The Matt Thomas Show with Ross - People We Miss Hearing From - Ernie Johnson

Episode Date: May 15, 2020

Us as fans, we as fans want to see that. Houston Sports Talk 790. From the owner to the coach to the players. Your home for your home teams. As I said 20 minutes ago, and I bear repeating it, the most entertaining studio show in the history of sports entertainment, sports business, regardless of sport, is inside the NBA. We miss it terribly.

And that's why you began the people we miss hearing from segment. and we are very happy to be joined now by the man who hosts that show and has done so for decades. Ernie Johnson is with us here on the Matt Thomas show. Ernie, it's Matt and Ross. Thank you so much for carving out a few minutes of your time. This has to be such an uber surreal time for you because you guys, during this time of year, are working five, six days a week, correct? That is correct.

That's our busiest time of the year, Matt. And thank you for having me on, by the way. It's good to talk to you. We, you know, we would have, we would have been diving into March madness and then the NBA playoffs when everything, you know, got suspended on March 11th, March 12th in that neighborhood. And so, yeah, we would have been, we would have been actually starting, I think, I guess next week, Western Conference Final. We would have been somewhere to start the Western Conference Finals. And who knows where that would have been. but it has been a strange time for sure to have not really done a show per se since the 12th of March.

And you have been doing a lot of Zooms with a lot of players, your federal analysts, that type of thing. Give me somebody that's been Uber interesting to you. I'm sure all of them have been, but some things you may have not learned about some athletes before you did these Zoom meetings. It's been a lot of fun. It's called hashtag NBA Together, and we've been doing them. to a week for six weeks now. I mean, it has Steve Nash on this week, and these are long-form conversations that are going, you know, sometimes, you know, 35 to 45 minutes,

but, you know, having Steve Nash tell me about the night that he played Michael the first time or if the second time in his career and had seen Chuckie Brown get on the bus in Chicago with Michael's shoes and was like, where'd you get those? I asked Mike for him. And so they go and play in Phoenix, and Nash asks Jordan for his shoes after Jordan had hit a turnaround jumper on him. And sure enough, he walks out of the arena with Michael's shoes that night. And he said he was getting all kind of grief from his, you know, guys like Rex Chapman when that happened. But it's been wonderful to talk to these guys and just get into, you know, stories.

You know, that Eric Spolstra, when he was a college player at Portland, he was on the floor when Hank others collapsed. You know, we talked about that. We talked Steve Kerr about losing his father, you know, on a terrorist assassination when he was a freshman at Arizona. I mean, we've gone down a lot of roads with a lot of guys and it's been really enlightening for me. Ross v. Real here, Ernie, and you mentioned Michael Jordan and obviously I imagine you've been watching the last, dance, yes? Watching what? The last dance? Yeah. Yeah. I know what you're talking. I was just messing with you. Oh, I was like, all right.

Good line, good work. No problem. Is there any particular, I mean, I imagine. Last day she speak of. Right. Go ahead. You've been around the NBA for a long time and obviously around those times. Is there any particular memory or something that you saw that you didn't remember or something you would share that kind of triggered your memory from watching that?

I thought it was the way they started out one of the segments last week with Craig Sager questioning Jerry. Krause about the team's cohesiveness and, you know, and how, you know, how have you stayed together with all the backstabbing that's been going on? And Jerry Krause just, you know, staring at Sager and saying, well, you got this wrong and you got this wrong. And then he walks away from the podium and somebody says, way to go, Craig. Thanks, Craig. I mean, those kind of things that you don't really, you don't really remember. And, but I mean, I think it's shed just an incredibly bright light on, on one of the great careers of anybody in any sport in Michael Jordan.

And you see what drives him. And you see, you know, I think the brutal honesty of teammates who said, you know, hey, yeah, he was a jerk at times. Yeah, he was tough to get along with. But, but he, you also saw the drive and the determination that led to all those titles. and Michael unabashedly saying, look, if you want to come along on the ride, this is how we do it. And, you know, he was responsible for putting a lot of rings on a lot of fingers. The great Ernie Johnson with us here on the Matt Thomas show, Ernie, of course, host of the Inside the NBA.

We're going to talk some golf here towards the end because there's a big event coming up next week that Ernie will be a part of. What are the text threads like between you, Shaq, Kenny, and Charles these days? What are those like? Spike. I mean, there's text and there's phone calls, and we're checking up on each other, you know? Shack's always one to throw out a few kind of bizarre videos and that kind of thing just to kind of get a rise out of us. But, you know, most of it's, you know, I talk with Charles every week. We have a podcast called the Steam Room that we do every Thursday. And so, you know, we have that time and, you know, when we're connecting and getting on Zoom and we catch up a little bit there. But our podcast is so just conversational that we kind of catch up with each other's lives just in the normal discourse of that podcast.

But it's the same way. We've had a couple of Zooms. We had one yesterday with a lot of the TNT announcers where, you know, shoot, everybody was on there. Marb was on there. C. Webb, Dennis Scott, Chuck, you know, Kenny. And it was, it's great. I mean, it's kind of tough because that's the way you're doing business now, but, you know, maybe you've seen the same thing. There's just something that's kind of like comforting about that, where you can look everybody in the eye and say, hey, you know, you look good, you know, how you doing?

How's the family? So, you know, we're just kind of trying to do things the way we're able to do things these days. Maybe not the greatest way to do it, but it's what we've got. How often, and obviously with TNT being a major television partner to the league, how often are you get updates from your bosses about potential logistics? I know that the players earlier this week had a kind of a conference call or text, and we're trying to push the envelope about trying to play. And I think Adam's been very respectful of trying to make sure the NBA doesn't get in the way

with other people getting their proper testing. But how often do you get, do you feel like relevant, interesting updates from the league and from people that you know inside the offices, or is it still very much a guessing game right now? Yeah, I mean, I'm not getting anything that you're not getting from, you know, on, you know, semi-regular basis when, you know, reports come out that there was a meeting and that kind of thing. And, you know, I think there's probably, there are probably discussions higher up on the food chain than I go, you know, in terms of Turner management, maybe when they're talking with the NBA. But, you know, this is, it's such a, because of the uncertainty of the virus and because you don't know, where it's going and how it's contained and if there's a second wave, et cetera, et cetera.

I mean, you just, all you can do, I think, when you're the league right now is, is come up with a variety of contingency plans and see if, okay, this one might work given these circumstances. But, you know, when they say, okay, you're allowed to open a gym or a training facility in this city, maybe you're not able to do that in another city right now. I mean, and Phil everybody's, you know, on the equal playing floor, then obviously you're not going to have any basketball played, but, you know, you try to remain optimistic,

but at the same time realistic. And you have to realize what these, you know, what the players are thinking in terms of safety and what the league has to think about in terms of safety. And, man, I mean, I wish that we could, you know, I just wish that they said, okay, everybody hang in there on August 17th. It's all going to be over. But we're not, you know, but you can't get that.

You know, there's this cloud of uncertainty is just developing every sport right now. And what has been your feeling on that? I mean, like, how do you feel personally about balancing wanting basketball back, but also knowing people have to be safe? Are you feeling like you just need basketball back or something, It's something that you could just, hey, if we need to take a year off, we can take it. I mean, just how do you feel about it? And I've said since the beginning of this, I said, look, there could be worse things in the world than having a season in which there was not an NBA champion.

Okay, we don't want that. But if that's the way it worked out, then that's the way it worked out. If that was going to serve the greater good, then okay. But I realize, you know, the importance of business and the economic situation with these teams and these leagues and employees and that kind of thing. So obviously, you want everybody back to work and you want to see things come back. But at what, you know, what's the tradeoff? What's the cost? And so that's what makes it so difficult.

We want it every, we want it both ways. We want it three ways. We want it to be safe. We want everybody back to work. We want live sports and live competition as the American sporting public. But we're just unable to do that. And that's the frustrating part. Sure, I want to see play.

But, man, I don't want to, you know, every base better be covered before you crank things back up. Before I let you go, the match Champions for Charity, May 24. Tom Brady, Phil Mickelson, Tiger Woods, Peyton Manning, will be on TBS and TNT. Tell me about what your role will be and how you found out about it and how your network's going to cover this event. Okay, well, let me, I'll talk about the event first, and then I'll talk about my role and how that has evolved. And obviously, we're looking forward to it. I did the first one a couple of years ago with Peter Jacobson and Darren Clark. We had a bunch of folks out there, Adam Lefco and Charles, and it was a lot of fun when Phil and Tiger went head to head.

It wasn't the greatest golf that day, as I recall, but Tiger did ship in late, which was dramatic, and then they had to finish under the light. So it was a fun night overall. But I think when you add Tom Brady and Peyton Manning to the mix now, you're adding some entertainment value, not just because I think Manning's one of the funniest guys on the planet. And he showed that when we had our announcement of the match,

the champions for charity. I mean, he stole the show. You know, his one-liners about Brady and everything else. So if that can translate to the golf course, and I think these guys understand that, they understand they're the show. They're center stage on this day. They're going to be miced.

And so it does nobody any good if you just clam up. So I think they'll be, I think they'll be, ready to entertain and ready to hit some good golf shots. And when you've got a couple of eight handicappers out there like Brady and Peyton, they can play for the possibility that there might be a couple of skulls and some things that might make you chuckle. So that's what you're going to see and you're going to see them play in a couple of different formats, best ball on the front and an alternate shot on the back.

Now, as far as my role on that, I was prepared to be part of this, and I just had to back off. And I will have an essay in the course of that, but I'm not going to go down to a golf course. And it's because I have a 31-year-old son at home who's got muscular dystrophy and has been on a ventilator for nine years. And so my wife and I have talked about it, prayed about it. No, we've, you know, because look, I'd want to be part of this event. I really do.

I'd love to be down there. It's going to be a lot of fun. But what I can't do is say, is risk going down someplace and coming back from Florida and bringing something into the house that makes a 31-year-old guy who's on a ventilator who is susceptible to lung infections. I can't bring something back in the house. I can't risk it. And so I had to, I had to.

in our discussions with the folks at work and just said, hey, and they gave me the opportunity. They said, look, if you have any reservations, don't do it, you know, we'll be fine. And I said, I appreciate that. And I said, and after a lot of thought and discussions that, I said, I'm just not ready to make that step to do that. So I'm going to have an essay in the pre-match show before they tee off. And that'll be my involvement.

but I just, you know, guys, it's hard. It was just one of those things where I said, I'm just not ready to commit to that, given what's going on in my house. Certainly. And I'll wrap it up by this. I introduced myself to you during the Western Conference finals a couple years ago, and I had told you that I had watched the real sports episode about you and your family, and I was blown away by it.

And I'll say this again, like I told you that two years ago, you and the way your family is put together in the responsibilities you and your wife have put on, especially with your son, make me want to be a better father. I know that that story hit me very hard, and I think about my children every day and the things that you have sacrificed for your love of your children. So know that I respect you as a man, as a father, and as a broadcaster, and we cannot wait for you guys one way or the other, whether it be at the end of this season or the start of next season to get you guys back on T&T, I thank you for coming on my show today. I wish you and your family the very best, and we look forward to watching that golf on T&T next weekend. Matt, I appreciate the kind words. I really do. And it's great catching up. with you, man. I love what you're doing here too and, you know, kind of just reconnecting with

folks that the viewers and listeners are used to hearing about and hearing from. So it's been, it's been my pleasure to spend a few minutes, and I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Stay safe. Thanks again. Thanks, Tony, very much for the time. We greatly appreciate it. That is the great Ernie Johnson, Jr. And if you have not seen what he's talking about, his son with muscular or just a discrephy, excuse me. Go, HBO, has HBO go, go look up the story a couple of years ago that the real sports folks did on him. And you will, it'll be tough not to shed a tear because not only is he a great family man, but a great broadcaster and probably even a better person. Thanks again to Ernie for joining us here at 1246.