The Press Box - Covering Formula One With Kevin Clark, Plus NFL Draft Audio and the Greeny Conversation

Episode Date: May 2, 2022

Bryan and David are joined by Kevin Clark to break down Formula One coverage ahead of the first U.S. race, the Miami Grand Prix (4:58). Later, they recap media moments from the 2022 NFL draft from tipping picks to guest announcers (34:57), and then wrap things up with a conversation about ESPN’s Mike Greenberg (50:15). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week, and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Kevin Clark Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Chris Vernon, and me and my buddy Kevin O'Connor, aka Kevin O Everything, host an NBA podcast called The Mismatch. They call it The Mismatch because I'm awesome and Kevin is a gigantic nerd. No, no, that's not why at all, Chris. They call it the Mismatch because I have a brain and you're a loudmouth bozo. Good grief. Anyway, listen to our amazing NBA podcast, The Mismatch. Or don't.

We really don't care. We're probably going to win a million awards either way. Chris, we do care. So don't say that. Please subscribe and listen to the mismatch only on Spotify. Did you really call me a bozo? Longtime listener Simone E. Simone has a question for us. I just saw John Heiliman on Showtime's Billions, and it got me thinking,

what show or movie would you choose to be in as yourselves if given the opportunity? Oh. So you and I, nominal sports writers, what are we appearing in as ourselves? Wow. I mean, I think the easy answer would be, you know, that we would be in like a cutscene where we're like doing a podcast when like the zombie invasion and the Walking Dead happens. We're doing the meta media angle. Yeah, exactly.

And that would be a lot of fun. You want to hear the funny Twitter jokes about the zombie invasion that's consuming? the world right now. Exactly, yeah. And then the windows shatter and we're like screaming. By the way, grand tradition from the movies. Oh, yeah. I remember my old boss Michael Kinsley was in Rising Sun,

which is a very, very not good movie, but was like doing a crossfire segment that was somehow embedded in the movie. Was CNN just like incredibly available for those sort of things all through the 90s? Or was it just that they were that prevalent for that specific role? Because it seems like it wasn't like fake CNN. There was a lot of actual CNN logo. in the movies in our time, in our, in our lifetimes. Absolutely. And I think Larry

King was in particular extremely available. Oh, yeah. I'm sitting here with Happy Gilmore. Happy question for you. He would be Larry King in the movie. Oh, man. Also, the news networks got a little touchy about that after a while.

You think so? Like, should we have our real people in the movie doing the zombie apocalypse? Because does that make our newscasters a little less trustworthy if they're willing to play the newscaster in the movie. It's kind of interesting question. Well, then at some point, it just became all Pat Kiernan from New York One, just doing every single anchor role, except it wasn't New York One. It was just Pat Kiernan apparently has like a out in his

contract to go do movies or whatever. Pat Kiernan's New York City News. Yeah, but I don't know, do you have an answer to this question? I don't know, what would be the, I'm sure there's an answer to this. In the sports writer lane, I think if you watch, Ted Lassau. There was that recurring character, Trent Crim of the Independent, who would stand up and ask meme questions to Ted, and then had a kind of bigger role in a couple of later episodes. That to me is a real happy place because it's not a cameo. It's not the podcast embedded into the episode, but it, look, for you and I, it's not a heavy lip. Yeah. We're not going to be doing big dramatic scenes episode after episode. We need to get in and get out, a good line.

David Schumaker, the ringer, take off your glasses. That's the question. Yeah, that would be a lot of fun. I mean, I don't know. I mean, listen, I think we can all agree here that basically any portrayal of podcasting in any sort of movie or TV show is just the worst thing in the history of the world, you know? So, I mean, maybe a decade from now, podcasting can be treated in journalism, you know, I'm sorry, in media like, you know, like newspaper journalism is now. The spinning headline that used to be in the newspaper used to be in the movies. Anytime you turn on, anytime there's a new show with all due respect to the ones that exist out there,

anytime there's a new show, it's just like, David and Brian are podcasters. They get themselves mixed up in something really bad. It's like, no. Just no. Have them write books. Have them write newspapers. Have them right for a magazine. We don't need to be this specific.

Coming up on today's very real podcast, what's it like to cover a sport that's still newish to a lot of Americans. Kevin Clark of the ringer stops by to talk about the art of covering Formula One. We'll also listen to some NFL draft audio and talk about ESPN's omnipresent host, Mike Greenberg. All that and much more on the press box. A part of the

ringer. Podcast Network. Hello, media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, producer Erica Cervantes here. We do an occasional feature on the press box called Who Wants to be a Formula One analyst? Well,

There was a Ringer writer or heard that question and pulled out his podcast microphone. He is Kevin Clark, NFL reporter, host of the Ringer NFL show in Slow Newsday, and now host of the Ringer F1 show. With Formula One's first U.S. race of the season this week, Kevin is here to talk about what it's like to cover a sport many Americans are just sinking their teeth into. Kevin Clark, do you read us? Hello, how's it going, Brian? Hello, David. We've got to do the pit mic here. know, Kevin, any issues.

Radio in. What's going on, brother? Yeah, no, it's, uh, I, do we want to do just like a extremely muffled Formula one style thing where I just complain about, about how the tires haven't warmed up? Is that what you want? Yeah, that's exactly what we need. All right. First serious question.

Sure. Is the broadest question. Why do Americans like Formula One? So it dovetails with a couple of trends. Number one, Americans like superstars. And Netflix has delivered them superstars. People knew who Lewis Hamilton was four years ago, I would say. I don't think most people knew who Daniel Ricardo was.

He was a Red Bull driver at the time. In a strange twist of fate, a great coincidence for Daniel Ricardo. Ferrari and Mercedes did not participate in the first season of Drive to Survive. And so they made the star. And this is something Netflix is very good at. Someone said to me, I think it was Ryan Rosillo when he started watching the show. They said, so does Netflix pretend in season one that Louis Hamillian? doesn't exist. Well, yes, they do. They do pretend that Lewis Hamilton doesn't exist. And they

created these stars out of nothing. And so Daniel Ricardo becomes a huge star in season one. They get him, he's an Australian. They get him on his ranch in Australia. He's taken off his shirt. Yeah, in season two, I believe it is, he switches teams. He becomes a vehicle through which you can probably chart the rise of American F1. Ricardo was on The Daily show last week, by the way, doing a little New York media tour. Lewis Hamilton, by the way, was on I believe Good Morning America on Monday morning as well. All of this to say is that a Netflix show started four years ago that got everybody intensely familiar with the sport, who these people are, what the, what the workings of the sport are, you know, two teammates, 10 teams each, they travel the world.

It blended so many different things Americans like, not just the superstars and the personality, a bunch of good-looking guys who sell product to her, by the way, kind of basically pre-screened before they get into the sport to sell product. This is all very marketing 101 for most of these guys. And then the other part of it is that just the baseline, the baseline of if you turn on a Formula One race on a Sunday, it's a travel show. They're in Belgium.

They're in Monaco. They're in Miami this weekend. They're in Australia. They're somewhere you want to be. And so it is the perfect sport for the casual fan. Hey, I know who Max Verstappen is. I saw him on Netflix. Let's see how he does.

Or it's the perfect sport for the fan who wants to get obsessed, which is they star with Drive to Survive, which is the Netflix show. They get into Red Bull and all of a sudden they're studying what rear wings should look like and what diffuser should look like and how the floorboard should be operated with new regulations. You can get into it at any level. And that's why I think Formula One has taken off. It's a mixture of superstars and the internet and all of the things that are a launching point for famous and successful US sports. Talk to me a little bit about being a podcast.

in the F-1 sphere. Now, I think we can all remember those days, you know, the early meetings days of the ringer when Bill pulled us all out of central casting and assigned us the sports we'd be covering and told us how to podcast about them. No, but, I mean, if you listen, I mean, everyone who's listening to this

has probably heard your work on the NFL show. And it's a pretty, you know, I would say that like most ringer podcasts, it doesn't take much time to explain the terminology. You know, it values kind of going deeper and being in precision and actually like, you know, kind of an insidery feel or at the very least,

the feel of people who are very, very invested in the sport. How much time do you feel like you have to spend explaining F1 to the audience or is there none because people still like to feel like they're getting

an inside point of view? No, you can lose people, and I see this with the NFL a lot, you can lose people pretty easily in Formula One. You have to back up everything where if someone says dirty air, well, everybody who's watched Formula One

for five years, knows what dirty air is, but you guys don't, and I need to explain that. And so the terminology you can lose people who are like, there's a lot of F1 jargon that I think needs to be slowed down quite a bit. How much time do I have to spend? I mean, I'm still, I started watching sport in the summer of 2017, which is actually a lifetime compared to a lot of F1 fans. Now, in America, now, there's a lot of F1 fans who remember the NBC Sports Days,

which I started on the tail end of, where they had their own broadcast and it's been diehards. It's been a race in Austin for years. it was a race in the mid-2000s, and before that in Indianapolis. Watkins Glenn had a race in the 70s. This is not Long Beach. This is not a new sport to some Americans, but the vast majority of Americans started watching in the last four years.

That's why the ratings on ESPN have just about doubled. And so we need to slow everything down and we need to serve a pretty casual fan. The first three episodes we did on the RingRap 1 show were literally recaps of the Netflix show. And that was an entry point for a lot of people. We did an episode at the end of last week with a guy who makes explainer YouTube videos. I just had people do a mailbag where it's like, hey, what do I need to know about driving styles?

What do we need to do about corners? What makes a track exciting versus not exciting? And I think that you can explain things without dumbing it down and also make it. I think if someone's watched F one for 40 years, they could listen to that episode with the explainer YouTube guy, Chain Bear, Stuart is his name, and still learn a ton. So I think that there's a, it's a mixture of analysis, explaining what's going on in very simple terms, and it's having fun.

Like, we had this thing, you know, I talked to Ryan Rasillo a lot about career stuff and all that stuff. He's just a great, a great resource. And I had said, is that kind of as a humble brag? Or are we beyond that with Ricelo now? No, he's a friend.

He's a friend of all of ours. I don't get to talk to Rousselo now. Put you on a text later. All right. do that. But I, you know, last summer we were talking a little bit and I kind of, we were talking about F1 stuff and, and we basically said, I basically said, you know, compared to the BBC Checkered Flag podcast or compared to F1 Nation or compared to missed Apex, I don't know a ton about F1. And he said all that matters at the starting point is people like the personalities. And that's sort of why going abroad took off last year, I think, where, which was my segment on his show, which is a lot. And he said, just like we were just two dudes just getting excited about things. And I think you can grow from that. You know, you do the enthusiasm and the excitement comes first. People identify with that. They like it. Tell a couple jokes. And then you build up the expertise from there. Having said that, I rely pretty much

entirely when it comes to expertise on people who know a hell of a lot more than me. Every single guest, every single episode, we've had somebody who's really freaking smart and can explain things, starting with Matthew Summerfield in the third episode of the show when we stopped doing the Netflix now, which is explain the new cars to me. Zach Brown, the CEO of McLaren came on, explained some things to me, explain some things to the audience. So this is a learning experience for me. I'm not, the most important thing for me is to not pretend that I know a ton about side pods

and tire regulations and floor boards and all that stuff because the audience is going to see a fraud pretty quickly if I try to be Mr. Tech. I'm not that, but the good news is I can send DMs and get Mr. Tech on in about two hours. And that's my goal on this. And people don't understand with sports writers. That's what we do is learn about things we don't know. You know, David did not get a doctorate in the National Wrestling Alliance. That's that stuff he learned about later.

The master's is a terminal degree, say. He didn't. You haven't gone to the school at full sale and just learned to wrestle, David? No, I was down there yesterday. I mean, yesterday. I was down there last week, and I've said this on my own show, but there's, you'd think that someone like me, I know every other wrestling fan I know when they see a wrestling ring just goes and like cannonballs in and they're just like, oh, I'm here, man.

It's like the scariest thing in the world for me. Maybe because I've seen, you know, too many YouTube videos I shouldn't have watched, but it's a, yeah, I did not practice, no. I want to ask you this, Kevin, about covering F1. So if the ringer asked me to, tomorrow. to start covering, let's say baseball. It's what I have a much longer history with. I'd feel comfortable asking questions right away.

But it would be a while before I would feel comfortable having big takes about baseball in 2022. So when do you feel comfortable having big takes about Formula One? I have big takes now, but they're not about things I don't know about. They're not about areas of expertise. If I came out today and was like Mercedes is struggling this year, they have been the dominant force for over basically a decade between two drivers, Nika Rosberg won one World Drivers Championship, Louis Hamilton, won all of the rest. Mercedes is struggling this year. And I can say right now, Mercedes is not going to win the championship.

I can say that. I can declare that. It looks completely out of sorts. What I can't say is here's the exact problem with the power train that's going to. to prevent Mercedes from ever improving. Or Mercedes is done for a decade because they've just not caught up with the regulations. I don't know if anybody can say that, but I'm certainly not the guy. I can see what I see.

I mean, Daniel Ricardo is a great example. A couple weeks ago, we had a long discussion on the pod about whether Daniel Ricardo should have never left Red Bull. The answer is pretty obviously he shouldn't have left Red Bull. He should have never gone to Renault. He had a bet that failed. He's now at McLaren where he's the second driver. He's struggling in that car right now.

he would have been much better being number two to max first step and being in a world constructors championship hunt all the time i'm comfortable with that in the same way at the nfl level and it's completely different um i can say certain things about coaches i can say certain things about trade value quarterback play all that stuff but if you're telling me to say hey we really need to you to talk about how the niners are um you know their offensive line you know is really something extremely granular where You know, right now, their offensive line is just not creative up front at all. And there's just, there's just nothing going on there with between the line play. If I were to be assigned a 49ers offensive line podcast, I would pass. Having said that, there's a lot. I could talk ex-deparaneously about the 49ers for 45 minutes right now. That's the difference is I could find things to tell you about Kyle Shannon and Jimmy Garoppolo, Trey Lance, Trey Lansing College, Trey Lance's development, George Kittle, you know, all of those things.

That's the difference. I cannot at this point talk for 45 minutes ex-deprieningly about McClare. Wow. Well, it's a... How do you... This is maybe just too inside baseball. But the thing that's, like, stunning to me the most

listening to you talk, listen to your podcast, is that the NFL draft just went down and you're sort of having to Dion Sanders sit out here. Like, how do you... On a big sports night, like the... I mean, when you have competing programming on, How do you divide your time? Well, I have some great news.

There was no Formula One last weekend. It's on every other week just about depending. They're back-to-back weeks. There are 22 Grand Prix. And it actually flows pretty well. We have to sort of see what happens in the fall when there are. I mean, most European races are on at 9 a.m. It can be done.

The race ends at 1030, 11. I can be done by the time the NFL comes on. That's going to be fine. I have not yet had a day where I've had to do significant NFL and significant Formula One. Once that happens, I'll have to figure it out. But I think the time zones work. The draft was an easy lift because I was able to do the Stuart Taylor podcast on Thursday

morning, was able to prep for the draft. I haven't had, I've not had any conflicts yet. And I feel, if I felt like I couldn't cover the NFL and the way I do, I would just not have taken on the Formula One thing. I mean, we can, we'll probably figure out personnel as we get into the fall. I'm not going to be able to do as much as I can right now. But right now, it's pretty, it's the NFL offseason. That's why I'm okay taking, taking this on.

So I don't, I don't know what the future holds as far as that goes, but I'm pretty, right now, it's going to be pretty easy. Like, you know, the Honey Badger just signed a free agent contract. We don't really need to rush to our microphones for that. You mentioned how much of American Formula One fandom was seated by Drive to Survive. Netflix is now doing similar shows for golf and tennis. Do you think the formula can be replicated with those sports? So I asked a media executive about this last year,

because we were talking about the golf and the tennis thing. And this is not, the golf thing had been talked about since the moment drive to survive dropped. Everybody said golf needs this because there are another sport that similarly, maybe there's not a lot of momentum when Tiger Woods isn't around. They have young stars that are super marketable and should be hugely famous. And that Netflix is a good way to deliver that. what I'll say is that there are certainly overlaps, the travel part of it, the rivalry part of it.

But one of the media executives said to me, I thought it was interesting that the teammate thing makes F1 more insecure than other sports. So just so if you don't know, the only person who has the exact same situation as you, in most cases, sometimes the cars are different, but the only person who has the exact same circumstances as you as your teammate.

And really, you're racing against your teammate all the time. You're with your teammate all the time, but you're racing against him and they're a competitor. So there breeds some insecurity. Lewis Hamilton, Valteri Botas at the end of their tenure, you know, Valteri did not enjoy being Lewis Hamilton's runner up all the time. That was not a good life for him, even though he was in a great car and he was making millions of dollars in traveling the world.

He did not enjoy it. He was upset about Instagram comments about, you know, being number two. That was just something he did not enjoy. You see this all the time. You saw it a couple years ago with the two McLaren guys, Carlos Sines and Lando Norris, where Carlos Sines goes to Ferrari. Lando Nora says, oh, why would you want to go to Ferrari? It's a sixth best car on the grid.

I mean, there's a, the fact that you're only real one-to-one competition as your teammate leads to a level of pettiness and shit talking. Because here's a thing is that if not, this is the analogy I use all the time, not to go back to the 49ers, but if you were able to see the 49ers play a full season with Jimmy Garoppelow's quarterback and then a full season with Trey Lancet quarterback, everything else is the same. One of those guys would lose. How do they react to that? You can make excuses in a way you can't in football. And we saw that in Drive to Survive, Mazepin, who's been stripped of his seat and his dad is a Russian oligarch. And they've basically been stripped of their team, which they were heavily invested in. He kept saying last year when he was struggling, well, the car is different.

You're stacking this. You're stacking the car for the other guy, Nick Schumacher. No, they weren't. You were just a bad driver, brother. And I think that you end up with a level of desperation and insecurity that is unique to Formula One. Having said that, we can see some of that in golf. What if you're leading and you hit five straight shots that don't find the fair way? I mean, that to me lends itself to some of it.

But I think the fact that there's no teams, there's no team principles, which are kind of the narrators in the show a lot of times, makes Formula One a little bit unique. And also I would say, you know, I think that the golf has a better, chance of take off than tennis. I don't really know a ton about tennis. That's just unfair to tennis. But I do think that it would take, it's going to take a Brooks Kepka. It's going to take a, you know, Colin Moracala to come out and be the dominant personalities in the show. It depends on what they want to say. You know, it's funny you say that because when I just, you know,

absent-mindedly look at the drive, the whole F1 phenomenon through net Netflix into everything else, you try to relate it to other sports, existing sports, right? I mean, if you could imagine, I mean, it's not, you know, we have hard knocks or whatever, but if there was a super successful behind the scenes NBA show and only like, you know, a handful of teams participated in it, you can imagine that being a selling point for free agents, right? You get to be on the show, like whatever. To what degree does that kind of stuff get discussed inside the sport? And I guess by corollary, is there any talk inside the sport? There must be about how the personalities are become,

it's more important to have a good TV personality than it is to be a good driver. Yes. So there's a bunch of that. There's a lot of talk about that. In fact, Miami, I actually haven't seen an update on this, but a couple weeks ago it came out that there's a,

in the parade, the kind of welcome parade, the team principals are now going to be paraded in front of the crowd, which is like saying that NFL GMs are going to be paraded out at the NFL draft and everyone, they're going to wave, right? And that is a direct. direct reflection of the fact that these guys are an outsized part of the Netflix show. Krishna Horner, who was married to a spice girl, Jerry Hollowell.

He is a huge part of the Netflix show. He understands exactly what to say at all times to heighten the drama. He is absolutely from central casting. Toto Wolf is his adversary. He's the team principal at Mercedes. Same thing. He knows exactly what to say. After Mercedes lost the championship last year, he showed up in a roll-neck sweater.

in the last scene of the show and said, everybody's got a target on their backs next year. Like, imagine an NFL GM, like four years into a reality show, just getting so into the gimmick. I mean, it is, David, we've talked about this. It's living the gimmick in wrestling. It really is living the gimmick. And I think that that has happened a little bit.

Driving is always going to be the thing that gets you in those seats and keeps you in those seats. But I think the marketability around it has become a little, little bit different. Where people want, I went to, when I went to the, to interview Zach Brown, the CEO of McLaren, the event that we spoke at, it was after a New York Stock Exchange event. And the person who had decided to sponsor McLaren, literally, she was American. And she said, the reason they did it was because during quarantine, they got really going to drive to survive and said, like, I want, I want to be involved in this. And so McLaren got money from that. So if you're Zach Brown,

this time next year and you're looking at new drivers, don't you in some way want someone who's going to give you camera time? Because there are teams that get completely ignored over the course of the season. And if there's tens of millions of people watching, that ends up mattering in some way. Even if it's not the dominant thing, like the fact that you can be a part of this hugely successful show and that in turn gives you sponsors opportunities,

which gives you more money. Mercedes is probably not going to pick a driver, based off of that. Red Bull is not. Ferrari is not. Will McLaren? Will Williams? Will Haas? Sure. Down the line, it might become the thing. You're going to Miami this week for the Miami Grand Prix? I am. Here's a dumb but earnest question. What does a writer do at a Formula One race? So, uh, great question. We walk around the paddock. There's a lot of, I've, I've heard this. I've only heard rumors. I heard rumors. Great lunches at like Ferrari. They put out, nice,

nice Italian food. They keep, they keep the F1 writers fat and happy, which I will be on Sunday. But there's a lot of access, a lot of access. And you can walk around the paddock, which is where,

where the cars are. You can walk around the track on Wednesday. If I'm not mistaken, I'm going to do a little walk around the track, figure it out, see everybody. It's pretty old school, from what I understand.

You know, BBC does a podcast after every race. And oftentimes, it's almost like an old talk show where it's like, oh, here comes so-and-so, walking down the paddock. Hey, can you join us for five minutes? I mean, it's like, it's very like, when Kramer had the, uh, the, the, the, Merv Griffin set in his office, oh, look who it is. Like, it's, it's, it seems a little bit more like that. Now, they all have the press conferences. I'm sure Lewis Hamilton and Max for

Stopping and those guys will do a, and they do kind of a sitting at the table, here's what the week is going to be like thing. It's also, it's a little bit, from what I understand, a little bit like golf media where they give the big kind of conference room, press conference, but also, you know, after they practice, you can get them off to the side for a couple of minutes with maybe three or four of the writers. So it's open. You know, I saw a thing last week that drivers are actually getting a little bit perturbed at how much access there is. They're giving up a little, which is not, it's not uncommon in all sports is that the drivers, the principals do not like the fact that they're talking to the media so much. But it seems to me a little bit like golf where everyone's kind of doing their own thing.

They grab drivers and team principals at different times. And yeah, and there's a press box and you watch the race and you kind of like golf. You have to sort of focus on one portion of the track and monitor the rest on television. You might have to check back with us after this weekend to answer this question. But is there a – where do relatively newcomer American podcasts about F1 rank in the hierarchy of journalists? when you go to an event like this? I'm going to find out.

I think that, so one thing that helps me is that a lot of this is coming through the dolphins, and I know those guys pretty well, having covered the dolphins for a long time. I covered the dolphins when I was in college, for instance, even before I was at the Walshirt Journal of the Ringer. So they, those guys know me and that will help. I don't know. I don't know if there's an auxiliary press box or whatever. I can't imagine it's all that high, right?

I can't imagine that they're going to roll out the red carpet for the for the ringer F1 show. But I also think that we're going to treat it fairly and we'll get access. And we had George Russell, who's now on the Mercedes car. We had him last year on slow news day. There are plans for a slow news day with a driver TBD. I know who the driver is. I don't want to say it until the butt's in the seat. There are plans for that.

I communicate with F1 pretty regularly over the past couple of months. So I don't think we're going to be treated like the BBC or Sky, but I also think that they understand. And the numbers have been really good. And the charts have been really good. And I think that they understand that there's a booming market in America and that they're trying to capitalize that in any way that they can. But there's going to be a Las Vegas race next year. There's going to be three races next year in America.

They understand that capitalize that. And media is part of it. Lewis Hamilton would not be on Good Morning America if it wasn't part of some broader American strategy. So I don't know. I don't think they're going to say, hey, man, you want to do a hot lap with Lewis Hamilton, now. Like we'll just, you know, we'll put it on Instagram. I don't think that's going to happen. But they do understand the American media market and that that's growing. I was going to ask you before we go to give us a little lay of the land of F1 media royalty.

Oh, yeah. Wow. Okay. So the broad, so I feel like Drive to Survive has changed us a little bit because Will Buxton is if you watch the show, Will Buxton is the guy who comes in and gives, and he gets a little bit ribbed for saying overly obvious things, but he's speaking to people who do not know the show. He's speaking to my aunt and uncle who were 70, who told me they started watching the show a couple weeks ago, right? He's speaking to me, by the way, too. Yeah, I rely on Will Buxton.

You know, yeah, Will Buxton is there to say in Formula One, the car is everything. Thanks, Will. I got you. You know, that kind of thing. And I was actually watching the Roman Grojan crash a couple of days ago. And in that there was a lot. really fire your crash a couple years ago. He's got millions of views on YouTube, just the

Netflix scene. And everything goes silent. And then Will Buxton goes, in Formula One, there's times where everything goes silent. Like, just absolutely like that. They just needed someone to say that, right? That's Will Buxton's job. So that, Jeannie Gow is also in the mix there. I would say that in Drive to Survive those two, those two folks have risen in fame. the broadcast Martin Brundle um Ted Kravitz those guys those are considered some of the best

pundits. I mean Martin Brundle is awesome and the broadcasts are really really really good. Um, Crofty, those guys get it. And I'd say the F1 TV, those guys, you know, Nico Rosberg who was Lewis Hamilton's old old teammate who doesn't love Lewis. Um, they had they were best friends and then they had a rivalry when there were drivers. Nico did the great thing of retiring right after winning the championship when he was

really young because he won it and he just got out of Dodge. He's a bit, I don't really know, like, young guy went straight into media, had a lot of success. Like Greg Olson-ish, I would say, Greg Olsonish. That'd be Nico Rosberg. And then the writers, it's the folks you'd imagine. You know, Andrew Benson at the BBC does a really, really good job. I'm trying to think who else in the in the F1 space.

Jensen Button's always always sort of around. I actually quite liked a guy named Julian Palmer who also retired a couple of years ago to do media. And he was on the BBC podcast for a number of years. And he just left to go to F1 TV, which is a type of international feed. So there's a lot of guys who were really, really, really good at this. And I'd say that because it's,

in niche sport, kind of like what I said earlier, you can, you find your own pundit because you find your own level of, of, um, interests, you know, I think there's a lot of, there are a lot of podcasts that really only do the kind of celebrity culture drive to survive. Oh, this guy's being petty with this guy. In the same way, there's that with the NBA. You know, oh, man, these, you know, look at, look at how much Russell Westbrook hates this guy. You know, like that, that happens in every sport. F1 is no exceptions. So if you're more into the tech stuff, you're going to like the tech podcast and you're going to like the tech talk on TV. There's all sorts of guys who will take you through tire degradation and all that. So I would say that it's the British within, and by the way,

I have to add an extra layer here. I'm only talking about English speaking media because there's a whole lot of Italian media that I don't consume that where they cover Ferrari like they're the Yankees and that's a different ecosystem. Brazil, massive market, totally different ecosystem. Spain has, you know, the Carlos Sines, you know, is on the grid. There's probably guys like that. You know, you one thing I didn't realize until I started covering tennis a little bit when I was in college, because there was a Miami tournament when I was down there is like, you know, you'll go and there'll be some guy that you don't, you know, ranked 17th in the world. And he's from some country where they just are tennis mad, you know, Sweden. And you walk into one of those press conferences and there's 100 people there because Sweden is just mad about this guy, you know. And so that to me, there's probably a blind spot for me as far as non-English-speaking media.

But that's kind of my rundown. Kevin Clark, catch him on the Ringer F-1 show. I think he mentioned something about a 49ers offensive line podcast he's going to be doing for us. Kevin, do you want to stick around and help David Shoemaker guess the strain pun headline? Sure. Good. I need help. This is good.

But first, let us do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the Pressbox Pod where they are always, always gratefully received. David, the big media news last week was that Elon Musk bought Twitter. Would you like to hear some of the other companies people want Elon Musk to buy and how they want him to improve those companies? Yes. Some good stuff here.

Elon Musk should buy lays and put chips inside instead of air. people upset at those little bags of Lays you get with your sandals I think I'm on board with that one here's another one Elon Musk should buy Walmart and open up some registers Elon must should buy the history channel

and make it about history Elon must should buy McDonald's and fix all those ice cream machines I think he actually responded to a tweet about that and said that he couldn't work magic but anyway and this one from former NBA player Vernon Maxwell

Elon Musk should buy the NBA and remove the Utah Jazz franchise from the league. Not because America hates Utah, but because it makes me sad to see their fan base, heartbroken year after gear. Oh my gosh. You've heard him Maxwell on Twitter is just gold, folks. If you think Elon Musk shares your frustration with some of America's greatest franchise and also with the Utah Jazz, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. Time for the no-book dump, David.

Let's talk a little bit about the NFL draft. I watched starting on Thursday. As you know, I love the NFL draft. Back when we were in high school, being a huge fan of the NFL draft was kind of the most eccentric sports thing about me. Oh, yeah. Because in those days,

I really wanted to get Mel Kuyper's physical NFL draft guide. Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah. But there wasn't a worldwide web that was easily accessible to search for Melkiper.com so what I had to do was wait for him to come on a local radio show. This is not a joke in Dallas, Fort Worth.

I had to listen to the show to get the Mel Kuiper 800 number so I could call with my mom's credit card. You never got through to Mel. You just got an answering machine and you left your mom's credit card in my case on the answering machine to get the Mel Kiper guy. but here was the even weirder hitch, David. Often Mel Kiper would come on these radio shows while we were already at school.

So, and this makes me sound like a very, very ancient human being, I would push record on a tape at home with my radio playing. We got the radio playing sports radio. I'd push record on the tape and then I would just hope there was enough tape to record the Mel Kiper segment

so I could harvest the 800 number. That actually had. happen. Wow. That's how you used to watch the NFL draft. That's, I don't have a word for that that doesn't come off like a backhanded insult. It's sick. That's the word. Absolutely sick. So 30 years of watching the NFL draft, let me tell you, there is a sound effect now on ESPN that makes me salivate like the old Pavlovian dog experiment. And that sound effect is this. Isn't that a great sound? It is. The pick is in. It's such a great sound. You and I were talking about why the draft is so exciting for a non-event.

I think you use the Royal Rumble analogy. There's just scheduled content coming all the time. Yeah. So ESP plays that sound effect. You're like, oh, my God, the pick is, I don't even care about this team, but the thing is, the content is coming. The pick is in. Here we go.

Especially in a year like this year where like, you know, it's not like we had four quarterbacks who were, you know, on the tip of everybody's tongue. But we did have a couple of quarterbacks who had been talked up to, you know, some degree. So even if that's all you knew going in, right? Every time you hear that sound effect, like at the Royal Rumble, the countdown starts, you're like, maybe this will be the rock coming back, you know? And that's like, maybe that's Malik Willis in your mind or whatever. But it's like, you know enough to hope or to like to be excited about one thing. And then, and so you just, it's just, it's just a constant reset of potential. I regret to inform you, we have a little bit of a tipping picks problem now in the

NFL draft. So we experienced the NBA version of this where Adrian Wojnarowski when he was at Yahoo and then when he was at ESPN, he figures out who the draft picks are going to be long before the draft picks are revealed on television. And he starts tweeting him out. Now, the NFL version, at least as I saw it over the weekend, and especially on Thursday, Friday, was a little different in that the picks were only spoiled like one minute to 30 seconds before they were made on TV. Basically walkout time, right? I mean, it was like this wasn't like somebody who's getting inside information. This is like somebody was being alerted, probably around like several minutes after the NFL

was informed, but it just takes a while to get the pick to the podium. Yes, just just early enough to be annoying that if you're sitting there watching the broad You're like, okay, here we go. Oh, it just got spoiled for me. I just read Albert Breers tweeted. It's over now. And I know who they're going to pick. And so I think we have to make a decision here. I don't begrudge any journalist from revealing the picks and ruining a television show because it's not their job. But I think you either need to go the full woge and be on pick 18 when the television show is on pick three. Or you just need a hold off. Because I don't think there's a lot of glory in revealing the pick 30 seconds to one minute before it's going to be announced to the world. Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess they're, I mean, I take your question at face value or your comment at face value. In some sense, obviously, they're not competing with the TV show. They're competing with other tweets, right?

So you want to get the footprint out there to get the most engagement and blah, blah, blah. But I agree. I mean, to me, I think it's, it's. It's easy enough to not look at Twitter, right? Well, maybe not. I mean, in this day and age, especially when your team draft somebody, you want to not just know all about them, but more importantly, you want to read all of the reaction tweets to that pick, right?

You want to know everything. And so it is part of the production. I'm trying to imagine, by the way, total sidebar, back to when you were, you know, recording the radio from El Khyber guides and how it's hard to wrap your mind around how being an NFL draft junkie was a novelty in such an NFL friendly part of the country, right? But it's almost like, I can't, I don't know the words. Maybe you can help me, but it's like, like the Jimmy Johnson,

the Herschel Walker trade was like one of the most notorious moments in Dallas Cowboys history. And yet there was, when people talk about it, it's almost as if Herschel Walker was traded for these people, right? And the, and the Troy Aikman and Emmett Smith just sort of materialized on the team upon completion of the trade. Like the draft was seems, even though it's a part of the, the deal. It's not the same. We never talked about, I don't know, it didn't feel the same as it does now. There's not as much palace intrigue. And maybe it's because it's not being reported in

real time as much. I think what's changed is that people are fans of the whole draft and the whole NFL in a way they weren't 30 years ago. So if we took the time machine back to Dallas in 1989 when the Cowboys had the first overall pick and drafted Aikman, there was a lot of intrigue about who are the cowboys going to get. Right. What are the cowboys going to do? But there was comparatively less about who, you know, are the lions going to draft Barry Sanders? Oh, sure.

Okay. That just wasn't like, again, it wasn't a non-story and there was a group of people in the world that did it, but it wasn't like sports fandom has been very, very universalized in the sense of like become league wide. I think that's because of fantasy. I think there's a lot of reasons that that has happened is because also we can just watch a lot more games now, much more. more easily and cheaply than we could back in those days.

But it just wasn't like, it was definitely very, very eccentric to do that. And as we've seen with analytics and all these other things, the thing that was weird and eccentric has now become the most obvious thing in the world. Of course I'm going to watch the NFL draft. Yeah. Of course I'm really interested in where Malik Willis goes, even though Malik Willis isn't going to my team.

And isn't going to play this year. And, you know, it's a, yeah, there's a lot of qualifiers on that. Yeah, the pick tipping thing to go back to your original question, it's an interesting situation, although I do think, to my original point, it is relatively easy to not pay attention to Twitter if you don't want to have your picks tipped, right? I mean, that's it's a pretty, I mean, and listen, I'm sure given the opportunity, most people would, even the ones complaining about it would probably, it realized they secretly wanted to have all the, all the picks tip, you know, as part of the complaint is probably part of the viewing experience. I will say to make a, maybe early pivot to to watching the draft on TV. The more awkward thing for me was watching, well, I was watching, I told you this, was mostly watching the Twitter broadcast that ESPN did,

which I thought was incredibly good and compelling, but I had, you know, Dominic Foxworth and Mina Kimes and Spencer Hall of Field Yates. It was a much more sort of laid back, you know, Gen X sort of, Gen Z sort of like presentation. And I was all the way in. But there was, there was one point where it wasn't just Mina,

but Mina Kames and Field Yates were both like, like they knew that the picks come like way before it happened. They were getting texts. They were getting DMs. They were getting whatever. And then, but then we're like saying it on the air. So there was just like, you know,

the picks are far enough away apart from each other in the NFL that you have a lot of time to fill. And that time ends up getting filled with people saying like, oh, I know what this is going to be. And so I can't say anything. That's literally these words are coming out, you know? And it's just that it's a very bizarre situation. I understand why there'd be a rule that you can't spoil it.

But at the same time, these people largely have their jobs because they have the intel to spoil picks like this, right? Not specifically to spoil the draft, but because they have the connections that allow them to spoil the draft. And so it just makes for like a very bizarre viewing experience when, when, I mean, honestly, this is just a, this is a more honest version of what we see all the time. The people who are on the screen know more than they're telling you. And they were, and at least in this case, they were just saying it out loud.

But it's kind of weird. Yeah, I do feel we have less of the Chris Berman, whoa, reaction that we used to get 20 years ago. Well, we have less of that. We also don't get the wind up anymore where like the Chris Berman would know the, know who it was going in and make the pun before the pick was made. You know, like they would like, I mean, do they still do that? I feel like the old drafts used to be full of just like, I'm smelling tight end. You know, ha, ha, ha. When they would go in and it would just be like, you know, because they knew who.

the pick was going to be. But, you know, it is. It's definitely a different feel. For years and years, David, draft picks were announced in a very particular way, which is you'd have the league commissioner come to the podium and say, with the first pick in the 1993 NFL draft, et cetera, et cetera. And at some point, the commissioner of the league would lose interest, and you'd get the lieutenant commissioner announcing the picks.

Remember when the NBA draft would go into the Rod Thorne phase? Okay, I guess these players aren't going to really make an impact this year. Well, a few years ago, the NFL decided that Roger Goodell should still do the first round. But after the first round, we should have famous people come out and announce draft picks. And those famous people started, perhaps on their own volition, doing bits when they announced the picks. And sometimes those bits just do not work at all. for instance, here is the NFL's all-time rushing leader, Emmett Smith, part of that Herschel Walker trade you mentioned,

announcing the Dallas Cowboys third round pick on Friday. Don't be hating. Don't behave on our Cowboys. With the 88 pick in the 2020 NFL draft, the Dallas Cowboys select. So not the 2020 NFL draft, Emmett. This is actually the 2022 NFL. NFL draft. What was hilarious is Emmett is standing in front of a huge sign that says 2022 NFL draft. We made a joke about how people always say this draft instead of the

draft. Perhaps we did need to specify to Emmett that it is this draft. Not the 2020 version. Another one from the weekend, David. Ed Marinero, who played for the Minnesota Vikings in the 70s and later became an actor on Hill Street Blues, came out to announce a pick. Now, maybe because Ed was an actor, he thought, time for me to give a soliloquy before I announced the pick. Let's know a little bit of this. This is crazy. We didn't have this many people when I played in the Super Bowl.

You know, I got to tell you, finding a Viking purple sport coat is not easy. But I did it, and I hope you appreciate it. You know, the significance of me being here was that 50 years ago, I was drafted by the Minnesota Vikings. I know what you're thinking, I look pretty good for my age, but it was nothing like this. I was in my little apartment in Ithaca, New York, at Cornell University, and Jim Fink's, the general manager called, and told me, congratulations, son. You've been drafted by the Minnesota Vikings. All right, Ed is just kind of writing his memoirs.

It's a new residency here in Vegas. All right, Erica, you can cut it right there. So this went on, David, and on and on. And we'll pick up from the one minute and 22 second mark. I figure a draft pick takes what, like about five seconds to announce? This has already gone on for a minute plus. Here is Ed Marinero continuing to regale the odds. audience with his memories of his career in the NFL.

I love it. It's a new residency here in Vegas. They weren't on the top of my list for teams I wanted to be drafted by. Look out. In fact, there was only one team that I wanted to be drafted by less. Oh, my goodness. But I'm not going to mention Green Bay. Well, that's some red meat right there.

I see those cheeseheads over there. Anyway, it was a great experience. got to play in two Super Bowls, and now 50 years later, here I am in front of all you folks. This is really exciting for me. All right, Eric, we could put us out of our misery again. So at some point, David, an official from the NFL had to come out and tap Ed Marinero on the shoulder and point at the card in front of him.

in order to get him to announce the pick. It's not the Oscar, so there was no band that could just start playing. But somebody had to physically walk on a stage where please do what we asked you to do today instead of just freestyling on television for a couple of minutes. And this was a problem in the WWU Hall of Fame where people would come out and just give like 45 minute acceptance speeches, you know, even though they were like scripted down to five minutes or whatever, they would just keep going. And Mr. T, when he was inducted into the celebrity wing, went on for so long that they eventually just had Kane come.

They played Kane's music and had the wrestler Kane come out and escort him off the stain. Not a gimmick. Can we have a little bit of the Mike Greenberg conversation here? Oh, please. So Mike Greenberg was the early round host of ESPN's NFL draft coverage. We've talked about before how Jimmy Petaro, president of ESPN, has, built that network like the LA Rams have built their football team, which is to say around a handful of big stars. So Mike Greenberg now does the NFL draft. He does NBA countdown. Get up. There is a daily ESPN radio show.

There was and maybe still is a gambling show on ESPN Plus. What do we make of the Mike Greenberg era? there's a lot of Mike Greenberg I mean it's he's an interesting he's such an interesting character because he's he's he's you know unquestionably competent at everything that he does

and I would say competent I don't mean that as an insult I mean he is for all the different fields that he covers you would not expect him to be NFL draft literate I mean you would expect him based on his work ethic too but you wouldn't just like necessarily watch an episode of Mike and Mike back in the day or even get up now and just be like this guy has this guy you know woke up today with the inherent wisdom to host the NFL draft um and and weirdly I kind of feel like the like NBA countdown is a higher degree of difficulty because it's not just about the information it's also about just the sort of ambience you know it's it's about like the character work um and yet he pulls it all off. I mean, it's, I mean, I'm sure somebody has run the numbers and just that could, and they could show us how much of ESPN's, you know, airtime over the past couple of weeks has been, you know, Greenberg and Stephen A. Smith, which is probably a ton, right? I mean, and we've talked about Stephen A. Smith is just sort of the

ultimate innings eater for, for, you know, high volume, but also, you know, innings eater for ESPN. And, you know, Greenberg's sort of in that same position, too. I mean, you and I both know that a lot of these decisions about who hosts a show have much to do as much to do with, you know, agent power and contract negotiations and the power of the, power of the broadcasters themselves as it does anything else. And I'm sure that, you know, Mike Greenberg probably has been dreaming of some of these hosting gigs for as long as he's been in the business. But there's also a point where it's just sort of, you know, for some people, for. some of these gigs, they have to be just another like bobble on the charm bracelet, right? I mean, it's like, I'm doing it because like I have the power, I have the ability to do it. Right.

I mean, and also, I'm guessing it comes to a pretty nice paycheck along the way too. I mean, it's, but it is interesting to go back to my very original point that in an era that is more and more specialized, just in general, in the way that we engage with sports, that there is a, that ESPN has just a go-to, generalist at the, you know, playing point in every single one of these situations. An all-purpose air traffic controller. Yeah. Who is incredibly smooth and can seemingly walk into any event and hosted. Yeah. And by the way, I'm sorry to cut you off, but to reiterate that point, the one thing you do see on

get up, and you can think whatever you want about Mike Greenberg. But that's a free-flowing conversation to say the least, different co-hosts every day. And there's never a moment where somebody makes a point. And Mike Greenberg's just like, wait, what? Like, Mike Greenberg always, like, always has the rejoinder and the segue, like, in his back pocket the second he needs it, you know? So you're right about the air traffic control thing. Yes. And I think if I was going to say, if I was going to give him a compliment, I would say that he handles all that stuff as well as anybody I've seen on TV just about in terms of hosting, having a voice in your ear.

If you watched him during the draft, he's like, take. and his glasses on and off. He's got like physical sheets of paper there in front of him. You can tell when he's kind of making that face that guys on television do where they're listening to somebody in their ear and listening to the person across from them at the same time. He's juggling elements. We had Michael Cole on the show a few weeks ago and he goes, I'm the best in the history

of sports entertainment at juggling elements. Not calling a wrestling match. But being able to say, here is the video of the draft pig. here is Roger Goodell, here is Booger McFarland, and making that all seem seamless. That feels like his talent. That feels like what he is really good at. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, and you can make the case, especially in the NFL draft, so many people involved, both on the set and it remotely, that you really do need that job. You can even make the case, I guess, for the NFL countdown that, like, the most important thing is not the personality of the host, right? It's making sure that everybody gets their 15.5 seconds to say their thing, you know, in exactly the right order. So you do need an air traffic controller in those jobs. And he's, he's obviously, you know, very adept at it. And I think there's no way to compliment Greenberg without sort of making it sound sort of like you're that you don't, like it's an insult, you know, because no one, no one, no one dreams of being an air traffic controller, except people that actually, you know, go into air traffic control. But, but it's just a, I mean, he's, he's, he's.

He's very good at. There's just a lot of them. And by the way, all those jobs, and that's, we didn't even mention the just for men commercials that he's doing from the fake NFL draft stage that are airing in and around the draft. I don't. Or he goes out and pretends he's making a pick. It's one of those weird mashup commercials where it's just like, I guess he's obviously playing himself, but he's also sort of playing Roger Goodell.

It's a very bizarre thing. Anyway. To your point about the sort of, it seems like you're giving him sort of half, of a compliment. He does have the thing that a lot of play-by-play announcers have. Yeah, I've been thinking about Joe Buck, this whole conversation. Early Joe Buck, where you're so involved in smoothness. And you're so involved in creating a seamless TV presentation that after a while,

a viewer looks at you and goes, what are you about? Yeah. What are the jokes running through your head that are just right on the line of acceptable on television? You know, what are your ideas about these things you're talking about? What is it that makes you mad? What puts you in high moral dutchin? And watching him undoing all these shows and listening to his radio shows sometimes when I drive around serious, I don't know the answer to any of those questions. Yeah.

I really don't. And I don't like to do the thing with ESPN where you throw out the names of anchors from the past because it's just you're just chasing something that's, you know, that's not attainable and probably not available. And probably not real. It's like the deification of like the old SNL or it's like good. We're thinking of like five sketches. We're not thinking about any whole episode or a whole season. Well, yeah, which is fair enough.

But I feel like I had the answer for a lot of them. I understood what they felt about sports. I understood what their sense of humor was in particular. I understood what was weird about them. I don't have the answers to those questions about Mike Greenberg. I really don't. And again, I don't know if that's from doing almost 20 years of a radio show that was designed to be really, really broadly popular for sports fans. I don't know if that's him coming out and working in a way where he wants to, you know, not to offend people.

I don't know if that's ESPN being a very, very different place than it was 20 years ago where, hey, we have the tent pole events now. We got the NBA. We got Monday Night Football. We got all this stuff. So it's not about us being the little stepbrother sports network where we're getting by on our wits and chewing scenery. it's about us doing something different. I don't know what it is, but it's different. Well, it's hard.

I mean, it's hard to, you know, it'd be hard to write the definitive think piece about Mike Greenberg without really trying to digest the media landscape over the past 15 years, you know? I mean, it's like, listen, the people who talk about Mike Greenberg, the people that tweet about Mike Greenberg, the people that you and I know who have opinions on Mike Greenberg, they weren't the target audience of Mike and Mike, right? but like to to not acknowledge that mike and mike mike by being so light and broad in its way was like like so just ridiculously more successful than everything around it it was just like you know it was godzilla with a big happy face stuck on him you know i mean it was it was it was

it was just a machine and in some ways you know he's obviously taken a different tax since he's gone out on his own since get up started everything else but like he's he's a he's obviously incredibly driven and he does have a sort of like you know great communicator vibe to i mean aspect to him right where like he's like he is starting from the point that all of these sports discussions need to be explained or you know need need to be need to be corralled in a certain way and to that in that sense he's he's succeeding at what he's doing obviously you know and I don't think that that I mean I'm sure that the public opinion will come back

will come around on him at some point it always does right just like with Stephen A. Smith and with you know Joe and Troy and everybody else but like but what he's doing is something that's like deliberately not of you know not a corin you know I mean he's not he's he's not doing a thing that he's not catering to the audience that is listening to this show you know and that's I mean and and and he wouldn't be where he if he were, you know? I mean, like, nobody, like, there's a reason why we talked about Mike and Mike's contract negotiations for years and not like, you know, whatever like advanced metrics

podcast was airing at the same time, you know, I mean, it's, they're doing a very different thing. And he is, and he has proven the worth of that all across the board. Now, what I prefer to, yeah, I mean, I told you, I was watching the Twitter show, you know, I was watching it for all of its dysfunction, but also for all of its like supreme insight and and incredibly interesting personalities like watching real humans interact in real time you know like that to me is much more interesting and electric and the information that they had to share in some ways was a much more you know just perfect for me for me as a viewer but like I think sort of the beauty of what they get to do of of the split is that like Greenberg is holding is anchoring this one this

this old school thing, like he's just holding it down and it allows them, it allows ESPN or any, you know, you can extrapolate out to like take risks in other directions, you know,

like if they had, if Mina and Field Yeats those people were doing the main broadcast, it wouldn't have been as much fun, you know? And it wouldn't, it would have, it would have felt like people

trying to do my Greenberg stick. And I'm grateful that we got, that we have everything. Met his dad one time. Do you know his dad owned a bookstore in Manhattan? No. Wait,

what was his bookststores? store. The complete traveler in Midtown. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Which was this wonderful place that sold travel books. Dad's name was Arnold Greenberg, passed away a few years ago. And I remember going in there and just looking and they had stuff that was like shelved by different regions and things like that was like a really, really fascinating store. And I remember one time I had a first edition or an old edition, Graham Green. I think it was Our Man in Nevada that I had bought in London. And it was one of those where you buy a handsome first edition, it sits on your shelf and you're like, this just doesn't speak to me at all. Yeah. Like I'm, this is a very handsome book, but it doesn't, it doesn't have

particular meaning to me. So I don't want this anymore. And I remember I took it in there and he traded me that book for a comparable, comparably valued very, very old American travel guide to Mexico, I believe from the 1920s that I still have. And they absolutely love. Absolutely fabulous guy and absolutely fabulous store. That's awesome. That is so cool. That makes me, yeah, I'm so glad we had this conversation just so I could hear that. Also, was it weird that makes me like greenie a whole lot more?

I don't know. And now it's time for David Shoemaker and Kevin Clark. Guess the strained pun headline. We are the power and glory of pun cracking tag teams here. I thought you guys could be like an F1 team kind of frenemies competing to see you get it first. Thursday's headline. line, David, about a boring buzz lightyear trailer was to infinity and we yawned.

Today's pun comes from the athletics, Eric Corrine. It's from ESPN.com and draft related, Kevin. For the first time since 2007 ESPN reports, two punters were selected in the first four rounds of the NFL draft. The Raven selected Penn State's Jordan Stout, number 130 overall, and the Bucks chose George's Jake Camarda three spots later. Okay. Two punters. Fairly early. What was ESPN.com's strained pun headline?

Oh, man. Do you know this, Kevin? I don't. I mean, I know. I wish I didn't know the actual story, which is how many punters were taken over the weekend's draft. But I do. But I don't know the headline.

Has it happened since 2007? Oh, well, that's, that's, so what, uh, uh, how many years is that? 15 years? Well, uh, 15 years. Well, let's just say a long time. Oh, okay. A long time. Hang time.

Very unusual this occurrence of these. Rare air, rare, rare. Oh, I like that first word. Rare, um, rare, um, rare. We're talking about punters here, folks. I know. Perhaps the appendage. A rare feet.

Rare feet. That's so good. Rare feet. It's funny because it's true. Huge thanks to Kevin Clarkie is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. I'm back later in the week with a big interview.

And then Shoemaker and I'm back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.