The Matt Thomas Show with Ross - People We Miss Hearing From - Ian Eagle

Episode Date: April 30, 2020

is the Matt Thomas show. Oh, I miss this music. Actually, I miss March Madness music. Hell, I miss the NBA on TNT music. I think that's where I and even can be found anywhere you can find him. He'd be really busy this time of year. Instead, he's letting his son hang out with him in his house during this pandemic time, which is crazy because his son Noah, who I've got to know a little bit,

is the new voice of the LA Clippers. Ion, you're a great dad for letting Noah come hang out with you and eat all your food out of your refrigerator. I can tell you that for sure. I know, Matt. He's back on scholarship, and I'm enjoying it. It's been a nice family reunion. It's good to see the young man. Who's taking care of his apartment?

I mean, I know he's making decent money of the Clippers, right? He's okay, right? Yeah, that's not an obtrusive question at all. No, of course not. He's doing very well. He's doing just fine. No worries. Well, I'm saying worried about his apartment. Is who's watering his plants?

Who's taking care of his pets? These are all things you should be worried about when you live 3,000 miles away from your home for a short period of time. Yeah, we've thought of none of that. That's a great point. You've now changed our lives in that one statement. We're going to have to look into that. Very good. We are part of our people we miss hearing from series.

I talked to Jim Nance about this, your colleague. This is your busiest time of year. you would have gone from March Madness to the NBA to the NBA playoffs. How is the Eagle family, notably you, who lives out of a suitcase much of the year? How has your time been and how have you adapted to all this beyond the obvious? Yeah, in addition, I do the French Open every year for Tennis Channel. So I go NCAA tournament to NBA playoffs to Paris for the French Open. I've been doing that.

This would have been the 15th straight year. So it's been surreal. It's very odd to go from 120 miles per hour to zero miles per hour. But I must say I'm okay with shutting off my brain. I'm okay with recharging the battery, but I'm just used to doing it in mid-June to July before I ramp up again for NFL. So I've tried to take that mentality that I normally have over the summer and shift it to this time. And then hopefully, and I know you're crossing your fingers as well, that we're just going to have an avalanche of sports action.

And that would be the dream. Right now, the dream scenario is an event every day starting at a certain date and right through the end of the year. Oh, I think for us, because we carry both the Astros and the Rockets, it's great for us, and I'm sure for you as well, if everything comes together and hopefully it does, knock on wood, you could be doing an NFL game on Thursday, an NBA playoff game on Friday.

and if college football takes a delay, maybe they put some NFL games on Saturday. I don't even know. No one knows this, not even the commissioners of these respective sports, what the sports counter is going to look like for the fourth quarter of 2020. No, it's all speculation right now. Anyone that is speaking with any conviction on this subject is probably unwarranted in doing so because it still hasn't taken its shape or form yet. we need certain information to start coming to fruition before we can take that next step.

But we are allowed to dream. And to me, that would be the perfect scenario to have all of these events and to be engaged every single day. And not just events, big events, the feeling that it's going to be a sports fan's cornucopia starting hopefully soon enough. And I know, again, we can't say this with any true confidence, but we are allowed to daydream about it. Ian Eagle from CBS Turner Tennis Channel with us here on the Matt Thomas show. Ian, you live in the New York, New Jersey metropolitan area, and obviously that corridor has been devastated by this virus. And the one thing I keep bringing up when talking about resuming games, and whether it's with fans or not, do you envision any events sports-wise, whether there's fans or not, at MetLife Stadium? at the two baseball stadiums, at the U.S. Open.

I mean, is any of that going to happen in your neck of the woods for the rest of this calendar year, do you think? Yeah, it's hard to visualize that, Matt. I can tell you very early in this process, I knew six people that were admitted to the hospital here in the New York area. Fortunately, all six are okay. Some were there for three days. A few were there for six or seven days. I know one person that was there nine days, and they've all recovered. They're all back home.

I wouldn't say they're 100%, but they're certainly on the road to recovery. So that made it very real in this area when it's people that you know, people that you work with, people within the industry, behind the scenes, and you're getting texts and phone calls from people that you just can't wrap your brain around, that this has happened to them. And it's a very helpless feeling. There's nothing you can do. You can't visit them. You can't go to them.

You can't help them or aid them in any way. So the idea of picking it up where we left off here in the New York area, as if nothing happened, is very unrealistic. But the idea of doing it in a remote location and creating a potential bubble like the NBA has discussed, that seems more realistic if it's a controlled environment. course the Players Association has to sign off on this, and you have to get all the parties involved to agree that they're doing everything in their power to keep things safe, to keep the players, the participants, and any of the essential members of the organization healthy, and that's the only way that we can take this next step.

You're also, we should tell the audience here that you're the television voice of the Nets, and there are two very interesting Nets that haven't worked together yet, that have been both hurt. What are their progress like if you know anything? And it's kind of funny that people bring up, well, if they really push this thing to October and November, could Kyrie and Mr. Durant play? So I'm assuming the answer to that is no,

but is it fun to even speculate about something like that? Yeah, Matt, there have been questions posed to the organization about that. The Nets have been pretty adamant in saying that's just not going to happen. But then every now and again, video emerges of Kevin Durant working out. There was a fun video that popped up just a couple of days ago that he was on a basketball cord trying to take the basketball against a offensive lineman that was drafted to rush the quarterback.

It was, I believe, a player drafted out of Temple and how those two ended up together. I have no idea if they share an agent, if they know each other, family friends. And it's him cutting and him trying to get around this. large human being, and then he ends up on the ground laughing and smiling, and you think to yourself, wait a second, he looks pretty spry. He looks like he can do this. So if you're just looking strictly at the timetable from when his injury happened to where we are today, he physically could go out and play. That's my belief. Now, has it been the same rehab that it would have been with the team supervising? Of course not, because nothing has been what we once.

knew it to be over the last 50 days. But Kevin Durant was certainly on his road to recovery. Irving is a different issue. It was a shoulder injury. I've heard conflicting reports as to when he could possibly be back. But boy, the clock is ticking. And if we're looking at a potential July NBA start resumption, I'm not going to say definitively that, no, those guys aren't around.

The Nets can because that's what they should do. should side with caution. But from an outside perspective, I think Kevin Duran is chomping at the bit to come back and play and play in meaningful games. Ian Eagle with us from CBS, Turner and the Nets here on the Matt Thomas show. Ion, you probably done four or five at six, maybe as many Patriot games per year. I don't know that your assignments are going to be like this year coming up, but I feel like you may be going to Tampa once or twice this year. Just your general shock factor when you found out that Tom was a leaving the Patriots and then moving down to Central Florida.

Yeah, Matt, I'm sure I was in the minority. I was not shocked. I just felt the last two years meeting with Tom in our production meetings. He's very open. He's very honest. He never came out and said, I'm done with New England. That wouldn't be his style. But just talking around it, you could tell that he had another chapter in mind. And it didn't necessarily line up with what the Patriots might be thinking. So the fact that he ended up somewhere else, not campus specifically. specifically because I certainly couldn't have predicted that. But the fact that he ended up somewhere else was not that surprising to me. I thought there was a very good chance that Tom Brady would take his services somewhere else and right off into the sunset with a new experience and something different. This Tampa situation lines up pretty well. Bruce Ariens is a great guy. He's a players coach.

He's an offensive guy. He was a quarterback guru. I can see the two of them hitting it off. It's going to be very different, the dynamic between Tom and Bruce and the head coach he played for Bill Belichick throughout his NFL career. He gets grown up there. They have excellent skill position players. He makes them relevant right away. There's no doubt about that.

There's going to be a curiosity with the Buccaneers. And he has an immense amount of pride. So whatever it requires of him physically to be ready. Look, at some point, Father time is undefeated. He catches up to everybody. Right. But Tom Brady does. has this other non-human ability to somehow do things that others cannot do.

So if you're telling me right now that Tom Brady can still play at a high level with Tampa this coming season, I'm not going to fight you on that. I'm going to trust that he still can. Yeah, and that's probably going to be make things even more competitive in the NFC South. Before I let you go, and I have spent a lot of time watching old NBA games on television. You've done a long-time voice on NBA doing the TV shows and the highlights and whatnot. I saw Vince Carter dunk that you called not too long ago. How is the Eagle family, you and your son, because he's now in the league with us,

how are you guys consuming television? Are you spending a lot of time looking at old games, or do you happen to catch an NBA TV game or maybe you're calling the game with one of your many partners over the years? Yeah, Noah turns on NBA TV every day. He doesn't wake up until noon, so keep that in mind. He claims that he has remained on West Coast time. Which I don't quite understand how the body could do that. He's been here for 45 days.

So I'll let him continue to think that. That works for him. That's okay. He wakes up at noon. The second he comes downstairs, he pops on NBA TV. And you're right. You get caught up in these old games. I've gotten caught up in rabbit holes on my computer.

I don't know how it happened. I ended up watching seven minutes of Rosho Nesterovich highlights. the other day. I don't know why. I wasn't exactly a huge admirer of Roshone Starvich. He was fine. He was a good player. That's freaky. That's freaky. It's what that is. Yeah. Like, yes. There's no rhyme or reason to where you end up when you start going down these rabbit holes. You start looking on the right side of the screen on YouTube and just random links start popping up. And mine was Roshoneistervich. So I feel like I'm all caught up with Roshonezeg. Well, I'm going to give you two.

One is John Lucas is one of the assistant coaches of the Rockets. He and I are good friends, and I saw him in a Milwaukee Buck uniform in 1987, wearing those really short shorts. And what I do is I take pictures of him and then text it to him, where he then tells me what I can do with these texts. And then number two, I was the PA announcer for the Rockets during their mid-1990s, and I was significantly heavier at the time. And so they'd have a Rockets Knicks game on from the 94 finals,

and I would take a look and try to find myself, and I'm like, my God, I was a fat slob 25 years ago. That's my life, Iron Eagle. That's just what I did. Very nice. So you now, you have a restraining order from John Lucas. Yes, you do. Yeah.

And you're going back and you're seeing yourself at a time where you probably realize that you shouldn't have had dessert. Yeah, and I'm thinking, how did I marry a good-looking woman like this? Look at me. I mean, she must have thought of my economic potential, which is doing okay. It was just the weirdest thing. But yeah, I have become an NBA TVaholic because no disrespect to ESPN, but I don't want to watch any more Lakers Celtics games.

I've seen every one of them between 2008 and today. That's all the show. NBA TV gives me the good runaround. Major League Baseball Network does a good job as well. And then the Masters, CBS did a great job with the Matt. I mean, we all need to be working. That's all there is to it. But we're all trying to find time.

And I appreciate you spend some time with me. Tell no, I sent my best. It's been great meeting him and watching his young career grow. And I look forward to a Laker. Clippers, Western Conference playoffs, whether we're doing in Las Vegas or Orlando or wherever, in the main case, maybe. Yeah, Matt. Yeah, he's really enjoyed meeting you as well.

I got to get back to some of the stuff I've been working on. I've really gotten into Russian literature during this pandemic. No, that's not true at all. I know nothing about Russian literature. I just wanted it to sound like I was doing something productive. Yeah, okay, so if I could find Iron Eagle on a game show, which one would you go on that you had the most success with? Oh, game show.

I mean, I was a game show-aholic as a kid. You name it. I watched it. My father, who was an actor. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You and I next time the Nets and Rockets Play, which is the next season. We'll have a game show trivia contest because I think I could beat you in it.

Really? Oh, yeah. Now I'm going to have to bone up. Now I have something I actually study for. Yeah. My dad was an actor and was very successful in commercials more than anything else, but he did television and he did movies. but his success came in the commercial genre, and he appeared on Family Feud because they had

commercial stars. I think he went head to head with Mr. Whipple, and I believe Richard Dawson kissed him. So those were career highlights. Damn. Well, so if you had a family feud of CBS Sportscasters, who's the five on that you're putting on that team there? Oh, that's tough. I can't tell you, Matt, because someone's going to be offended.

Oh, then let me do it then. Let me do it then. Trust me, I would be on the, I would be on the squad. Yeah, yeah, you are, you're the captain. Be you, Nancy Harlan. We got to put color commentators, or we're going to go strictly play-by-play guys. Yeah, play-by-play guys work. Okay.

You harle. We can go against the analysts. That was probably a really good matchup. I'm going to go, boy, this is a good one on the, Greg Gumboe, he got to because he's just been there forever. Yeah, he's got good, deep knowledge, musical knowledge. And I don't know Spiro Ditas very well. Would he be an asset to your squad? Very nice guy.

I think that would be a battle with him and Andrew Catalan as to who we would put on the squad for Family Feud. And then the analyst. Tom McCarthy also has knowledge. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the analyst side. Well, actually, you know, Carter Blackburn guy lives in Austin. He would be in a way. Oh, Carter's got a lot.

Carter's got funky knowledge. He knows, like, weird stuff. Yeah, he's got better hair than two than both of us. All right, all right. He does. He's also growing a mustache. You need to see it during this. And the analyst side, Bill Raftery, you got to go.

No, no, Bill wouldn't be honest. Bill would get no answers to that. What's the question, Steve Harvey? Yeah, and then he'd have a glass of Vino in his hand, right? For sure, correct? Yeah, he would. All right. Well, we'll forget down the road.

Go enjoy your Russian literature. Take care of it. And we look forward to hopefully seeing you, whether it be in Orlando or in Houston sometime soon. Boy, I hope so, Matt. All the best of you and your family. Thanks very talented and funny. I am Eagle with us here. on the Matt Thomas show.

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