The Press Box - COVID-19 in the White House. Plus, Michael Jordan and the Media With Jack McCallum | The Press Box

Episode Date: May 11, 2020

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss the major news that COVID-19 is now inside the White House: We discuss who’s infected, what this means for the White House, and what this means for the country (1:30). Then, we are joined by longtime 'Sports Illustrated' writer Jack McCallum to discuss 'The Last Dance' and what it was like reporting on Michael Jordan (18:00). Plus: the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week, David Guesses the Strained Pun Headline, and much more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelly and welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. We're excited to announce our latest podcast launching this week called Behind the Billions. Coming from the two co-creators of Billions, Brian Copleman and David Levine give a behind-the-scenes look into Billions Season 5. Following each episode's airing on Showtime, the podcast will impact the writing of the script, exclusive stories from production, interviews with casting crew, and much more. The first episode is out now, so make sure to subscribe to Behind the Billions on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers, Brian Curtis and David

Shoemaker of the Ringer here. This is the press box. And David, today, our agenda includes a dive into the topic of Michael Jordan and the media with legendary NBA writer Jack McCallum. What was it like to negotiate whether Michael Jordan's baby was off the record? Jack will tell us all about that. Next, you and I will talk about,

and this is going to shock you, David, another shakeup on ESPN's Monday night football. What should follow the Tess and Bug era of American life? Plus, David guesses a strain pun headline and the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, I want to start with a big political news of the weekend. The voice you're about to hear is Kevin Hassett, whose name you might have read about lately.

Kevin Hassett is talking about how scary it is to go back to his office to work. Where does he work? The White House. The fact is that I practice aggressive social distancing. I'll wear a mask when I feel it's necessary. It is scary to go to work. I was not part of the White House in March. I think that I'd be a lot safer if I was sitting at home

than I would be going to the West Wing. But it's the time when people have to step up and serve their country. What we just heard is a White House employee, I think for the first time grappling with just the reality that we've all been grappling with for so long and it's not the fear of getting this thing. It's that this is so.

much more than a hypothetical. I mean, we point at the elites in the world and talk about ivory towers and living inside bubbles, where unfortunately, it seems like the people in the White House have been almost literally inside of a bubble for the past, you know, however many months. It's not the fear of getting this thing. It's just, it's the fear that comes with the complexity of the unknown, right? I mean, if you're a single guy who's going into the office because you work in the media or something like that, you can rationalize this.

but if you're coming home to a family, if you ever want to see your parents, if you want to come into contact with anybody outside of your work bubble, then suddenly it's not just the specter of, I might get sick, and there's this minute chance of whatever. It's the real, tangible reality

of like, I am a bearer of death. And that is a really shitty place to be. Totally. Something, by the way, all of us, as you say, outside the White House have been feeling pretty acutely. Mm-hmm. For six plus weeks.

Yeah. And that the White House has not seemed to have been feeling at all or acknowledging in really any way. And you're right. It's bracing. They just to hear it. Yeah. I mean, I guess, you know, I was going to say something with the president. Let's keep like parsing through this. I mean, let's talk about this piece that Maggie Haberman and Michael Shearer in the New York Times wrote because it gets into that. And I think in a really, in a really smart way. So they reported that senior officials believe that the disease, that is the coronavirus, is already spreading rapidly through the warrant

of cramped offices that make up the three floors of the West Wing. On Thursday, a valet to the president whose job it is to accompany Trump and his family when they travel and provide them with food tested positive for the coronavirus.

Trump said he'd had, quote, very little contact with valet. Then on Friday, David, it was reported that Katie Miller, Mike Pence's press secretary, had tested positive. Miller is a regular attendee at meetings with top officials on the White House's coronavirus task force.

And per the New York Times, did not regularly wear a mask at work, as was standard behavior for White House employees. As a result of that, Anthony Fauci, Dr. Robert Redfield, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Stephen Hahn, Commissioner of the FDA, aka the people in charge of our response to this pandemic, are all in some form of quarantine. None of them has tested positive for the virus,

but they're in quarantine. We should also note here probably that Katie Miller is married to Stephen Miller, senior advisor to Trump. He tested negative for the virus on Friday. You know, Katie Miller and Stephen Miller, both very fine people, I'm sure, probably have like the least problematic

of a sort of like inter-West wing incestuous relationship of the many that are there, but this is one of the many cases against this sort of like intermingling and nepotism and whatever else that goes on in the White House. It's just like there's so many jobs they're inextricably linked to each other, just in terms of like public personal contact and health. I do before we get too far away from it, I need to pause for one second and address the issue of the valet. The job descriptions such as the details have leaked out seems totally reasonable, but I do want to know how many job titles are in the White House that are completely

that I'm completely oblivious to because if you would ask me if I thought valets still existed at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I wouldn't have said absolutely not. Like, I thought all of those jobs, I mean, all those jobs, many of those jobs are taken by like military personnel and that sort of thing. You would think they would have more official military titles. But the first time that I heard Trump's valet, I just thought that some like jeevesy personality had just come with him from New York City and that he had tested positive. I had no idea. This is so bizarre. And it reminds you the conversation we're having about sports, right?

Because when we talk about let's bring baseball back or let's bring basketball back, the question is not will LeBron James get the coronavirus or the only question is that? It's does that guy who has to open the doors at the arena and clean the bathrooms and, you know, make sure the locker room is sanitary to, you know, is that guy or gal at risk of getting coronavirus? us. There were already sort of like behind the scenes discussions. It said there were at least rumored to be going on the NBA because certain teams sort of figured out that their median the median age of their support staff was significantly higher than some other teams. Right. So like you would they would end up having to leave X percent of their support staff at home

as opposed to, you know, bringing them into the into whatever brave new world of basketball people were considering. So yeah, I mean, there is there are so many, you know, tangential horrors, you know, that are just awaiting everybody. I mean, there's so much that's just we can't predict, we can't expect, and nothing. I mean, you know, as well as I do, as well as many people listening this, as a parent of young children, we got a rude awakening this week about the potential adverse effects on our own kids that this thing could have, right? I mean, there's so much that we, and that's a tangent itself, but like there's just so much that we can't foresee. And we're still in the discovery phase.

And somehow, our White House has found themselves. there as well. I mean, probably this is a huge positive for the country, but it's just sort of mind-boggling that it took this. One of the striking things I think about all these White House briefings that you and I have watched and then talked about is that at the vast majority of them, at least early on, the president and his associates were not practicing the social distancing that they were asking the American people to practice. So you had this TV image of all these people standing next to each other. When we were, you were asking the American people standing next to each other when we were being told over and over again, do not do this in public.

And we know this actually went just beyond what was on television, right? President, Vice President have both refused to wear masks while making public appearances. Pence famously did that when he went to the Mayo Clinic in late April and was the only person in the building not to wear a mask. We just heard about what Katie Miller not wearing a mask in a meeting. I'm one of these people I think that there is such a symbolic effect of that. And symbolic is the wrong word. I guarantee you there are people in America who are not super politicized, but look at the television and they say when the leaders of the country are not wearing a mask on TV and are standing next to each other,

I'm going to take this a little bit less seriously and be a little less careful than maybe I would have been if they had been in one. I'm not sure. I mean, I would actually go back and think symbolic is, I mean, I think symbolic is actually the right way to put it. I think what you got to was correct, but I think the symbolism, I mean, I think, you know, there's a lot in that New York Times piece that sort of shows the, or alludes to the sort of idiocy of our president, that he's sort of mad at people for being sick and just like that's the foremost on his mind. But he understands, if nothing else, let's give him the credit of understanding, symbol. symbolic gestures, right? He understands what the visual, what the PR visual is worth. And he has made the

decision, made the choice that standing shoulder to shoulder and looking strong or going out in public and these like, you know, North Korea style photo ops without a mask on is more important than conveying the message that we need to be wearing masks. You know, I mean, this is, it's very, it's not ineptitude that has led him to that decision. That was a deliberate choice. choice, you know, and, and, uh, and it's, it's kind of heartbreaking. No, you're absolutely right. That, that was absolutely coordinated. And, and, you know, because what's happening in his mind is strong leader, not afraid, right? Not afraid of anything. Is conflicting with this idea that all of us need to have a, at least a little bit to a lot of fear somewhere in our minds right now.

It doesn't mean we need to be afraid that we're all going to die or that this thing is going to, you know, turn into something out of Stephen King or whatever it is, but we need to have some measure of fear. And that, by the way, is the thing that just scares me the most right now is that we're reopening America to some extent. And speaking of symbolic, I just think there are a whole bunch of people. And again, these are not super politicized people. These are not, you know, people who are loud Donald Trump supporters that are trying to do this on behalf of the president or a political party or whatever it is.

These are, as we're fond of saying on this podcast, some of these people we're related to who are saying, well, America is reopening, right? That barbershop is reopened. That restaurant is reopened. That means it's safe to go there. Yeah. That's not what this means at all.

And I just think like that's kind of the extreme version of what we're taught, or the bigger version of what we're talking about with Trump and these guys not wearing a mask on television. Yeah, I mean, you talked about the early press conferences too. and it was, it has to be said that Trump was also just joking around. I mean, he was just like, even as much as he was being serious,

he found time in almost every press conference to do some sort of like social distancing, like physical comedy or whatever, you know? And, yeah, I mean, the message just is just such a mess. Such a mess. And, I mean, and listen, I guess it's, I guess it probably is too much to ask that the White House

to current be aware that like, they need to turn up the knob, the gravity knob, you know, because that's not necessarily the first impression that they're going to give off. But that part has just been such a mess so far. And Pence going out without a mask on, Trump going out without a mask on. I mean, it's just like, to me that has the complete opposite effect. Like you were just saying, not just in the terms of how people are going to react to it. But I think even people, I think it's just we just don't know where to go for answers at this point.

because they're certainly not getting consistent ones out of Washington. No, and like I said, it's beyond just like reading a transcript of what Trump and Pence are saying. It's what's happening to us all around us in America right now, looking around and going, ah, people are getting haircuts. People are going to the beach, all this kind of stuff. And again, some of those acts in and of themselves are fine and you can do them safely and not worry about it. But that doesn't not mean you're safe because you can do something. And I feel that, you know, between Trump encouraging this, the governors who are carrying this out or local officials, that that is kind of what they are accidentally telling or maybe on purpose telling a lot of people.

Yeah. And listen, there are a lot of governors. There are a lot of people in Washington who are doing with this with making, if they're making mistakes, you're doing it with, you know, the best intentions, right? I mean, we have economic impulses. We have social impulses. There are so many reasons to do it. But you're right. They're giving the opposite, that people are taking the opposite thing from it. And I can only speak in. anecdotally about what I'm about to say, but I can't tell you how many people that I've come into contact with, I guess not that many people, to be honest with you, but like percentage-wise, a large number of people who have, who are just sort of shrugging their shoulders, mostly men, to be honest, and saying like, well, it's got to be over soon, right? Like the people who clearly not paying attention, but who's, like I think I said it a couple weeks ago, there's no overstating the power of personal convenience, right? The seductive power of personal convenience when you're just like, I don't, like, it doesn't make sense that I should have been inside for this long,

that I shouldn't be doing my regular life for so long. So you just kind of immediately take this side step to, oh, like, like, it's got to be over. Like, not, like, if it, if it hasn't gotten worse by now, then it's that means it's better, right? I mean, and the way that people are just totally shrugging their shoulders at the fact that the fact that we've been inside for the past two months is a positive, I mean, it has led us to the place we are now. It's just, it, it just beggars belief. But anyway, I mean, it's like I've said before, it's on our, it's on the people in charge to make these decisions for us. I mean, to help us guide us in the right direction to convey the gravity of the situation because it's not going to be in most people's instinct, instinctive reaction to do that. Exactly right.

All right, David, let's 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 press box pod where they are always gratefully received. of all last night, Sunday night's episode of The Last Dance made me realize we need to give out a lifetime pun achievement award to the headline, laugh line, tweet, whatever it is, Error Jordan. Error Jordan. They flashed that up on the screen. It was a Twitter thing for like half a day after that.

First of all, I remember when we were kids, Er Jordan, like E.R. Jordan. like E-R-R-R being a much bigger deal than error Jordan. Yeah. Sounds really bizarre. I look this up. LA Times 2001 from Err Jordan to Error Jordan. Washington Post, 1992. This time Error Jordan proves nobody's perfect.

Wall Street Journal 2003, good riddance, error Jordan. I think we should do an official power ranking of like the top 10 or 20. air Jordan puns for headline puns. I did like three on Twitter today and Bill pointed out that we forgot the Jordan rules, you know, or Jordan rules, that's a thing, right? When he would have a good game.

Paolo O'Gettie wrote about this on the site the other day. Whenever there was the next Michael Jordan, it would be Air. Oh, yes. That's my favorite. I.R. Jordan, right? There were some Hare Jordan headlines in there for balding. NBA writer, Mike Finger,

now a columnist sent me a note that said he had used the phrase chair Jordan one time when Jordan sat down. Anyway, thanks to Jonah Bellicus and Aaron Warenko for pointing that out. And finally, David, I'm not sure how the website IndieWire became the overworked Twitter joke straight man. All right. But we had another one. Indie Wire with this tweet about the upcoming movie The Batman, quote, Robert Pattinson's Batman will be quote, so raw and quote, not sanitized,

says cast member Peter Sarsgar. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write. The last thing the world wants right now is raw unsanitized bat. Thanks to Travis White. If you reminded us that the Batman

is still a thing, congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. When you're just putting the in front of an old title make it appropriate to be like the title of a sequel? Is there anyone but the most die-hard, like die-hard X-Men fans. They can tell you the difference between Wolverine and the Wolverine. Like, which one is, I guess you always know the the come second, but that's, it's, what,

it's so ridiculous. Anyway, moving. You, you were more of the comic person. So when I saw The Batman, I thought I was just missing on, missing out on some piece of the mythology. I think it's just a way to signal a reboot without it being like a old school full-on reboot. It's like, we're going back to the, the basics with this title, but it's not like, we're not tearing down everything you know

about the character or something. I don't know. All right, David, in the notebook dump, the last few episodes of the ESPN documentary The Last Dance have really touched on how the media covered Michael Jordan. We saw the gambling stuff. We saw Sam Smith, the Jordan rules back in 91. In this last episode, we saw a handful of reporters sort of wondering aloud if the murder of Michael Jordan's father, James, was somehow connected to Michael Jordan's gambling, seemingly without evidence. I wanted to talk to somebody who covered MJ in the moment and also watched other people cover him. Here's my interview with longtime Sports Illustrated writer Jack McCallum. Jack McCallum was on the staff of Sports Illustrated starting in 1981. He's written books.

He's got a new podcast out on May 18th called the Dream Team tapes. Before we talk about Michael Jordan, Jack, let me ask you this. You're punching your ticket at SI in the 80s. The NBA at that point in history is the number three sport, pro sport anyway, in America behind the NFL and Major League Baseball. What made you want to cover pro basketball? At SI, Brian, it was about number five. I mean, it had, I'm serious because there was, baseball was huge. And it had something to do with it being, you know, the complaints about SI being New York centric are totally irrelevant now.

I mean, they are totally, but it used to be somewhat relevant. know the Yankees, the Mets were everybody's darling. So football was obviously big. College football was huge because Dan Jenkins in that kind of history, you know, some of our best writers were college football, major league baseball, college basketball, you know, had come back. So the NBA was kind of like this. And I got lucky, you know, I just kind of shuffled around there from 81 to 85. At one time there, I think I've recorded this. I covered eight different sports in eight weeks, including the World Championship of Squash, boxing, indoor track. And it was a time when basketball and football were both going on. So basketball was just an afterthought, you know.

And in 1985, the managing editor came to me and said, hey, it was almost, it was kind of like, well, let's give it to Jack. Some great writers had done it, John Papineck, who was, I think John was becoming an editor. And Bruce Newman had done it. Great writer. But, you know, it didn't have any buzz there. And but by then, I had written a couple stories, but by 85, as you know, Michael was in the league. It was literally his first year. Larry and Magic had been in the league, had kind of changed it into at least a cognoscendi type of thing, but it had not crossed the cultural terrain.

Total accident of timing. I was like the journalists that were in Dallas. It's a terrible comparison, but I would like the journalists in Dallas. Dallas when Kennedy got shot. That's exactly what happened to me. It was available and you did it and the timing was perfect. Let me ask you this about Michael Jordan. How was covering him different from covering the other big stars of that era? Well, Jordan, I had this line in one of my blogs and I just remember saying it all the time. Somehow this guy was always better than his hype. It was sort of like whatever you wrote about the guy, and I didn't really realize that until Shaq came in,

in Shaq's rookie year, this is 90 or 91. I wrote a book with Shaq, the rookie. It was nominated for a Pulitzer that year. I don't know whether you got it. And Shaq had all this stuff thrown. It was amazing hanging out with this guy. Like a book for which we got a lot of money, Shaq got. most of it, as he should.

That was like the 25th consideration for him. You know, he had deals coming at him, and he hadn't done a goddamn thing. It was just his personality. Michael was never like that. It was about basketball. I mean, and I wrote this on the blog, the one thing that one of the lines that stood out for me in the documentary was Falk saying, maybe you remember this, they wanted to say, sell $3 million worth of Air Jordans within four years.

They sold $125 million in the first year. So there was this explosion around Jordan as a player, number one, that there was always something to write about, you know, that he was so good there was stuff to write about. Number two, Michael, although he never got political, and we've certainly been through that, you know, rain. It's not like he never said anything interesting. He just bordered just below cocky. You know, he was always very confident. He'd say stuff about other players. He'd feed into the rivalries.

It'd feed into the histories. He'd get on his teammates. He'd get on Jerry Krause. He'd speak his mind. So he wasn't a boring guy. You know, that was not. So you combined that with how good he was. And number three, fortunately for me, he wanted, he understood what his mug on the cover of Sports Illustrated. So I could kind of always get him, you know, and I never believed it had anything to do with me. We eventually had, I would say, a relationship and he kind of trusted me, even though we had some fights. But it was about the cover of Sports Illustrated, which was still singularly important. And so you put those three things together, you know, you wouldn't be talking to me right now if it wasn't for Michael Jordan and secondarily those players in that era. I want to hear about the fights.

What kinds of things did Michael Jordan not like that got into print and SI? Well, there was one in particular. This was probably in the late 80s that I was at Michael's. This was Michael in his kid days. There was a very clear delineation between Michael, sort of the friendly media guy, and Michael, the Howard Hughes kind of Uzi and recluse. You can't call him that because he had to go out and actually play basketball. But I'll talk about that in a second, but very clearly in I'm just a kid days. I went to do Michael, and he invited me down to his condo, I guess suburban Chicago.

and at one point, this is before the internet, but you do all the research you can, at one point, Juanita, his girlfriend then brought down baby Michael Jeffrey, Jeffrey, Michael. And I'm thinking to myself, holy crap, you know, Michael's got a baby. You know, I didn't read this anywhere, and I'm holding the baby, and I'm talking about my kids who were, you know, a lot older than that by then, but we're talking about fatherhood and make a very long short. story short, that night the Bull's public relations man came up to me and said, Michael expects you won't write about the baby. I said, well, I'm holding the baby. I mean, it's a baby.

And I just thought it's a longer story with some negotiation with him, but I just thought that some things he just can't tell me, show me, and then say you're not writing that. I understand you're a writer. You understand off

the record. You understand background. You understand how you got to weigh. You got a way thing, right? You have to weigh things, and you do have to give breaks to people who are helping you. But I just felt this kind of went a little bit beyond, and it wasn't any kind of moral issue with me. I mean, I don't care whether he was, you know, whether he was married or not. But I just felt I had to mention it. And I think the moral of the story is more like it tells what those times were.

like and how lucky I was to have covered those guys because I put it into the magazine. He was pissed off, but we went on. You know, life went on. It wasn't, hey, man, you're dead to me. You know, you're dead to me. And I think what happened, I'm talking about this delineation very definitely happened around the stuff they've covered in the documentary. When the media, Sam Smith's great book, the revelations about his gambling.

not going to the White House. It was right around then after the first championship at the point when he had proven exactly what everybody said he couldn't do win a championship is when his relationship

with the media and the way he looked at kind of his position in this weird interplanetary sports world that's when it started to change. And I think the media and those stories are presented

as a little bit of a boogeyman in the documentary. And when I look back of those stories, both Sam's book, which you mentioned, the stories about him getting called as a witness in a federal money laundering and drug trial, North Carolina, I'm like, of course those are legitimate stories.

And he lied about it. Yeah. He lied about what the loan was for. No, you, I mean, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, what, you know, that, but that's how it becomes. when you become that big. And Michael understood this in the beginning,

and it just became this kind of world that he thought this semi-paranoic, everybody's out to get me type of thing. And Michael was smart enough and a good enough personality that he certainly never turned fully that way. You know, I mean, that shows in the films, 96, 97, 98,

beside when he shut them down after the New York the gambling thing. But, you know, he engaged with the media, but it was just, it was just different. You know, it wasn't the same kind of joyful guy. And I made the point that to an extent, Magic Johnson, to an extent, was the same person when he came into the league as to the end,

even though despite all the HIV stuff. Larry Bird, who came in as kind of a grumpy, guy who said funny things was sort of that on the way out. Michael was not. Michael was a different guy and maybe with his level of fame, that was just the way it was going to be. The other thing I thought about with this is the NBA during this period, and especially with the dream team in 92, which we're going to come back to here in a second, it's just getting so big. And the crowds in the locker rooms, people have told me through the 80s, you just see it getting bigger and bigger with bad boy pistons it takes another jump with michael it takes yet another jump and was it

somewhat inevitable that you were that the stars were going to get pushed farther and farther away just because the league was getting so big and the press crush was getting to this unbearable point no question that's absolutely true there were more uh outlets that couldn't find anything that you couldn't get access to him, you know, so you had to kind of write opinion. Talk radio became big. But I'll tell you what was another big factor, Brian, was that when these guys came into the league,

particularly Magic and Larry, I don't think your listeners would understand what that league was like. It was, you mentioned third among the big sports. I mentioned five at Sports Illustrated. It could have been nine somewhere. up. It was not a league that people gravitated to. And the one metric that the late great David Stern used to always use to talk about it was the 1980 finals, Magic Johnson, the most

brilliant rookie to come along in any sport ever almost. Julius Irving, they're playing against each other in the finals. Tape delay. It was on tape delay. It was 1130. I wasn't covering it then, and I remember like, well, and there wasn't the internet or talk radio, you could probably avoid the score pretty damn easily. So my point was is that magic, to a big extent, even Larry in his own way, Dr. Jay certainly, Isaiah really in the beginning, they bought into this idea that we had to sell the league. we were part of this organization. Michael, who would have been inclined to do it anyway, fed into Dr. Jay's example. Dr. Jay's not going to be an asshole.

I'm not going to be an asshole. Magic Johnson's not an ass. So all these guys fed into this. And we was sort of like there were negative stories, and I'd like to think that the press in the 80s, there were some great reporters doing this work. Dan Hubbard's one of the great underrated, NBA writers. We would write the stuff. Stern would get mad. The players would get mad. But there was this

sort of understanding that we're all in it together. I mean, I don't want to go overboard on that, because I never felt I sold out to the NBA. But there was this idea that they needed our help and that if we did this honestly and candidly that we were in on this thing that was building, And we're not very smart, but I tell you what, there's one thing we understood. We understood where this thing, where it had been and where it was gone. We used to talk about it. And it's very rare when you see things enveloping kind of in front of you. It really is rare because usually I can't see anything.

Another point on the timeline of Michael in the media that we saw in the documentary last night was Michael retires for the first time. He goes to play minor league baseball. S.I. puts him on the cover with the headline, Baggett, Michael. As an SI writer, what did you make of the events that transpired after that? I had, it was strange that in a retirement, in a leaving the NBA that was much less noticed than anybody else, Jack McCallum left for a couple years. And this was feeds into what it was like. Larry had retired right after Barcelona. Magic eventually retired because of the HIV thing, which is a whole other thing.

Michael left the game. I said, man, I've been doing this for eight, nine, ten years. It can't get any better than this. I took like a couple of years off. I mean, not off. I was working. I was editing. As a matter of fact, editing the scorecard section. So I wasn't heavily involved. Steve Wolfe, who was a great baseball writer, wrote the story about Michael. And I read it. And the subhead was what got me. It said bag at Michael, which is sort of a, you. you know that tabloid wood type of thing, you know, you want the wood. Subhead said, Michael Jordan and the Bulls are embarrassing baseball. And I said, oh, shit. This is what, this is what's going to get Michael. You know, this is what. And I kind of knew that, especially by that time, he was in what I referred to earlier, that second stage of, you know, not being very friendly anyway.

So I think part of it for Michael, 50%, 40%, was he was legitimately pissed and insulted. I believe the word he used on a documentary last night was betrayed. And the other 50% was, hey, this is just somebody else I don't have to talk to anymore. My cover shoots used to take two hours, you know. I don't need SI anymore. I'm making whatever the figure was, 35 million. million dollars off the court as an endorser. I don't need SI anymore. So I think part of it was a pragmatic, a lot of it was he was pissed, but I think there was a pragmatic aspect to it all.

And when I went to interview him for the Dream Team book, I had run into him here and there. I went back on the beat when he was a wizard. And I used to see him in the hallway. A couple times I was down there. Hey, Yutz up, would talk. And then I'd ask him some questions. He'd look at me for a minute and go, is this for SI? I go. Oh, yeah. I mean, I'll say this. He stuck to it.

And Phil Taylor, a great writer from the West Coast who took over the beat for me, he had the full Michael, I'm not talking to SI thing. And I never had it because I wasn't doing it. And when I went back, you know, I had it, but he was with the Wizards. And so when I was doing the research for the book, the Dream Team book, which is in 2010-11, you know, my agreement, I told him that, or I told his representative, Esté Portnoy, that it had nothing to do with SI. And a little bit surprisingly, he said, okay, and we had a, as was all the conversations

for the Dream Team book, he was great. And we never even really talked about it. I did not feel the necessity to revisit with him. But we talked about everything else. One great moment last night. I was sitting there watching the dock with my wife. And Michael has a scene where I think it's before the finals against the Supersonics when George Carl snubs him in a restaurant.

And then he says to the camera, well, now I just wanted to beat the hell out of the sonics. And I turned to my wife and I said, now, now we're saying here that Michael Jordan was not fired up to play in the NBA finals until George Carl's. Carl snubbed him. But I thought about the media because did you see him use the media as fuel in that same way where it's not, I'm not even mad. I'm just, I'm just using this headline, this piece, this opinion column just to get me revved up. Yeah, I didn't, I didn't see that as much because early on, I mean, it was such a struggle. Another thing I don't think people understand is that Magic came into the league 7980.

He's in the finals in 80. He's MVP of the finals in 1980. Larry Bird next year, finals of the MVP in 81. They were in every finals, one of them until 90, until the Pistons beat the Blazers, right? The pistons, they didn't win every year. The Lakers or the Celtics were in every finals. Jordan had a really divergent experience.

I mean, Michael, you know, comes in the league 84, 85, doesn't get to the finals until 91. His, you know, lessons were all from the Pistons in the Eastern Conference semis and finals in the late 80s. So he didn't quite have that straw man. He was just early. He was just, his motivation was, I got to get there and prove all these people wrong. They're telling, you know, kind of telling me this. That, to me, what you were talking about came along, you know, came along after he had won his first one. Hey, Clydex, what they say he's as good as me?

F him! That was 92. 93. Charles is my good friend. He's the MVP? F him, you know. And then it just continued on. I had forgotten the great story Dave Aldridge told about LaBradford Smith, that this obscure guy goes off for 30.

37 in Chicago against Jordan. Jordan claims he said something to him afterward. And it turns out Jordan said later he didn't. I didn't know that story. Jordan got 36 in the first half in the next. So this setting up the straw man type of thing, I think, was a very real thing. But it came on a little bit later than what I saw, you know.

As you've watched the last dance when it has referred to media coverage of Michael at various points in his greatest. Does it match, broadly speaking, what you remember from those days? Yeah, I think so. I mean, this is a documentary, and the people that have not liked it have talked about, you know, it's to a certain extent, you know, what's the word hagiographic? I mean, it's, you know, and it's Michael's story, and Michael's production company is partially involved in it. But at the same time, they have shown a picture of Slim Buller. They have shown a picture of Richard Aschina.

They certainly went through the very difficult particulars of James Jordan's deaths. So I guess it's been pretty good. One of the moments that struck me was his press conference. I wanted to get it into my blog, but I couldn't a local Chicago broadcaster before this press conference, Michael's going to retire. He's there with his microphone and he goes, here he comes. Here he comes. Here he comes. Here he comes. I think he says it five times. And if anything speaks to the sort of restless way that we kind of looked at this, you know, it was kind of that. But, you know, I think it's been, I think it's been basically okay.

The director told me that they went to Michael and said, hey, we really think we should interview Sam Smith. You know, Sam wrote the Jordan Rules, which one of the things started the negative perception. Do you think that's okay, Michael? And the quote from Michael was, I don't give an F who you interview. So Michael's thing on this was, you talk about anything you want to. You bring anything you want on me, but I'm going to tell you my story of it. And, you know, to use the cliche at the end of the it's Michael's story. It's Michael's world. It's Michael's world and we're just, you know, we're just living in it.

I mean, that's the way it is, you know. Let me ask you for you to go about your new podcast. This is the Dream Team Tapes. It's a week from today, May 18th. Is that right? Yeah, it drops then. I had these, for some miracle, Brian, one of the things I had kept was my little radio shack cassettes.

that I did to record them to do the book, 2009, 2010. And I had started working on this long before Jordan. I'm not doing it because of the documentary, but let's face it, we're all hopping on pandemic, we're hopping on the pandemic trail. So I got it done, and it's coming out on IHeart Radio or wherever you get your podcast from next Monday. and it's got the tapes of the, you know, my interviews with the guys, you know, it's not a recitation of the book.

So it was, you know, you're doing podcasts now and some of us old dogs, I'm an older dog than you, but learning new tricks. And I don't know. I just love the podcast form. I just think it's such a cool thing, and I really had a good time doing it. And Contra the Doc, you have Michael Jordan on tape saying that, in fact, he was the one who nixed Isaiah Thomas. from the dream team in 1992. Is that correct? I do.

Jack McCallum's, the Dream Team tapes out May 18th. Thanks for joining us, Jack. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Brian. All right, thanks to Jack again for that one. David,

let's talk Monday night football. Speaking of something that has been rebooted more times than the Batman, I was just thinking about this the other day because as a sports media writer, I felt I've spent more time writing about the re-rereinvention of Monday night football than any other subject, period.

Talking about the Monday Night Football Announce booth is our the last dance. It's our the Tiger King. It's the conversation that will get our minds off of coronavirus and take us back to a happier time. I had this memory of writing a profile of Tony Kornheiser when he joined the Monday Night Booth. And I went and looked that up this morning and it was in August 2006. you want to feel old that's like when everyone on Twitter was feeling when Kurt Loder turned 75

the other day I'm like holy crap I was a young man when I wrote about Tony Cornheiser in the Monday night booth latest shakeup David came Saturday when the athletics Richard Dyche reported the following quote Joe Tessitore and Booker McFarland will not return via sources the successors will be internal

no decision has been made yet both Tessitore and McFarland will remain in prominent roles at ESPN? I, first of all, this is a brilliant move by ESPN, right? To say, to announce, I mean, I don't know, I don't know, do we have a, do we have a a term for the Friday news for the, the, the coronavirus news dump? I'm not sure there's like an appropriate way to talk about, like no one really cares

about this except for us right now. It's certainly not going to eat up a day of coverage or whatever. But also just to say, to announce that they're moving on, but also that the, that the replacements will be internal, right? So it sort of turns off, you know, the alert siren sort of goes off, right? You don't have to like start a mad, you don't have to start fantasy booking, you know,

Bill Maher into the Monday night football booth, right? I mean, it's going to be someone that you're kind of, that you know and you're comfortable with. Your mind immediately starts, well, let me, let's start with you. Where does your mind immediately wander when you start thinking about building a Monday night football booth internally? Um, well, it's been, it's been poisoned a little bit because the names that pop up

whenever these articles come up are Steve Levy, Lewis Riddick, he's really well liked on Twitter and beyond, and Dan Orlovsky, which seems to me to be a pretty safe option and be like something that Twitter likes and Twitter is really not liked

everything about Monday Night Football for the last two years. I don't know how much that informs ESPN's decision, but I would think at least marginally, right, you're serving up something, that people out of the gate are going to give a real chance to. Yeah. It begs the question, certainly, whether Monday night football now becomes a stage for like get up personalities or if like just being on get up is an indication of, of ESPN's

confidence in you and it's sort of separate from anything else you might do in addition or subsequently to that. Yeah. It's where you audition, right? Yeah. I mean, both Riddick and Orlovsky. I mean, Riddick's obviously been doing this for a while, but Dan Rolovsky, I mean, it's kind of like earning his chocolate.

on there a little bit. It's certainly in the sort of vocation, the, the, the, the, uh, the lingo and the, the, the style that, that, that Monday Night Football would, would require. I don't want to pull us off track here, but what, what you're indicating is that is, is, is something that has been covered, not a ton, which is get up is actually really worked for ESPN in its second iteration, and it's doing what it should have done from the beginning, which is getting smart, talented people from ESPN in front of the camera and just like, let's let these people be smart. Absolutely. And it also, and it's also, it's reps in the traditional sense, but it's also just like the quantity, right? I mean, I mean, you're that you can be on camera for 15 minutes or 30

minutes for two hours. And you can, and, you know, producers and anybody else can point to the moment that really worked that, you know, the moment that stood out out of a 30 minute block. You know, I mean, that's something that's really hard to get to when all you're doing is talking head bits on other shows, you know. And you're right. It's worked. I mean, it's worked. And it's, there's something about the morning format where I think we're all a little bit forgiving, you know, we're not, and there's, you know, the free-flowing, whatever, copyright Bill Simmons aspect of the whole thing, makes it a little bit easier to integrate new personalities. I got to tell you, the first time I saw this, I tried to fit, Steve Levy's would be a fantastic

choice. But the first time I saw this news, I immediately tried to fit Monday night football into maybe back into the Mike and Mike Rumor Mill expanded universe, right? I mean, and I'm just trying to figure out how, are we rebooting Golix show again? what is Greenberg's next move and then how does this fit into the whole thing? I guess it makes more sense just to use the sort of guest stars and peripheral characters for Monday Night Football. But, you know, all of those are very interesting choices.

Yeah, well, we did see a little of that expanded universe kind of thing on Twitter. A lot of people want Mina Kimes to be part of the broadcast in some way. Pat McAfee, who's essentially been publicly auditioning for this job forever. You know, do you put him on the sidelines as like Tony Saragusa 2.0? that's probably insulting to Pat McAfee, or do you put him in the booth or do you do something with him on the show, right? There's also been this idea of like,

oh, what if we took our really good college announcers, Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreet, and just let them do Monday night football. Because everybody likes them, right? Or they're really well liked. And what if we just put them on Monday night and fix this problem? A couple of things about this to me stand out.

So much of this is about what Disney and ESPN are going to do in the next NFL TV deal. Like, they want more games. games, right? They don't just want Monday night football. They maybe want Thursday night football. Maybe they want to be on Sunday. Maybe they want, they definitely want more playoff games. They want a Super Bowl, right? So I think their first idea was let's get an announcing booth that's going to be like going to be able to handle the Super Bowl and that we can show the NFL. So what did they do? They publicly went out and tried to get Al Michaels, or at least mused about getting Al Michaels. They tried to get Peyton Manning. They talked about Drew

breeze, right? They talked about Tony Romo most prominently. So, and by the way, one thing is you were mentioning like this as a coronavirus news dump. Before the coronavirus, seemingly Joe Tessitore and Bougar McFarland were replaced in public for like weeks and weeks on end, which is a pretty horrendous state. I'm not judging, you know, because I think some of those stories, obviously ESPN did not intend to to have leak. But that's got to be a pretty ugly situation to, watch people muse about who's going to get your job that you still have. Yeah. At least in theory, in public like that before it finally came out this week.

The other thing I was thinking about is just this, there's this bigger identity crisis of Monday Night Football to me. And I know you feel this too because I think we've talked about it before. I don't know what Monday Night Football is. And I don't know what it's been for the last 15-ish years since ESPN got it. and it became kind of the less big primetime game, Sunday night became the big primetime game and it became the other primetime game.

And I watch it and I've watched it again, reporting on it, just watching it as a fan. And it's like, to me, half of ESPN thinks it should be a big game. It should be like a Joe and Troy, Jim and Tony level game every week. Then there's this kind of other idea

that maybe it's like, this is actually like a network B or C game, right? This would be like the, you know, not the main game on CBS on Sunday, but kind of like the third game. It's about that level and that's how we should treat it. And then there's like a third option where maybe it should be like Thursday night football where it's kind of a crummy game a lot of the time,

but we're kind of had the announcers are kind of wacky like Joe and Troy are on Thursday nights and they kind of have a little more fun. But just watching it and watching them cast it, I don't get a sense that ESPN as a network has ever picked one of those options. No. Here's the thing. I feel like the choice A has to be the answer when you're pitching the advertisers, when you're pitching to the, you know, Disney brass, right? But then you can never live up to that. And that becomes the sort of, you know, the problem with the entire thing. I mean, the more I thought about it, the more I think that Sunday night football didn't just replace Monday night football in terms of being the prime time game that people care about, you know, kind of got the better, it has the better. lineups, I mean, the better matchups. It certainly has taken, since the, since it's very inception, taking all this team on Monday night football, but it wasn't just the game.

It was the, it was the recaps of the football of the Sunday football, right? It was the discussion of football that by the time that, we're just in a different world now, but by the time you get to Monday night, you don't care about, I mean, you're already fully, you fully processed everything that happened on Sunday during the day, right? And it, and it wasn't that long ago that you would have watched one game or a game and a half because that was what was on local TV. And you were actually kind of waiting for the Monday night show, the Monday night football pregame to sort of process what was going on in the rest of the league.

All of that is totally put to bed by the time that we literally go to bed on Sunday night. I've learned, I don't even read Monday morning football columns as much as I used to. You know, I mean, you just like, you've processed it all by the end of the day. And Monday might as well be Thursday. I mean, it might as well. I mean, it could be Tuesday or Wednesday or anything else. Monday night doesn't have the same gravity that it used to have.

but I don't know that ESPN can just come out and say this is, this is our Thursday night. You know, it's just, it's not, it seems like, I'm sure there's the concern that if they give it up publicly, if they say that publicly, then viewership might go down. Oh, absolutely, right? You have to pump it up as a big game. I couldn't agree with what you say more.

And I almost, I have had this feeling for a long time that the games are in the wrong order. Mm-hmm. Because it used to be that you'd have your big Sunday games and then Sunday night football, was on ESPN and Turner was kind of a lesser game. So you kind of took a breath, right? It was kind of bonus football.

And then the big game, the next big game was Monday night football on ABC with Al Michaels, John Madden, those kind of guys. We got out of order. And I just weirdly came to me when I was watching The Last Jedi recently with my kids here, forgive this insane pop culture reference. But watching The Last Jedi, spoiler alert.

And Ray and Kylo kill Snoke, the big bad guy. They kill the big bad guy. And then they have a fight with the bad guy's henchmen right after that. And I'm watching this. I'm like, this isn't how drama works. You kill the henchman and then you kill the bad guy. Like they just got this dramatically in the wrong order. And I actually think that the same thing applies to the NFL.

You can't go big game, big game Sunday night and then go, and here's something else. Right? It just, it just didn't, like mentally, I feel the same way as you. By Monday night, I'm almost, and I'm never tired of football. But by Monday, there have been Monday nights where even when it's a good matchup, I roll in there and I'm like, I'm kind of tired of football. Yeah, especially when the week, the football week now nominally starts on Thursday, you know, so for much of the season, then we get Thursday night and we have college on Saturday

and Sunday and then Monday really is just sort of like, we're just dragging by that point. So yeah, I mean, you're right. It would make a lot more sense. And it would also make a lot more sense for like the, you know, From ESPN, you know, ESPN spends all afternoon covering all these games. They go into the studio after all the Sunday games are out. And then, you know, we got to flip channels to NBC to sort of, you know, they're competing with each other for a bit at the tail end of ESPN, the beginning of NBC.

So it's, it does seem a little bit just like it's, it's just, it's over conceptualized. You've got to go back to the basics almost. I got, I got more to say about this, but I'll hold off our next discussion for six months until we talk about the Monday night booth again because it's going to come back. said it's it's the batman of sports media yeah i cannot wait for the monday night football to debut this evening warner brothers will rebrand it all right time for david shoemaker guess is a strain pun headline all right monday's headline about the coming meat shortage was slaughterhouse dive david i had to pass on this one that uh listener ethan radkey sent over from the london

times obit of little richard did you see this a wop bab bala lubop a lot a lot a lot Bam gone. That is like high school newspaper level wit right there. There's also an ellipse, an artful ellipsis between Bam and gone at the end. So, you know, just to make sure you took that full, that little beat to really to really ice those things. Yeah, definitely a pause for laughter there. Today's headline comes from Emily Ann.

David, it's from the Albany Times Union. This is from April. It's about a goat. Yes, a goat. that David found itself in peril. I'm going to read to you from the article, A goat, perhaps taking social distancing to an extreme, needed a rescue after he found himself seemingly trapped

on a ledge under a busy highway overpass near Marcy in Oneida County. Now, I'm hoping that the writer of this article actually figured out the goat's gender and was not just using he. There was not a lot of some male gaze going on here, but I'm going to assume that. So in other words, this is what happened. You know how you drive under an overpass and you see those rafters kind of in the top? Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

That's where the goat was. In fact, the call was recorded at the police department as, quote, goat in rafters. That is what happened. Eventually, the goat was able to free itself from the bridge. It sort of just walked out. But David, as you think about a headline, I want you to think about it in terms of that outcome not being assured. We didn't know what was going to happen. with a goat? What was the Albany Times unions strained pun headlong? Oh my gosh. Uncertain on a question

questionable outcome sketch, uh, goat. Um, definitely want to use goat. Goat. Goat. Goat. Your pun, your pun word is goat. Uh, gold. Golden goat bridge does not really make sense. What's a, what's a phrase when, when you don't know the outcome of something? Uh, oh, it's, it was a, In doubt, in, getting closer. It was a blank situation. I'm going to be a little Gene Rayburn for you here. It was a blank situation. A hairy situation?

God, why can I think of this? A doubtful. A little more help here. It was a blank and goat situation. Oh, touch and goat situation. That's fantastic. It was a touch and goat situation. goat situation. Love it.

Those yucksters at the Albany Times Union. He is David Schuemaker at Bride Curtis, researched by Chris Almeida, production magic by Erica Zervantes. We're back Thursday. Listener mail, David, does that sound good? Let's do it, man. Send those to

us at your leisure. I think we should also talk about the alarming digital divide between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Oh, yeah. Trump is extremely online and Joe Biden is not. What does that mean for November, et cetera, et cetera. Plus more lukewarm takes about the media.

See you that, David. See you, Brian.