my kids still haven't seen

Karate Kid. That's on the list. I know that sounds crazy. How old are your kids? 11 and seven. And, um, that's on the, I think that's on the list this week. Like they really want to see Karate Kid. They've been on set of Cobra Kai. They know Ralph and Marty and everything. But, uh, you know, I never, I didn't raise them to see daddy as a, you know, anything other than, you know, ride your bike and throw him a baseball and things like that. So, um, that's so funny. I showed, I showed my kid when he was like five. Well, if I was Daniel LaRusso in the movie, I would have showed it to him on when they were born. This is your father, right? You know, he's a hero. Yeah. I mean, there was a time when Micah, my son was, I think about five or six and he, he, he asked me, uh, we were always playing bad guy and good guy with Legos and the bad guy

always went down hard. And he found a picture of me and Ralph and the crane kick stance in my office. And he goes, dad, what's this? And I'm like, Oh, that's from a, uh, a movie I did a long time ago. And he goes, Oh, are you fighting that boy?'m like, oh, that's from a, uh, a movie I did a long time ago. And he goes, oh, are you fighting that boy? I said, yeah, I was, I was fighting that boy. And he goes, well, did you win? And I'm like, well, you know, not this fight. I go many other ones, but then he Googled, uh, the trailer and saw me in a skeleton outfit, beating the crap out of some guy in a fence. And that didn't go too well. So I'm like, I'm going to wait till you're a little older for this guy.

I'm sure once he dives into the whole franchise, he'll be upset about the scoring in the movie. I still don't know how Johnny didn't win. It was like punch to the face was legal. Then it wasn't. Then the crane kick is a kick to the face. That's somehow legal. I've still never figured it out. That's a long, that's an ongoing debate.

The preview, the preview, the, yeah, the show, that was complete. I mean, it could have killed him, really, you know. Took his neck back. You know, I love that. I mean, he just thrusts his neck back and then everybody rushes out and they give him a trophy. Unbelievable. I mean, it's an under-18 karate tournament. That couldn't have been. But hey, it worked with the movie.

By the way, when I did the research on that, they filmed an actual karate tournament as you guys were filming the fights for the movie, which I never realized. They tried to make it as realistic as possible. So there's like real shit going on, right? That's right. That's right. Yeah.

Yeah. There are real karate schools all around. All those kids sparring when Daniel walks in with Miyagi and checking it out and all the kids fighting. All that was real stuff. And then you fought like a couple dudes that were actually like real dudes. Yeah. In like the prelims.

All the guys I fought, yeah, they were all real dudes. And the best of them all was Daryl Vidal who plays Daryl Vidal. Yeah. The butterfly kicks, you know, that dude, I mean, he also invented the crane kick if you don't know who he is. Yeah.

You know, he did it in the prosthetics. But I mean, that guy, I mean, he made me look great. These big butterfly kicks. And I just stood there and threw a round kick. And he flew midair on his back. Yeah. So for the people listening, that's the guy Johnny fights in the semis. Yeah.

And it is a destruction. It's a 3-0 massacre. But the guy you're massacring was the technical advisor for the whole movie. Yeah. He was awesome. Yeah. Um, all right.

Well, listen, congratulations on all this. It's a great show. It really is. I really like it. And I think it's so cool that it's a show like for people, my generation,

your generation that we can watch with our kids. You know, I think that's a really hard needle to thread. And somehow they did. I think it's going to be a monster show during the holidays I'm sure it'll be front and center

on Netflix for a couple weeks there but congrats on everything I'm really happy for you thanks buddy thank you Bill man I appreciate it alright good to see you

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Other conditions apply. See Pennzoil.ca slash warranty for full details. All right, it's a special year-end edition of the Sports Reporters. Jason Gay from The Wall Street Journalist here and Brian Curtis from The Ringer. We've done this many times over the last few years. Have not done it for a while. Have not done it since the pandemic started and might as well start there. Sports media in 2020. We usually talk about sports media trends, things we saw, impact of certain things.

This had to have been the most tumultuous year in sports media history because we had to completely change how we covered sports. Brian, what was your biggest takeaway? Well, number one, is there sports media left? Barely. After 2020, after layoffs everywhere from ESPN to every local paper in the world. I mean, it was a horrible, and you could see that coming from March, April. Like, oh, wait, if sports completely shut down and a lot of these media organizations weren't doing great to begin with,

this is going to be really bad for people. And I think now we're sort of in the stage of a lot of the terrible things have happened. Probably more will happen. We've seen it as ESPN as recently as a couple of weeks ago. And now it's like, what, what do we bounce back as, as a sports media? Do the jobs come back? And if they do come back, do they come back in the same way? Or have we sort of re-imagined things over these last couple of months and they come back in a totally, totally different form? What do you think, Jason?

I will take a slightly more optimistic tack than Brian there. I agree that, you know, this forced the issue as it did in many, many businesses, things that were struggling before the pandemic certainly weren't helped by this. And, you know, we saw a lot of carnage with job losses in journalism broadly. But if I can, like, you know, defend my brethren for a second, I would just say that, like, I was just staggered by the way that journalists in sports media adapted to this situation. Many instances, you know, crossing over in the newsroom, you saw people who are used to covering, like, you know, springtime sports, moving over and covering healthcare and going into hospitals and applying some of the same things that they learned covering sports to this pandemic. And I thought that was incredible. You know, I have a very high opinion

with the rigor that a lot of sports journalists bring to this profession. And we saw that borne out throughout the year. I do remember vividly, you know, as those first games started to get canceled, when you had the Gobert game, pull the plug on the NBA. And isn't that weird that we'll just remember it as the Rudy Gobert game? I mean, that just will just, I don't know if it's own Wikipedia entry at this point, but I do remember having conversations with people as things were just getting canceled, right and left, like, what are we going to do? And I think the through line of this year has been not just this seismic moment where sports shut down,

not just in the United States, but around the world. And then gradually started to come back. I think it was a strangely compelling year. You know, sports, we realized rather quickly, rather vital to people's happiness and the human condition. And we saw, you know,

when things just started rushing back in the end of the summer and the beginning of the fall, you know, a lot of gratitude candidly from people that things were returning. I wouldn't say normal because it's still not normal, not even close to it. But I think sports proved its relevancy throughout the year. Yeah, I agree with that. I thought, you know, it's funny. Some things kicked in the way I thought it would.

You know, we had that whole Grantland Ringer background where we were always trying to create content when there were dead weeks, you know, and we would schedule way ahead of time. Oh, look at that two-week stretch in August. Nothing's happening. We got to come up with stuff. So it was weird on the fly to be like, oh, nothing's happening. Like for the foreseeable

future, we got to come up with stuff and everybody is doing the same thing. Right. Like I, I was redrafting NBA drafts and we were treating the last dance. Like it was the basketball playoffs or something. Um, but because like, what else are we going to do? Everybody was in the habit of this is how we do it. I just wonder, now that we're out of that, did we learn any positive lessons from how we had to ship, Brian, with trying to get coverage out of stuff

that maybe is going backwards instead of forwards? Because I think some of that stuff was positive. Some of it, yeah. I mean, I agree with Jason. It showed how smart everybody is. Because when you don't have basketball, you can't just be like, all right, boss, see you in three months. Yeah.

You got to write something. And people were really smart the way they figured it out. I'll just say one more thing to what Jason said. When they couldn't go to the games, or they couldn more thing to what Jason said when they couldn't go to the games or they couldn't go to the locker room or couldn't go to the bubble in Orlando. They wrote really good stuff. Like I read those pieces that were about the games.

They weren't even just like, Hey, in 1977, this weird thing happened. They were actually about like the NBA finals and they were good pieces, including on the ringer, by the way, because people are smart and they figured it out.

Well, didn't it, didn't it kind of show a shine, a spotlight on maybe locker room access in this day and age is completely overrated. I'm not saying the access of the human contacts. It's just like the athletes don't need it anymore. We've talked about this on multiple sports reporters. They're not those interactions that people had in the seventies and eighties. They're not the same. They're completely orchestrated by the athlete at all time. So maybe we didn't need to do it the way we were doing it. It, it showed to me, I don't know if it was overrated, but it showed me how subtle it is that it's not, it usually isn't LeBron had a great game or a bad game. And I walked up to him in his locker and he revealed to me everything that happened. And I wrote a really interesting

piece that happens sometimes, I guess, but it's more like the stuff those guys get is small. A lot of it's off the record. It's over the course of a season and it comes out like, you know, six months later or three weeks later, or they hear something right in a kind of casual conversation. They write a piece about that a couple of weeks afterwards. I think that's the thing. It's really, really subtle. Cause when I'm reading it, I allegedly do this for a living and I'm reading those pieces. I can't tell how they're different. Really? You know, even if they were, if they're doing a zoom call, I can't, I can't look at that and be like, well, this other than it says comma said in a zoom call after the game, I can't tell the difference, but I think there is a difference.

And I just think it's really hard for those of us who aren't in there to figure it out. Well, it does seem like we've talked about this before, too, the DM texting relationship that people can have with the principals, whether it's a GM, a coach, a player, even an owner, you don't need that locker room access in the same way. And I've always felt like when the answer to something is, and I I've never felt, I've always felt like when, when the answer to something is, this is how we do it then. And, and nobody's kind of re-examining that and go, wait a second. Well, why are we doing it this way? Especially with the NBA, which the guys are all their own, you know, brands at this point, they've become actors in the Vanity Fair in the 90s, where if you want access to them,

it's got to be on their terms. And it's got to be written a certain way. You might lose that access entirely. A lot of times, like going to a player, you don't go through the team anymore. You go through whoever their gatekeeper is or their handler or whoever is running PR for them. And so it's kind of all tied together, right, Jason?

Oh, absolutely. But I want to ask this. Like if we're looking at some of the numbers as sports started to come back in the fall, you know, ratings were down considerably in many instances. And there are all kinds of variables here. And probably the prevailing issue was the fact that there was just so much stuff happening. And I think also people were at a point in their lives where they just

wanted to be out doing stuff like the sort of home, like quarantine culture of sourdough and Netflix and watching eight hours of TV. I think it kind of waned by the end of the summer, early fall and people just wanted to be out. But I can't help but wonder if the fact that the media was stifled, stifled by the technology, stifled by the events, stifled by the fact that they just couldn't go to all these things. Not everybody could afford or want to send people into the

NBA bubble or on the road with an NFL team. If that kind of just crush of attention, the lack of it, perhaps contributed to that. Maybe there was some benefit. Maybe there was some usefulness to the ridiculousness of what we've all been around at Super Bowls and NBA Finals and Baseball World Series where you're like, why are there 485 reporters here? This is crazy. This makes no sense. You're all watching the same thing in the same press conferences. Does it have any value? And I, I, I'm wondering maybe it did have something, maybe it did contribute to this general elevation of conversation about sporting events that would make people want to tune in. That's interesting. Like, so, so I agree that it feels bigger and I always felt that at the finals and I always would try to go to the finals every year,

whether I was covering it or working for it or just to go as a fan. Because I love the finals specifically for like the three hours before the games. Yeah. And all the people on the court. And just felt bigger. And when the stakes are bigger,

it puts more pressure on the performances. You're shining a bigger, hotter spotlight on everybody. And, you know, I, I, I think that was what was weird to me about the bubble, which I also kind of liked where it was the same venue every time it was just basically the teams and, you know, a handful of, uh, people from the organization and the coaches and that's it. And I think that's one of the reasons the play was so good because it was just consistency. But at the same time, I missed, I missed all of it. I missed the whole spectacle of the whole thing, which we're going to feel again at the Superbowl. I, this is going to be the weirdest

Superbowl we've ever had. What's the Superbowl going to be like Brian? Yeah. I mean, that's, that's what's going to be felt most of all. Cause was i was at then so was jason at the last super bowl this year which was i felt like the last big sports writer conclave that we had before the pandemic kicked in and i know that because i saw 30 different sports writers at the jason isbell concert that week you know and someday i will name them all and embarrass them publicly. Yeah. But yeah. And look, if we're being honest, part of what we do is give free advertising to these things. You know, we do critical coverage. We're smart about it. We break it down. We, you know, give it to the owners and the players and all that stuff. But when you show up,

you are giving to Jason's point, free advertising to the event. You're making the event seem like a big deal because you're filing copy and doing podcasts and all that stuff. So yeah, I do think there's something lost. You never thought you would feel nostalgia for Radio Row, but you do, Brian. Radio Row will never be Radio Row, or at least not in the immediate future, the way that it always was. And that whole ridiculousness, I mean, had you said to us, Brian, I remember roaming the corridors of the Hard Rock, what is it called, the Hard Rock Stadium? It's been called 19,000 things, but I think it's Hard Rock Stadium in Miami. And if I had said to you, we ain't going to be doing this for a really long time,

your reaction at the time might have been, okay, that's fine. But no, it turned out we missed it rather quickly. Do you think looking back last nine months, was there a big mistake anybody made from a sports media standpoint? Is there something if we went back nine months ago that we would change? Because I just look at it from a ringer standpoint. We adapted really, especially on the audio side. I mean, this is the first time the three of us have ever done a podcast where we can all see each other. Sure. So for people who don't know, Brian would come to my office, Kyle would be in my office as

the producer, and Jason would call on the phone. And then when Jason was talking, Brian and I would just kind of look at each other, look around and, and, but trying to listen, but, you know, being careful not to interrupt. And, and to me, it's like crazy. We never thought at any point, Hey, we should just do this on zoom. Then we could all see each other and we'll just all record from our ends. And I'm running a digital media company. It never occurred to any of us. And then it had to, you know, within eight days, we're like, well, fuck, we got to keep doing podcasts. How do we do it? And then you kind of figure it out and you figure out this new world where it's like, ah, this is actually better. I, it turns out Rosillo doesn't

have to drive 40 minutes to my house on Sunday night so we can do NBA games. So there's subtle advancements like that, that I think were helpful. But I look at like somebody, something like ESPN where I feel like they've been floundering this whole year for a variety of reasons, but like, I don't feel like ESPN has innovated or changed at all. Do you guys feel that way? No, I'm sorry, Brian, you go first.

Well, yeah go we could do that here too no i don't feel that they've really changed i mean look they got the greatest they got the greatest gift of pandemic programming which was that the last dance was ready to roll out or it was slightly sped along to roll out right at the beginning of this thing and it was not one michael jordan documentary was a weekly Michael Jordan documentary that went on and on and on and on. And the longer, the better from their perspective, right? Like I watched the last dance. I really enjoyed the last dance. I milked it for as much content on the press box as humanly possible. But you know, some of those flashbacks to 1983 and 1984, I probably could have trimmed those out.

But for ESPN, it was a goldmine, literally a goldmine and probably a job saver in the long run because it just created so much attention. But in the same way, I think they would do it differently if they did it over again, because what they didn't realize is they should they should have had like a whole podcast set up ahead of time. And just basically like, how do we mine this for as much content as possible? The original plan before the pandemic was they were just going to run them all over the course of like a week and a half, right? It was five episodes. Yeah. And I think the pandemic made them think, well, and this was smart.

Hey, we'll do it every week. We'll try to drag this out. We need something. And that ended up being a really good model and antithetical to the binge watch model, which I think people are used to. What did you see, Jason, from them in 2020? Well, I would just ask really quickly,

what do you guys think of the idea of like, had the last dance just gone according to plan? Had there been no pandemic and it just had run out the way they intended to run it out in the interstitial time during the finals? Would it have had the same kind of impact? I doubt it. It just felt like such a big thundering moment

because people were starved for something and it became a talking point in a way that television programs, especially sports documentaries, I mean, just unheard of. Would it have had that same kind of impact? I would say no. Yeah. I think part of what gave it the impact that it had was that we all needed, you know,

like people like us were treating it like it was the playoffs, but it also kept having these storylines pop up, you know, like Scottie Pippen was mad about this or, you know, the Dennis Rodman episode, which I felt like all of us, the Dennis Rodman stuff we've known for 30 years. It's like, all right. Yeah. I know that story. I was bored by it. And then there's this whole new generation was like, whoa, Dennis Rodman. And then that was 48 hours. And it just had all these spinoffs. It was really kind of crazy to watch. It almost reminded me of when I was a kid, when there would be like, you know, long miniseries

like Rich Man, Poor Man or Roots. And all these stories would pop out from those miniseries. And it would just like kind of be this all-encompassing thing for, I don't know, three weeks. That's what it felt like. Yeah, it was the thorn birds of sports media. It really was where you couldn't wait to come back the next week and see it no that's i i totally agree and i would i think it would have been big but just not

quite it wouldn't have been must see in the same way it really wasn't anything else to watch it didn't have it wouldn't have had the oxygen as bill pointed to i mean people were the next day, re-litigating Scottie Pippen's contract in 2020. It was amazing. Or who were the unsung heroes? Or did they give short thrift to Horace Grant? It was amazing that these conversations were actually happening. It felt like some sort of role-playing game or something. But I would say with respect to ESPN, and to a degree every media company including the one I worked for that the challenge

here was you know walking this line between the distraction of sports sports as entertainment which is principally what they are they are a distraction from ordinary life to a very real very dramatic situation which was affecting ordinary life in a fatal way for some people. And it was not the kind of thing that lended itself to sort of glib commentary, right? You know, we're really good about just, you know, goofing off and being silly talking about sports. When things get a little bit more serious, obviously, that's a bigger challenge. But it was this thing where they were kind of simultaneously happening, especially as the league started to roar back. So Brian wrote elegantly about this when it started to happen.

But at what point does a writing about baseball stop paying so much attention to COVID positives and start telling you about who's the best shortstop in the National League? Or do you do both? And I think to a large degree, people found that middle rail impressively. But I think that was always a challenge. I know that where I worked, it was a constant conversation of covering the sport journalistically was the most essential thing, but also acknowledging the fact that people watch sports for entertainment and distraction. What it really reminded me of, sorry to cut you off, Bill, what it really reminded me of was the football head injury thing on a much bigger scale.

Because I think all of us, whenever you see those head injury stories, you're like, this is awful. This is horrible. And I kind of am rethinking, you know, watching a football game and should I be doing this? And should we be sending those guys out? And then the football game starts and I'm the biggest example of this. And I'm like, oh, football. Oh, here we go. Here we go.

Okay. You're already conditioned that way. Yeah. And as sports media people, you get this real talent for cognitive dissonance and you sort of do both, right? And then a head injury thing comes up and you talk about it and it's important.

But then the game switches on, you just completely switch gears. And I thought that happened all during the pandemic and it's still happening up to the start of the NBA season. Yeah. I think it was such a grim situation just for all of us as people day to day. And you talk about the distraction thing. I totally agree where the COVID thing where games are getting either almost canceled, seem like they might get canceled. This team's missing all their

quarterbacks. And it was kind of like the show must go on and everybody reconciled, you know, whatever their own feelings were about it. And if it was like, you know what, I'm watching this stuff anyway, then you can't be morally judgmental about it. It hit a point where either you're in or you're out. And it's like, look, here are the risks. This is how it's going to go. There's going to be some games that will genuinely be compromised because the NFL is just moving along, moving along, moving along. And you can't watch all of it while also bitching about it. It's like it's kind of one or the other.

And I think all of us are so used to bitching about everything about football that we're just kind of used to it at this point. And it's even before that injuries, you know, it's like you go back to how they treated players and the contracts and all that stuff in the seventies and eighties and steroids and then looking the other way with a lot of that way. And basketball is so much more player friendly and so much more, um, cognizant of how, how people feel about them and feel about the league and feel about the players. And Adam Silver is somebody that is really, really wary and aware at all times. So what happens if we start hitting these same checkpoints with basketball? What I like, we're taping this on a Wednesday. There's a situation tonight with the Rockets where there might be a COVID.

They might have to cancel this game. I feel like they're going to fold way more quickly on some of this stuff than the NFL did. The NFL is just like, nope, we're going, going, going, going. How do you think this plays out, Jason? Well, basketball teams also are quite a bit smaller. So the dynamics can change rather quickly if you have both positives or players, you

know, under, you know, just out for games. You know, I think the most acute situation was college sports. If you want to talk about something that requires cognitive dissonance, nothing requires more cognitive dissonance than like bigtime college sports. You're talking about a multi-billion dollar enterprise in which one party, the talent on the field are not compensated while everybody else is compensated at market rate. And that was all before any of this. And then you had this situation, which a little bit like the NFL, conferences were announcing that they were going to do this and they're going to barge ahead. And the reason they were doing it was clearly

the money. So if you were hanging to some sort of thread idea of amateurism, that's all gone now. And I'm very curious what athletes will do going forward, because I think if you're a college athlete, especially if you're in a high revenue sport, you're quite aware now of the leverage that you have in the environment. You saw flashes of this late in the summer as some of the conferences were debating coming back or playing or not playing. But I do think that that's going to be a significant change going forward. We were talking about ESPN a moment ago. We announced just a couple of weeks ago,

ESPN has a $300 million per year deal for the SEC, which is a major, major hike over what CBS was paying for the same. The money is still there, despite, obviously, the economic carnage that has ensued. The money is still there, despite, obviously, the economic carnage that has ensued. The money is still there. What's different now is I think the players are quite aware of their value here.

What do you think, Brad? Yeah, I agree with that. I just think sports makes all of us who work in the industry we work in make peace with it, know if it for better or worse right sometimes it's temporary peace sometimes you just shut off your brain for three hours sometimes it's two hours and there's another dan snyder story this week i mean

seriously how many people who watch washington you know how much of how much moral you know cognitive dissonance that they had to push through to make that work? You don't even have to look into, you know, high revenue college sports or professional sports. I mean, everybody on this call is a parent who has kids who are playing sports. And during this pandemic, if you were in a place where sports were starting to crawl back, you were confronted with this question of like, okay, is this safe? Do we do this? And you were evaluating those trade-offs personally. You were thinking about what's important here. And I can tell you in my home that I wanted the kids outside. I wanted them running around. If I felt like they were making necessary precautions and

things like that, yeah, get out there. Let's play. Let's do this. Um, so this was a very unusual circumstance in which the conditions were applied, not just to the highest levels of sports, the marquee stuff that we all pay attention to, but everybody's ordinary lives. Well, and you can also see kind of how semi-psychotic some people are about this stuff, even at the youth sports level, you know, and I've dealt with it. My daughter's playing club and she has a four day tournament in Arizona for, you know, in January. And it seems like it's going to happen. And the case for it is, Hey, it's soccer. It's outdoors. The people aren't really near each other that much. You can talk yourself into this whole reality of it. But the bottom line is in California, nobody's playing soccer. Nobody's doing any outdoor stuff. They don't there, but in Arizona, it's like, cool, come here.

So now you have all these parents driving to Arizona from California, six, seven hours for baseball and lacrosse and soccer. And they're all justifying it in their own ways, right? Whether it's my kid wants a college scholarship. He only has three years left. He has to be seen by the coaches or I just want my kids to be outside and not be indoors playing video games all day. I'm willing to take the risk. And it's really up to each person, I guess. It turns you into the 49ers. Right. Got to go to Arizona. Arizona. So it's like the youth sports, like offshore casino, basically. Like it's objective. But the amazing thing to me, basically. It's a subject. It's Fight Island.

The amazing thing to me is that Nevada ceded the territory to Arizona. You would think, who would have been more anxious to grab this territory than Nevada? Arizona is like, no, no, hold my beer, and they took it. It's so crazy, but you're right. It's like a little microcosm of all the big pro and college sports stuff that was yeah yeah and i and i think in in many instances too it created this weird uh mindset of sports fans because they were sitting there saying why aren't they playing pro sports my kids playing little league what's going on how come my college team

is playing a reduced schedule my kid just just finished, you know, youth soccer. Around the rest of the country, youth sports were back rather quickly. You know, we're seeing, you know, that not every application of rules was the smartest, but it does seem like there was a little bit of, you know, conflict in the way that various sports across people's lives came back. It's fucking weird. And it's one of those things you can try to pretend it's not happening, but it's still weird.

Like last night watching Warriors Nets, Steve Kerr's got a mask on. Yeah. He's trying to coach. He's pulling the mask down so his player can hear him and then realizes he can't do that. And he's pulling it up and they're cutting the sid're cutting the sidelines and his, he's just tugging his mask up and down. It's like, what are we watching?

And meanwhile, the players are on the court and they're not wearing masks. So it's like, all right. So, and then you have the media reporters, like the silent reporters and they have the masks on and, um, you just kind of get used to it. But I do, I do wonder, like, watching Hardwood Classics 25 years from now, one of these games, what the fuck was going on in

2020? Why did the coach have a mask on? This is crazy. We're going to take a break and come back and hit some more of this stuff. Jason, you thought the sports media event of the year was... All right. I never would have said in a million years

that the most important sporting event of a calendar would ever be the NFL draft, but I kind of feel it was the NFL draft. It is an absurd piece of theater in an ordinary year. It's effectively a bunch of telephone calls. When ESPN originally went to the league and Pete Rosell said they wanted to televise it, the league was completely baffled. But we've seen how crazy it's become. It's become a traveling circus. And that obviously wasn't possible. They did it in April this year. They ran it on time

against a lot of people's advisements. And yet they made it work. It was, you know, for a league that Goodell squirreled away in his basement, you know, in a cozy Mr. Rogers sweater. You had the athletes at home among their closest loved ones at a time when that's basically what everybody was doing. You had the coaches in their weird rec rooms with their families. Coaches don't spend time with their families.

What the heck is going on? And of course, you had the marvelous scene of Bill Belichick's dog sitting at the draft table in Nantucket. I mean, there was nothing not to like. And I think also they did a kind of funny thing where they had a bunch

of different telecasts, right? You had the heart-singy stories, mainstream-y kind of thing, And then you have the wonky fantasy style. But I mean, just the whole event worked in a way that I just, you know, didn't expect. Unless you were accidentally watching the the tragedy porn telecast versus the the football telecast, which I was watching on ABC going, what the fuck is going on? What is this? Where's like the football conversation, not realizing that I was on

the tragedy porn channel. I'm so glad you mentioned that. That was just such one of the weirder sports media things in the whole year was the ABC telecast of the draft. Cause here's on ESPN, as Jason mentioned, they're being so they're being different, right? Let's get, let's get cameras and zoom calls and coaches and like really figure this out. And then the other way is kind of going hard toward like 1985, you know, real people media, you know, we're going to tell human stories here, folks. And you're like, Whoa, what, who, who is this for? And then the NBA draft did it too. And this is when it all made sense to me because I had the NBA draft on in my house, but then I left and came out here because I knew I do a podcast.

I wanted the TV, just, just didn't want people interrupting me, but I had left the TV on and my wife came out after like pick 12 and was like, what's going on with this draft? I've cried three times. And, and I was like, Oh, now I get it. You're this draft telecast is not for me. I'm going to watch anyway. You have me, you have me, but you don't have my wife. But if you're telling these stories, maybe you pull her in. She doesn't care about the draft. She doesn't care where Obi Toppin goes. But if there's some story about this guy, he's found his father died and blah, blah, blah.

And this is, you know, it kind of ties into another topic that I think is really fascinating. The fact that Fox paid a premium price for Tom Rinaldi, who is the premium guy at this stuff. And it's become this genre that

I do feel like Sports Illustrated, Gary Smith, people like that had hit it pretty hard in one era. And now it's kind of crossed over I do feel like Sports Illustrated, Gary Smith, people like that had hit it pretty hard in one era. And now it's kind of crossed over to TV and Rinaldi was the one that perfected it. But Curtis, did you ever think you'd see Tom Rinaldi make 2 million a year? I didn't. And I was watching Game Day this week and I love College Game Day. That's that. And Inside the NBA are probably the two studio shows or pregame shows that I actually watch and I genuinely enjoy. And they cut to the Rinaldi segment and it was on the university of Alabama receivers having a great year. And his nugget from that was that the guy stays after practice and catches a lot of balls

after practice, which is interesting, I guess, but let's face it, that's a fairly common nugget among successful athletes, but it had the string music going in the background and that kind of slow-mo of him with the jugs machine and run it up and i'm like is there just one key that we can do all these stories in it's it's there's there's one guy making all the music yeah it's like we're the terence malik who were staring up at the cosmos, but it's like, he's just staying after practice. What is going on here? Isn't this a throwback in ways? This is Rune Arledge theory. This is Dick Ebersole theory, right? The idea that to mainstream a sport, to get more people in, you see it, it's been an epidemic at the Olympics forever. The idea that, you know, to get people to follow along athletes and, you know, the Olympics have a hard grasp. You're asking people to, you know, all of a sudden get excited about archery. No offense to archery. You got to keep your standing with all the fringe

sports, archery, cycling. Yeah. But there is. Yeah. But there's this belief, I think, especially in broadcast sports media that you're going for the widest audience possible. And how do you bring in the widest audience possible? Well, then you have to bring in an emotional immediacy to all this stuff. You have to remind people about the bad things that have happened along the way. And I think that as television and, you know, the internet have stratified

everything, it's easier to subsist on niche. You know, the idea that you can be super wonky and, you know, it's analytics specific or gambling specific, and you don't have to appeal to the widest possible audience. So when you see it, when you see it executed in sports now, it feels stranger than it may have once. Well, I remember really when this started. I remember the patient zero for this era was the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, the summer Olympics. This was when they had had the pieces in the previous Olympics, but that was the one where they're just like, we're going for it this year. Hey, whoever the athlete is, boom, let's throw to this five minute story about blank and people hated it. And it was early internet.

I remember I was on my own at that time. Website just was great for me. I'm like bitter guy. And you know, with my own blog, sports blog, just attacking everybody. Oh, this is great. This is, I could get two weeks out of just making fun of this, but this is now 20 years later, it'd be the equivalent of we're having this podcast right now. And you know, you know, who really feels strongly about this, who lost his relative recently

is Brian Curtis, Brian. And then we just did a five minute tangent on you just telling this really sad story about like your great uncle who just passed away. And I went to the hospital bed and blah, blah, blah. And Kyle starts playing music. And then it's just like, all right, back to the podcast. That's what this coverage is now. I don't understand it. And it really feels like Bill and you and I have had this conversation over the last decade many times.

Remember when we felt like sports profiles, like written profiles were broken because they all became sob stories. Yes. Everybody was doing Gary Smith. And I like reading a good weeper once in a while. I write them every once in a while, but there's gotta be other keys you can work in. And I feel TV profiles right now,

generally speaking, are pretty broken because they're all in that key. It's all about that. And it's like, you can do a funny one. You can do one that's just neutral. You can do one that doesn't have throbbing music on the background. And I'd just say the same thing about written stuff, people get in a rut and it feels, I don't believe that's the only way to appeal to non-sports fans is that it has to be a tragedy or a good cry. I really don't. It's getting worse, though, not better, which is the part that scares me heading into 2021. I don't know if it's...

I would say that the contrary is true. That like in sports media, especially even in television media, has become the domain of specialists. I was listening to Brian and Jim Gray the other day, and I was like, this kind of career won't be replicated. You're not going to do every sport. You're going to be the value, the superstars, the people who are paid the most and are emulated by the people coming up or the woes and the shifters, the people who have inside hardcore information about one thing. They're not trying to do everything. They're not trying to be Al Michaels or Costello. They're one thing. And so again, I feel like the emotional stuff,

it stands out because a lot of the time, the stuff that people are talking about on television is very sort of specific arcane conversation. Yeah. Well, I was thinking about this this weekend cause I really enjoyed it. Keep to leave. He's done two football games. He's just so different than all the other announcers that it actually makes you notice how generic most of the other color guys on the other football

games are, where it just doing that pros versus Joe's and just all cliche left and right. And you know, he's needs more time and he's, he just all cliche left and right. And, you know, he's needs more time and he's, he's blah, blah, blah. And it's just, it feels like it's karaoke. And then Talib came in and he was just interesting. Like I wanted to hang out with him. It was the same way I felt, you know, he is obviously really, really raw and would talk over a play by play and made, you know, a ton of mistakes that could be corrected. But I was just so happy. It was somebody who was kind of swimming against the stream, which I, I do. It just feels like this cookie cutter. You really notice it on the Sunday night NBC

when people are missing and then people move around and then it's like a different host because Tirico has to host it. So now we have Liam McHugh. But this person's out too. We're going to shove this in. But it's basically the exact same show with people just performing the roles. And it's like, what is this? How did we get here? And I think there's a pandemic explanation for that

because remember at the beginning of the pandemic, and I think I even wrote this about, could we totally reimagine sports TV? Could we reimagine these games? We don't have fans. You know, we need fake crowd. Are we just going to completely? And the conclusion that I think everybody came to was actually, this is the one thing

you want to watch in its regular form during the pandemic. You want a basketball game to look like a basketball game. You want NFL to look like NFL. So let's, other than keeping the announcers home, which they did last night and NBA and for the NBA opener, let's just make this as, as normal as possible. Let's not change any of the grammar of this thing. And I think that's, I think we would have considered that a surprise in April. Well, remember, remember baseball, how weird it was the first like month of baseball.

We were like, this just sucks. I don't like this. Yeah. And then they tried to fix it. They took mix results. Mix results. I noticed it in the World Series. We had a good World Series this year.

There's so much sort of interstitial fan stuff in a World Series game. You think about it. In the past years of the Cubs fans with the rally caps of the Red Sox fans before 2004 gripping their mittens in the cold

and just everybody freaking out. And that was always the go-to thing for a television producer was to turn to the panicking fans. Because you had 30 seconds between each pitch so you just cut to the stance. Oh, there's a terrified six-year-old who feels like his world's collapsing.

100%. So then you have to do, okay, well, I don't have that available to me. I can't go to the Larry King cutout behind the dugout. That's just too weird. I'm going to go to the players. And the players became more integral to the theater. And I actually felt more connected. Like I didn't know much about the Tampa Bay Rays,

but I felt like I knew them by the end of the World Series because I was constantly just kind of viewing their body language. And the same goes for the NBA. I was at the Nets Warriors game last night. And one of the things that... I don't know if television is conveying this in interesting ways, but you see it.

That the players on the bench in this kind of weird tiered bench thing that they have behind the benches now where, you know, they have multiple players, you know, going back a few rows are really, really into the games. And you can hear what they're saying to their teammates and you can see them celebrate after big dunks or defensive plays. And there's a colleague, you know, feels a little bit like college basketball in a fun way.

All that stuff would be drowned out in a standard crowd stadium environment. But I think where telecasts could get more innovative is to lean into more of that and show you more of that. They did a little bit of the bubble. I think it knew more. I don't know how they fixed the baseball thing without the fans.

I never, it was, it was weird. There were certain sports that I never realized how important random shots of fans were to my experience of watching the sport. Tennis was another one. Yeah. I, I got, I really liked the U S open. I would always watch, you know, at least some of the major matches. I didn't watch any of the U S open.

It was too weird for me. Some people liked it. I had friends that were like, it was awesome. I love just hearing the ball and the, and the, the sounds of the players. I was like, I thought it sucked. I never realized how much I relied on the noise of the crowd and the ooze and the Oz and kind of figuring out who they're rooting for. It was almost like wrestling.

Wrestling's another one that's really suffered. But at some point, the crowd drifts to one of the two players. And sometimes it would to a surprising result where you're like, wow, they want that person when I'm surprised to hear that or wow, this crowd's not really in a Serena. That's odd or whatever. And just removing that may be like watching tennis less. Did you have another sport like that, Brian? Yeah.

Well, I think last night we've gotten so used to fake crowd noise, but fake crowd noise during the Lakers ring ceremony was a really weird one. Yeah. They're getting it. And you, cause I don't think that button is on the, is on the console that these guys are pushing. You know, what is, what is like when the, like the Lakers 12th man gets his ring? Like what, what's that sound that the crowd makes, you know, what is, what is like when the, like the Lakers 12th man gets his ring? Like what, what's that sound that the crowd makes, you know, versus we know what the LeBron sound is, but what does that sound like? It should be like a, like a very polite applause sound. They haven't, they haven't mastered that one yet.

Yeah. Just this, I would have said college football because that's another one where the crowd just so into it and home stadiums, but you know what? You watch these college games and half of them had tons of fans. There are 20,000 people at a lot of those games. Yeah. Football really worked because you realize like, oh, I don't, I, they just show the field and the players of the field.

Then you, unless they're cutting away to the crowd, I'm not even thinking that there's a crowd there, you know, and then they'll cut to them. But I actually thought football has been successful. I don't know if you guys found this, but I found the fan shot to be really fraught this year. You mentioned bill. This is like a standard of sports TV. We always see go to the fans, but half the time, and maybe this is mostly a college football thing. They cut to them and the people just wouldn't be wearing masks or they'd have the mask down on the neck kind of thing. Then you're like, what the fuck? And I've never thought the fan shot could actually be fraught and be like this weird

public health warning. And I was like, Ooh, that makes me feel bad. Yeah. I always assumed like with the NFL that they'd cut to the luxury box and we just see both crafts sitting there with no bass or, you know, whatever. But that owners, even Jerry Jones, it seemed like they were pretty diligent with it. How did it affect the Tour de France, Jason? It was a little all over the place.

I mean, the Tour de France is a, and I appreciate the cycling question. You're welcome. It, you know, if you had asked me in April, a sporting event that would not happen, I would have picked the Tour de France simply because it's a month-long or three-week-long bike race through the mountains of France, outdoors, and moving place to place every single day. It worked. They didn't get shut down. I can't remember. I don't believe there were any sort of positive tests or certainly anything that were threatening to shut it down. But I feel like they got lucky, you know, and I'm happy that they pulled it off

and there was actually a very exciting race this year, as I'm sure both of you know. But, you know, it felt like a little bit of caution was thrown to the wind. I was shaking our heads like, what? I have one other big topic, but we're taking one more break. So I look at 2020. We covered a lot of the stuff that I think I'll remember

from a sports media standpoint. The two that we haven't yet. One is the gambling piece and the influx of, initially it was fantasy. Fantasy became the gateway to the gambling stuff. Obviously, I'm delighted.

I've loved gambling forever. We certainly, we have a big deal of FanDuel. It's not like we're not partaking. Last night, FanDuel did a deal with Barkley. And on Inside the NBA, Chuck's doing odds boosts and really leaning into it. And it struck me like gambling, I feel like is the thing to watch

this decade for how it's going to affect sports and how people cater the content to it and how people kind of get used to it and how they get used to it with the dialogue and the language of stuff. You could see it in the crazy, um, Tyson Roy Jones fight, which was, you know, just a, one of the more bizarre TV nights of the year, but draft Kings is running the odds during each round as Tyson seems to be beating Jones. And then at one point, one point he's, uh, like a 3,001 favorite. I can't even remember. Meanwhile, like it ends up being a draw, but the odds were just so omnipresent during that whole night. Um, and I feel like that's happening more and more with sports that really resisted this, like basketball and football specifically, where this was this third rail.

I was even thinking about when Paul Hornig died recently, Paul Hornig got suspended for a whole year, um, because he was gambling, not even on his own team. And then you think about all the Pete Rose stuff and Pete Rose not being on now gambling is just accepted and it's part of it. And people understand the language. Where does this go, Brian? Well, I'm always struck when I turn on the NFL and I see like a graphic of Terry Bradshaw holding a briefcase, like he's a heel wrestling manager, you know, from the eighties. That's how it was kind of amazing to your question about fantasy. Do we think gambling will make it into the mainstream sports shows to a greater degree?

Because fantasy is huge right now, right? Like Matt, you know, there's a Matthew Barry, there's fantasy shows, there's fantasy writers, but they haven't quite crept onto the set of like the Fox NFL pregame show. You know, when it does creep in there, it's always super awkward, right?

Or they're always like, I bet that helps your fantasy team. Like after like an 80 yard touchdown or something. And it just feels like forced every time. Exactly. It still feels like it's over at a different table, you know, like,

Oh, that's something over there. But we feel that gambling is going to make that transition more than fantasy ever managed to. I think it will because there's more money at stake. And I think the leagues are active participants. What do you think, Jason? Yeah. There are any number of people who are involved in sports gambling startups as these things become increasingly state legal who will tell you that this is a growth industry with no end in sight. I just don't know how broad the appeal is. I don't doubt for one minute that it's a huge industry and it will get bigger.

I'm just curious at what point does it, as you say, sort of infiltrate telecasts or alienate people? I had a conversation. I talked to a number of people who are running sports books, maybe a couple of weeks ago. And And this person said, I hope not. And which surprised me because I figured they would want that. And they said, you risk alienating a part of the audience. And the most important thing for these sports is to be wildly popular to as broad a people. We will get them. We will grab them if they're looking for extra excitement in their passion. But I don't think he was resistant to the idea that this is somehow just, you know,

it was just naturally going to happen because as these things become increasingly legal, you're going to want more of it. I think the thing that shifted, and I remember being at page two in like 01 and 02 when they really didn't want me to write about gambling on, you know, I want to do my weekly football column that I had done on my own website. And it was like a real battle. I don't,

I don't even think I fully did it until 2004 with the lines. And they were like, we, we just, we don't want to dab on that. And Berman would do be doing his picks. He was the only one on the channel that really acknowledged it, but it was always wink, wink. It was always like, I see the bills winning, but maybe not by as many points as some people think they should win. I see it being 20 and 24. So he'd be picking the bills not to cover and you'd be like, oh, I get it. So it was like this secret language. I think it's shifted now to the point that the one thing I've really noticed is people are way more educated in stuff like my homes being the MVP favorite. His odds have dropped. Kyler Murray's making a big run or the way they talk about the NBA finals. Now it's like Brooklyn six to one,

they have the third best odds. I think people get that piece of it. And I think the media members are more and more able to weave that into, to how they talk about it. But what's interesting is people still don't understand. I don't think a lot of people, how they come up with the odds and that their goal is for the odds to just get people to bet both sides. They're trying to take off the risk, the casinos, the bookmakers, whatever. So if they make like, this was always the Red Sox thing, pre 2004, Vegas would make the Red Sox, you know, five to one to win the world series. They should have been 21. They'd be like, this was always the Red Sox thing pre-2004, Vegas would make the Red Sox, you know, 5-1 to win the World Series. They should have been 21.

They'd be like, oh, we know these shithead idiot Red Sox fans. They're going to come bet the Red Sox anyway. We'll just make the odds lower. That's the part people don't get yet, I don't feel like. Didn't America get a giant lesson in how this all works on election night? So I wanted to bring that up. So that was the most fascinating thing, right? Where that became the most incredible subplot of that night.

The offshore markets in Europe and this crazy Trump money that was coming in. And meanwhile, they were just jacking the odds because they knew Trump had all these crazy people that were betting on them. But Brian, you've seen that with Dallas every year, the Cowboys always get treated like they're one of the four best NFL teams. Meanwhile, they have made the Superbowl in 25 years. Thank God. I'm not one of those stupid people. Superbowl. My, I just want to know is the, the fan that loves the Tom Rinaldi pregame piece. Do they also want the odds on the screen during

a game? Have we seen that crossover? That's when I know that the worlds will have truly crossed over. That will be, yeah, like crossing the beams in Ghostbusters or something. I just think it's going to be more and more part of this because there's too much money at stake. And the other thing is, I think it's 21 states are legal now, maybe something like that. So it's somewhere between 19 and 21. There's some big states that aren't legal. California is not legal. New York's not legal, although you can drive across state lines. I have friends who have done this drive right over the state line to New Jersey, put bets in drive back. Um, in the next three years, I would say probably at least two thirds of the States will be legal. And, you know, you think about it, Brian lives here in California with me. It's kind of hard to fathom. California wouldn't be looking

for another revenue source when you see what a freaking disaster it is here right now. Like it would kind of be cool to have more money coming in. So I don't, at some point that's got to be legal, but it does, it just feels like it's been a subplot this year because it feels way more mainstream than it used to be. And, and I do feel like the leagues are embracing it now. Whereas before it was this thing you stayed away from. So I don't know anything else you want to hit on that. You want to move on? I would just say that, like, I think that we're in a media environment now where you're going to be able to give that to people who want it rather easily. You know, it's not terribly hard to create alternative broadcasts for people who are very, very much looking for live betting odds. And I think that, you know, every single sporting

event now has multiple feeds, a big one at least, has multiple feeds, and it wouldn't be terribly hard to do that. I would be very curious if you reach a point where the marquee telecast of a game integrates lots of real-time gambling information into that, how that could work. Could you have a three-person Monday Night Football booth

where the third person was kind of a prognosticator? I don't know. Well, you could argue it would make the broadcast more interesting. Absolutely. Because they could come back from a commercial and be like, hey, the live betting over that commercial, people seem to think

the Chiefs are going to come back, and yet they're down 10. There's five minutes left. What do you think of that, Lewis? And then that would just be how they did it. Shouldn't we bring him in like Mike Pereira? Oh, we got a big gambling moment here. Can you come on and explain the stakes of this field goal? Honestly,

I'd rather have that than Steve Javvy just agreeing with whatever the call on the floor was for the hundredth straight time, right? If we're going to have experts at least have a, have a gambler. This leads me to my next thing. This is more, it's not a prediction as much as I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet.

And it's something we've predicted in the past. And now it's making me wonder whether it'll ever happen. I'm sure we have as sports reporters from the last three years. Anticipating that coverage was going to change. And like Jason just mentioned about different broadcasts catered to different people. There was a moment at ESPN where they, I forget what college, it was the big college game of the year, and they just put it on every channel, right? And it was a different broadcast tailored to each person. And it seemed like this was going to be potentially a little bit of what the future of sports coverage would look like.

Like, don't just watch our TNT feed. You can watch these feeds here, here, here, here, and here, and enjoy these different announcers. That hasn't happened yet. And now we're heading to 2021, and we're basically in the same spot we were in 2014. Jason, why hasn't that happened yet? Probably a little expensive.

I have to imagine that to have multiple productions of even a single event, there's involved personnel and expense. And at times when people are shedding payroll, that's probably a complication. I also think that, you know, sports media and cable, and you look at what ESPN has been going through the last bunch of years and like the talk about maybe Monday night football should be an ABC product.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a cable product. They have sort of refalled in love with the idea of scale as much mass audience as possible. We don't necessarily have to grow ESPN. Let's get the most numbers we can possibly get for our Monday Night Football game. Maybe sort of stratifying it further is a little bit challenging right now. But I think the more existential question for all of these networks is just, you know, we have young kids in our homes and we know what it's like to watch people who are not our age watch sports

and they don't watch it in the linear fashion that we all grew up watching it. They watch it in chunks and segments. They don't fear missing things. They don't feel like they have to be in front of it every single second. They know they're going to get whatever they want online immediately. And what that does to traditional broadcasting and the way that sports are presented, I think,

is the big headache. Because if you are ushering in a generation of people who are not sitting down to watch the first quarter of a football game or a basketball game or a baseball game right through, what are you programming for? Like, how are you doing this? And it can't all just be for geezers like us. Well, that's the big fear, right? Is their biggest fear is my son, my 13 year old son who follows the NBA through 2k, the video game he plays, Tik TOK and Instagram. And like yesterday he video game he plays, TikTok and Instagram. And like yesterday, he came and he watched,

he watched Brooklyn with me because he just wanted to see KD and Kyrie and he watched, I don't know, an hour and a half of the game then it was a blowout and he left. But he feels like he's following the league at the same level that I follow it on fucking TikTok and Instagram.

And I got to say, like, he's not missing much. He knows what all the stories are. He knows, like, he got excited about LaMelo Ball. He I got to say, like, he's not missing much. He knows what all the stories are. He knows, like, he got excited about LaMelo Ball. He's like, dad, LaMelo, he's all over TikTok right now. And to him, that means LaMelo is, you know, on his way up. He didn't need to watch the preseason game, but I actually watched LaMelo in the preseason, one of the games and kind of the same, I arrived at the same conclusion my son did from some of these clips. So if I'm running a league like the NBA, that would be the one way I would have, how do you wrap your head around that, Brian?

Where it's like, how do we know this is how kids are watching our sport. Some of them are still watching it conventionally, but we have this whole other audience that's kind of consuming it this way. And they still love our league, but we can't monetize them. They don't, we can't turn them into ratings. Um, what do we do? Yeah. And my, my kids thankfully have, um, inherited my athletic genes. So they're going to be sports TV watchers rather than people that get called to go to

out-of-state tournaments. I can already predict that one, even though they're pretty young, but I would just say that is a huge problem of the future, but guess what the present is. It's sports on television, right? And when we were kids, sports was one of the popular things on television right now, sports is the popular thing on television and the pandemic, if anything, just prove that, you know, whatever you want to say, and you know how much I love sports TV ratings, whatever you want to look at those numbers and this is down, this is out. It's the most, it's the thing. It is what people are watching. So there's this very lucrative present to be had for the next several years. The network's about to give the NFL a bazillion dollars for the,

for the next couple of years. And, and I agree with you, there is this sort of existential thing. And it's probably about all media, not just sports. Like, what are people going to watch? How are they going to watch it? But right now and for the foreseeable future, sports sort of is television and live television anyway, you know, beyond a few series and things that break through. And I don't know, it just feels like that's that's the story to me at the moment. It's the Mandalorian, Cobra Kai and live sports. Yeah, not in that order me at the moment. It's the Mandalorian, Cobra Kai, and live sports. Yeah. Not in that order, by the way. I wonder if there is a conversation that's happening in all these leagues about something that newspapers started to panic about in the late 90s and the aughts was, are we giving all of it away for free? What mistake are we doing here?

Because as you said, lamello ball is a sensation on tiktok social media and so on that like but that's because that content is chipped up and thrown around the internet and no one's like chasing the rights down and making a problem for the people who are posting that stuff um and the leagues have embraced it under the idea that you know you're creating awareness you're building fans and so on. But at a certain point, as you said, you're not monetizing any of that fan interest. And that's what television effectively was. It was the conduit through which you could monetize the audience, come to an advertiser and say, it's worth this. And that's where all those billions of dollars started to flow into the game. And if you lose that, you've got to get it from other places. And to go back to what we were talking before with gambling, that's a huge

part of why leagues have put their arms around gambling is it's a hedge against this audience decline or the way that television money will go. Well, it's funny. Ratings are going down and will continue to go down. And we don't need to litigate what happened in the NBA because there's seven different reasons why that happened. But I think the prices are going to still go up. And that's something that has not changed really since the eighties. Um, they'll be able to command more for their games because there's more people competing for those rights right now, whether you're a league like the NBA looking long-term, like we should just own all of this. Um,

and whether there's going to be a moment, like what happened with movies this year with HBO max, where they're like, fuck it. Movie theaters are out. We're, we're going directly to the consumer. And I guess that would be a question for me for 2021. That happened so abruptly.

It was something everybody had talked about for a couple of years. Oh, someday this could happen. Um, yeah. Someday could we get movies at home? That would be cool. I remember having conversations on this podcast. I would pay $50 for this movie right now, instead of going to the theater. And now that's where things are going. That's where Disney plus and HBO max. Is it realistic for a place like ESPN to just be like, fuck it. We're, we're, we're breaking our cable deals or we're out of our cable deals or we're not, we're just not going to be in that business anymore. We're moving everything to ESPN a lot sooner than people thought. Cause I feel like

it is realistic. It's funny. What I thought you were going to say is, is it realistic for the NBA to say, Hey, we're not making any more television deals. We're just going to sell you NBA games from our own. I think, I think it would be realistic if they didn't have so many competitors for the rights right now. You know, if that's where we are, right.

Yeah. Because there's so much money to be made, so much money to be made from not only the networks, but an Amazon peeking in there and all that kind of stuff. Right. At this moment. So I think that's a ways off, especially like how Bezos works, where Bezos just looks at stuff and goes, groceries. I'm just going to own that. And then it's like, wait, what's he doing?

And it's like, oh, he bought Whole Foods. Oh, they're now going to ship groceries to us. And if he just looks at it and goes, the NBA, I'll just take league pass. Right. And that's how I'll get into sports and watch every NBA game here. Um, I still feel like the NBA values the networks. And I think all the, all the sports realize like ultimately it's a huge fucking country. Not everybody's going to stream games and you want to be in as many places as possible. But I do, I do wonder if either a league or a network is abruptly going to shift. And we're all going to be like,

what happened the same way? HBO, HBO max, that was inconceivable a year ago that somebody was going to do that. Yeah. And, but that's also like a, that's an environmental change.

What we're having, what's happening, you know, you're watching it at home as opposed to in a theater, what's happening in sports is a behavioral change. It's just the way that people consume sports. And sports will get a stay on this for a whole bunch of years because, as you point out, there are all these digital players out there for whom, you know, they can afford it, first of all. But secondly, it's just a way of making new customers, creating prime interest.

If having the NFL as a way to retain prime membership or boost prime membership, then it makes sense for Amazon. It doesn't have to make sense on its own. It's actually, in a weird way, a return to the days of loss leading, right? With network buying sports because it was a way to propel their primetime lineups. I mean, that was why you overpaid for Sunday football, was that it was a way to sell, you know, your new sitcoms and dramas and all that. And I think that, yeah, there's a longer runway than we think for all these sports

because of these digital players. But I think where you'll see change is that, you know, even for behemoths in television, the economics will make less sense. You're starting to see networks realize that some of these deals may have been too long or overpaid. The idea you just could go on a spree and snap up everything may not make the most sense if you're just a traditional television company.

Feels like that's where that's headed. Last topic, then we'll go. We never really talked about how media-friendly the athlete relationship is. And that was the other big takeaway from 2020. And I think there's a variety of reasons and I've talked about it on the pod,

but I don't want to spend 100 hundred minutes on it. But, um, the, the friendly nature of the coverage now, and you really notice it, I think in the NBA, more than anything, even during free agency signings where you get to like the Moe Harkless level of a signing and the person who breaks the story that Moe Harkless has signed with Miami. And he's like, he's expected to have a dramatic influence on their three. And I'm like, Moe Harkless, I like him, but he's been on six teams.

I'm really suspicious at all times now in a way that I can't remember being before of people's motivations who cover different sports, the relationships with the athletes, why they were chosen for the story, why they were chosen for the story, why they were chosen for the scoop, how they got it. And just the favor trading that goes on that basically has been what celebrity journalism would happen to it really since the 1980s. And Brian has written about that and about the Vanity Fair piece and how that's

kind of started to become what is sports journalism. Brian, have we, are we hitting a point when this is a seesaw that is just going to tip over? Maybe. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I see moments when it feels like that, when it feels like we've gotten, and by the way, we should know this is a dramatic shift from when we were all growing and not just growing up, but what, like 20 years ago? Yeah. The Peter Vassieras, Jason Koss. Yeah. Where it was like calling the media pro player or wondering if certain, you know, we certainly reporters had, you know, rapports with players and stood up for players and all

that stuff. But just thinking of the sports media as overwhelmingly pro player, dangerously pro player that would never have come up, never have come up. No, nobody. I just, I just did. You did not get that vibe. Generally speaking.

Yeah. We all grew up. The media was an adversary to players and in some ways could drive a player out of town. Oh yeah. And then those days are now over. Yeah. So I guess I'd say two things about this.

One is like, when you talk about that, that thing about, I wonder how, who's, why this story is being broken and what the agenda is here. To me, that is largely a product of all these, the locker room stuff, players getting more remote, all these things getting shut off. So we just assume that there's like, when it's not old fashioned journalism anymore, it's got to be some kind of one for one relationship, some kind of favor trading with the agent or the player or, you know, that journalists are so desperate to break news that that's the only way to do it anymore because the old avenues that we grew up with have been

cut off. And probably to some extent, that's pretty true on the pro player stuff. I always do wonder, it's like, were we concerned at the time when everything was pro team and pro GM and pro owner, were we worried about that? Were we, when I thought about that, watching the last dance, when Jerry Krause got to tell Michael Jordan what to do, which is now just mind blowing where people standing up and not saying Jerry Krause is an idiot. Cause I think a lot of people said that, but it's saying like, Jerry Krause does not have the right to tell the best basketball player of all time when to end his career. Like that's

beyond the pale that this guy should get that responsibility. Were we doing that at the time? Well, I thought about it when I did the book of basketball podcasts about Rick Barry and reading about how it was perceived when he jumped to the ABA and how angry it made people like, how dare you? Yeah. How dare you do this? And I think that was a persistent theme when I was growing up and we had a lot of baseball free agency in the seventies and guys were jumping teams. There was a, how dare you element to it, you know, and, you know, or, or Dave Winfield, which you can go and you can go on sports illustrator, read the story when he signed with the Yankees, it was like 10 years, 15 million, whatever, whatever the final number was.

And the moment he didn't play well, he became a villain in New York. It's like, well, we paid all this money for what the hell. And that was just kind of the way it was for a long time. Now it feels like it's done a 180. And sometimes I wonder like, how far can a player go? Before there'll be like, the stuff Harden has done in the last two months,

he's pushed the envelope with this stuff. As far as I can ever remember anybody doing it. I mean, you know, last decade or the 2000s, Vince Carter wanted to get traded out of Toronto and did everything he could. And the moment he got traded, he was awesome. Um, we've, it's not like we haven't seen players do this before. I'm surprised people defending it so vehemently. And it almost seems like it's not even about sports. It's about this moment, the country's having, where it's like, he should be allowed to do what he wants. They can trade him and he would have no say in that. So this is the player's way of,

you know, being able to own something for themselves too. And it's like, all right, but you're, you're shitting on all the fans that you have that supported you for the last eight years. And if we're, if we're going to get in the shitting on fans business, then who's going to be paying for all this stuff eventually? You know, the, the fans are ultimately the reason that players make the money. I think, I think you can be not pro owner and not pro player, but you could be pro fan. Does that make sense? And if I'm in Houston and I just rooted for this dude for eight years, and then he's like, I'll see you later and leaves hell and high water trying to get out of there.

I don't know where that leaves us as high water trying to get out of there. I don't know where that leaves us as fans. And that's the part that worries me. Yeah, I think what you're also noting here is the decline of the moral scold in sports writing. That was a very, very competitive profession for a very long time, noxiously so. I'm glad we're out of that era of, you know, moralizing about athletes and so on. And I think that part of the reason for the evolution is that we just

know much more about the mechanics and economics of sport than we once did. You know, we look at a college football coach making $8 million a year. And we know why that is ridiculous contextually when players aren't being paid. And we know it's absurd to get riled up about somebody making $40 million to play baseball or basketball when you know what the television contracts are for the owners in these sports. But yeah, like everything, there's probably some medium in between. And I think that part of what you're describing also is that the evolution of the business. And we should all be a little wary here, right? We were all young people once.

We all walked into those press boxes and saw those old guys hunched over typewriters and said, I think we're going to be that person. Well, we became that in degrees. And I think that there's interesting new energy happening around all this stuff. But I also think that the way the business has modified the most is that the things that people want to do are largely to be that kind of insider and break that news and have social media vitality. I mean, speaking as somebody who writes a newspaper column,

I love doing it. I would sign a lifetime contract, but I feel like I'm making horseshoes right now. This is not something that people aspire to do when they're 11 years old now. They want to be woes. They want to be shams. They want to be, you know, people perking up on social media and dropping bombs and all that great stuff. And so I think it doesn't leave a lot of room for the kind of, you know, I'm going to get up here on my high horse and blast away. That's the kind of sports writing culture that we grew up with and are very familiar with and maybe sometimes miss. I didn't like that era either.

I think we've all complained about a lot of the people that, you know, dabbled in that pool over the years. I get maybe there's just no middle ground at all. I think the thing that's confusing to me, Brian is, um, what, where this goes over the next three to four years,

because, um, it seems like the players are in complete control, which is the way, the way it should be. But then I was thinking last night watching, um, Durant get interviewed by the inside, the

TNT guys. And he clearly had animosity toward them. Right. And he just does the one word interview. And I was like, on the one hand, I'm just surprised that he played it that way. Cause he's such a thoughtful guy. I've spent time with him. It was like, this is just a bad move by you.

Why are you doing this? And then the other hand, I'm like, he's looking at it. Like these guys have trashed me and Kyrie over the years. Like, fuck these guys. I'm giving them one word answers. I'm like, I kind of respect that. So it's, it's just so much more complicated and nuanced now. I enjoy it. I, the hardened thing is the part I can't wrap my head around when it gets to the point where somebody is just sabotaging their way out of town and people are defending that. That's where I'm like, I don't know what to do now. Yeah. And I just, I would love a world where we can actually take these on a case by case basis because everything is actually different. Some stuff is labor rights. Some stuff is players saying, I don't want to be just shipped around

like a monopoly piece around the league. So I'm going to do something to make sure I have a little more agency in this decision. Right. I'm going to say, I want to go here, try to like, you know, okay. Right. And, but, but there are, there are big differences between these things. The one that used to get me was we had this era, like 10 years ago, where whenever a player would just chew out a reporter at his locker, everybody would start laughing on Twitter, but look at that stupid reporter. He got clowned by the player, but then you'd actually listen to the question and be question like actually the reporter is the victim yeah how would you like to be humiliated like that you know in front of everybody like that's terrible but in some cases a reporter was being an asshole and probably deserved it so i

just i guess i would just want us whatever we migrate to in this thing to be like we can actually consider all these things on a case-by-case basis. Yeah. And it's a power dynamic, is it not too? I think that like, you know, you've written about this, Brian, I believe. I feel like that's like a thing we've said a lot in this podcast. You've written about this, Brian. But, you know, there's a power dynamic that where an athlete once was, you know, interested in the cover stories or needing the, you know,

profiles and needing the goodwill of television hosts, they're not terribly essential anymore because this is a whole other opinion ecosystem that exists apart from traditional media in social media. And they have their own channels, which are in some instances are even bigger than anything that can be offered from traditional media. And it's not as integral to their success or failure. I guess the thing that I miss is, is things just kind of come and go now. Players are just, some of this stuff is just crazy. Like LeBron had this thing. He said on one of the pods about how the two titles he won were the two toughest titles anyone's won in the history of the NBA. And it just kind of came and went.

And I'm thinking like, all right, so your 2016 title where Draymond got suspended when they were up three, one, and it flipped the series, but it was a good comeback. And then the 2020 bubble title, these were tougher titles than the Celtics in 1968 with Bill Russell as a player coach and Martin Luther King getting assassinated and then debating whether they should keep the series going or not during like the most tumultuous civil rights year in the history of the country. And then going through and winning in the finals. Like, so it was tough. Those two were tougher than that. Like, should we go through the 75 finals? Like when, when stuff like that gets thrown out and nobody challenges it, that's when I get scared

when it's like, we're just not going to challenge anything anymore. We're just going to, this stuff is just going to come and go. Um, I just hope people challenge stuff a little bit more. Yeah. That would be one of my hopes. There was a lot of MJ stuff thrown out without challenge this year, you know? Yes. And MJ is the greatest, right? But when mj says you know scotty pippen was very selfish having that surgery when he did because that really set us back and trying to defend our title oh by the way in the next year i just quit basketball yeah i just like you know like wait whoa whoa wait right i disappeared for 18 months so you thought he was walking out of his teammates and... Yeah.

It seems like the more famous you are, the more you can kind of get away with spitting your own narrative. Yeah, that's a long history. Same thing with actors and singers and everybody else. This was really fun. Good to see you guys. Happy holidays

to sports reporters. We stuck one in under the 2020 deadline. Hopefully, if we're doing a year end in 2021, I hope it's all about how, hey, wasn't it awesome when sports came back and fans could be at games and

life was more normal. But anyway, happy holidays, fellas. Thank you. You too, both. Thank you. All right. That's it for the podcast. Hope you enjoyed all the audio from me this week. Hope you enjoy the holidays. Hope you had a great Christmas Eve. Hope you have an awesome Christmas day.

Hope you're staying safe. And I look forward to getting to the end of 2020, as I know you do as well. Thanks for listening. Thanks for all the support. Thanks for spreading the support. Thanks for spreading the word. And thanks to my man, Nephew Kyle, who has been reliable and ready to roll this whole year. And it's been really fun to work with him and do all the stuff.

All the little behind the scenes stuff you guys don't know about, like when I fuck up my audio and I have to redo stuff or have to send stuff at three in the morning or, you know, some files not bouncing or, you know, Kyle's putting out fires left and right. I really appreciate what he's doing and,

uh, really appreciate all you for listening and for spreading the word for us. So we will see you on Sunday night with the Cuts.