The Press Box - Dead Solid Perfect: Dan Jenkins, Boycotting Fox, and Moonlighting for the Mets | The Press Box

Episode Date: March 12, 2019

The passing of legendary sportswriter Dan Jenkins (03:00), whether the Democrats have a right to stiff Fox News for a primary debate (32:45), and ESPN baseball analyst Jessica Mendoza’s new position with the New York Mets (40:30).   Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, it's Liz Kelly, and welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. I want to tell you about our new show. Can I still leave for a second? The Ringers Guide to Colton's Season, streaming now on Hulu. The show is an inside look into Colton Underwood Season of The Bachelor, starring Ben Higgins, Rachel Lindsay, Lauren Zima, and our very own Juliet Lippman. Make sure to tune in before Monday's finale

for never-before-heard insight into all things Bachelor Nation, streaming now on Hulu. David, Donald Trump called Apple CEO Tim cook Tim Apple the other day and then used two different excuses to deny he'd made a mistake what other

names of various captains of industry would sound funny in this construction Before you say anything by the way Can I say his funniest excuse was that he said Tim Apple as an easy way to save time and words Something he's deeply interested in is brevity

easy way to save time and words oh man yeah like his best defense was that there was a comma that no one really noticed like an implicit comma between tim and apple so what the other like titans or the other titans of industry on the tech field would i mean you have like mark facebook and jeff amazon i mean none of those are quite bill microsoft is not quite as not quite as funny jeff amazon sounds like a professional wrestler yeah i had you could do well we Vince wrestling, if you want to go into professional wrestling genre.

That's pretty good. I thought Ben BuzzFeed was kind of funny, but I think that's like the reverse of his actual Twitter handle. Adam New York Magazine. Oh, man. I mean, I don't know if he's technically like the biggest guy, but you go like Roger Football, although Johnny Football is kind of a thing. We could talk about our boss, the sports guy Bill Ringer.

That's good. Yeah. I don't know. I hope somebody calls him like Donald America at some point in the future just to sort of he probably like that though.

We are the Brian Press Box and David Grantland of podcasting. This is the Press Box, a part of the Ringer podcast network. The Press Box is the media podcast we are not allowed to defend Megan McCain. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here again with three topics

for your pleasure and amusement. First David let us raise a glass of J&B and a backup glass of J&B to legendary sportswriter Dan Jenkins, who died Thursday night. How should we think of the man his own self? Second, do the Democrats who are probably in some state of disarray have the right to stiff Fox News for a primary debate? We discuss.

And finally, David, a quick note on ESPN baseball analyst Jessica Mendoza, moonlighting as an advisor to the New York Mets. Can you call a game and also work for a team? Plus the notebook dump and, of course, the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, damn it, we got to start here. Dan Jenkins, legendary golf and college football writer, died of heart and renal failure last week at the age of 90. Jenkins was not only a great sports writer, he and you and I were all graduates of Paskell High School,

dear old Pascal in Fort Worth, Texas. Dan was our guy. He was our lodestar. And can we start this whole thing off by me telling the wedding story? Is that okay? Yeah. Do I have your permission? Yeah, and we've talked about Jenkins before in the podcast.

If we repeat anything, well, I'm not even going to apologize. This is the time and place to do it. So yeah, please tell the wedding story. To quote Dan, fuck people. If people complain, fuck people. When I got married earlier in this decade, my wife and I were going through and trying to figure out what readings would we do from the pulpit during the ceremony. And one reading was you, David, reading a passage from Jenkins's comic night.

novel semi-tuff. The other reading was from the Bible. It was a sweet passage. Right. One of those books is a guide for living a better life and the other book is the Bible. So I'm just going to put it that way. During the rehearsal, you get up there and read this passage and there's kind of these kind of stone face to angry looks around the church there. And then afterwards, there's a huddle with the bridal party. And it's decided that this passage must be severely edited before it's read at the actual wedding. So in the actual wedding, you get up there and read like 20% of a Dan Jenkins passage. Well, it was very long on the run through, but we did deliberately cut some of the crasser verbiage.

I think it dealt with infidelity, which is probably in hindsight not the best topic to bring up at that moment. But we did it. We read Dan Jenkins. Dan Jenkins made it through to the actual ceremony. I've never been prouder. Okay, I want to divide Dan into two parts here. First is Dan Jenkins, the writer. And the first thing I'd like to say about that is that I've gone through some of these old pieces over the weekend. He was a deadline writer at Sports Illustrated, which I think gets forgotten.

Because we think of Sports Illustrated as the great factory of literary sports writing of the 20th century, which it was. but he was the part of that factory who was watching a big golf tournament or watching a huge college football game on Saturday sticking a Winston in his mouth and working the typewriter for a couple hours to write his piece. He was not laboring over these things

for like weeks and weeks and weeks. And that to me is like an essential part of Jenkins as a sports writer is the fact that he was just cranking it. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think that you can, if you're exposed to him, mostly through his fiction work.

I mean, there's a little bit of a, I mean, there's such an ease with the way he writes in general, but I guess you can, you know, if you go back and read his Sports Illustrated stuff, it's, I guess, I guess you can read, you can take that ease to be incredible skill, and it was, you know, there wasn't, there was a lot, there wasn't, you know,

kind of indescribable, um, just power and joy with, you know, in every sentence that he wrote. But yeah, I mean, he was, he, he, he, I feel like, you know, I can sympathize a little bit growing up for a time in those same environs, but, you know, he wasn't steeped in literary aspiration so much as he was, he was a work-a-day writer.

He just happened to beat a hell of one, you know. I mean, he was just incredibly, incredibly gifted at every line that he wrote was just a treasure. Yeah. I want to light on a word you use there, which is joy, because I think he's also important and interesting in that he's one of these sports writers who comes along, and our boss on the subject of the NBA is another one, who takes something that is not topic A in sports and makes it sound like the most interesting thing in the world. And so you as a reader wanted to pay attention to that sport more than you normally would, just because the writing is so funny and so interesting and so, you know, not worshipful,

but just so full of passion about the subject. I was trying to make a list of people over the years. I'm sure Grantland Rice is in this category about college football. Like I said, our boss. I put Brian Phillips and tennis in this category because he sure has helped made me read a lot more tennis ready than I would have otherwise. Definitely. Dan did that for golf and college football.

And, you know, he's a guy who, as of 2017, had covered 229 golf majors. And, you know, again, golf is a sport that he certainly didn't invent golf writing in America. But I think for that generation, he made those British opens and U.S. opens and Masters tournaments just seemed so big. And he made those Nebraska, Oklahoma game and Michigan, Michigan State Notre Dame games so big. And that was part of his thing, too, is just infusing that stuff with so much joy and interest in nerdery that it felt like you had to pay attention to it.

We grew up in the Housian days of golf books being a big deal in bookstores everywhere we went. I remember saying Dan Jenkins, my first exposure to Dan Jenkins was before I lived in Texas, was just seeing his name on the covers of books. Yeah. My old line about golf books used to be, a golf book is a perfect giff or the father you hardly know. But go ahead. I think that was the publishing industry mentality too.

That and, you know, like war books, military history, really big stuff. But yeah, I mean, certainly Jenkins has an incredible bibliography. And part of that, like I said, is just the era. You know, I mean, his, but he published a whole lot of books. And that was my first exposure to Dan Jenkins was reading about golf. And, I mean, a sport that I'd probably never read a word about, despite, you know, my dad being a fan. I mean, but I just, I was never interested in it until it was through the lens of Dan Jenkins. And it's only, and it's probably because of that that I felt like I was really.

really able to appreciate what he was doing. I mean, I didn't know, like you were saying about Bill or whatever, I didn't know about the sport. I didn't read a line and think that, you know, and immediately understand it. He would, he, he was, he was the guide. And I think, you know, he was such like an affable character and his character really came through in everything that he wrote, that, that, that, that, you know, he made even a subject you weren't interested in, a welcoming environment. He was, as I said a second ago, a big nerd about these sports. He could tell you from memory every Heisman winner from the beginning by year. And then he could also rattle off who should have won the Heisman that year.

He could tell you every major winner going back to before he was born. He just had that sense about him. But what's so funny is he became kind of the reigning poet of those two sports without being terribly poetic and without being worshipful. He was not the keeper of college football in that way. He was not the romantic keeper. right he was stat guy he was nerd guy um he was cynical guy about those sports if anything but somehow became their number one writer and and i think that's just so funny too because it's like you know when we think of like the great baseball writers we think of people who are kind of doing nonfiction

field of dreams and you know who are the true believers in the game and dan was in literary affect just absolutely the opposite of that. Yeah. He was not a true believer. If anything, he was a big cynic. But still at the same time, the poet laureate, which is just a kind of a very interesting place to wind up. Yeah.

I mean, and clearly he influenced everything that came after him. But, you know, I think as with so many other things, and particularly when you look at every different, I mean, every different, you know, line of work. and it's whatever its glory days, it's, you know, was. You know, he influenced everything and probably, you know, and not always in the best way. But I think it's hard. I think that you can trace his lineage through the present day of sports writing

really clearly, both in the style of, you know, the simple, punchy, but like, you know, it's deeply informed style of prose. But also, just like you said, the nerdy side, the, the, the, the, historical side. And, but I think that it's, you know, again, as with so many other lines of work, what he, he was such a natural at what he did that it's, you know, impossible to really say that there's another like him or that would ever be. Because if you went searching for the next Dan Jenkins, you would search for one, one attribute or two, and you would fail utterly at finding the next Dan Jenkins, you know? Oh, absolutely. It's, what he did was, you know, effortless is,

is not the right word, but it sure felt that way at times. And to have, you know, that much kind of character and that much knowledge coming across on the page at the same time, you know, it mean, it's just really, it's just really impressive. And I always say, you know, when there's not a next Dan Jenkins, it's not a failing of anybody who came after him. It's just that the world changed. Sports Illustrated was never going to have that hammerlock on American society in the way it did. for a certain period of time when he's there 60s, 70s, and into the 80s.

He has this incredible advantage on all the work a day columnists who are writing three, four, sometimes five, six times a week because he can spend a week thinking about all this stuff absorbing all this information and then he has to type out his piece. They have to write every day. They don't get to go and write

one piece from the masters like he does. So you know, and even those guys, I think when I think of his acolytes, I think of that generation columnists that came of age in the 70s and 80s, like Mike Lupica, Dave Kindred, David Israel, those guys who, as you say, they have a lot of elements of him, but, you know, they weren't trying to be Dan because that would have been weird. Rick Riley certainly later, right? Yeah.

And also that kind of joke book style of journalism of sports writing that is now, I guess we could find it, you know, maybe we can squint at Spencer Hall and see something. some Dan Jenkins in there. Yeah. And we can squint. We certainly look at Twitter and see a lot of joke book going on there.

Mm-hmm. But that style just also kind of went out, probably for the worst, but kind of went out of vogue after Dan and Jim Murray and all those guys were doing it. Yeah, I mean, I think that the real, I think Twitter is actually

an interesting place to look because I think that, you know, to talk about a sports writer of this magnitude and then to be able to say, know, he did college football and golf, you know, I mean, it's, it's pretty stunning that he, you know, wasn't a national columnist, always, you know, always writing about what, you know, different, like, you know, baseball and at its peak and football and later

the NBA. But I think what, I think that, you know, what strikes me about the Twitter connection and about his influence on, on, you know, the modern world of sports journalism, is that he did what he loved, you know, he paid a whole lot of attention to the things he was deeply interested in and just sort of to hell with everything else. Yeah. And there's a certain romance in that. You're coming to me, reader. I'm not coming to you. You're coming to me. Yeah. I mean, and just to think how many like Twitter accounts I follow because they're hilarious obsessives about one thing or another, you know, and not because they're in my wheelhouse. Those are the sorts of writers that that you flock to because, you know, as writers, you know,

and not just as sources of information. And I think, you know, that's, that's always been the line in sports writing between those two things. And I mean, he just, he managed to, you know, straddle the divide to a large degree. But, you know, he was a guy that you read because he was Dan Jenkins. And I think another thing that's to me, when in terms of like Dan, Dan demanding the reader come to him, is in terms of our hometown, which is Fort Worth, Texas. and sort of Dan saying, I'm going to write unapologetically like a Fort Worthian.

And you're going to love it, right? You're going to think this is going to seem like the coolest thing in the world. And I still have people, sports writers of a certain generation, when I say, I went to the same high school as Dan Jenkins. I say, you went to Pascal? Because all the characters in the books went to Pascal. And he made it seem. Again, like the coolest place in the world.

And by the way, we should know Pascal is a public institution in Fort Worth, Texas. Yeah. This is not some private, you know, sports writer, Ivy League breeding ground. This is just a public school. It's just a place. And it had a bunch of famous alumni, but he always thought it was. He went and I found this piece in one of his book, one of his collections, where Fort Worth, for some reason, had been named by W. magazine as being in a particular year.

They had like an in and outlist, and Fort Worth was in. Do we think the Pascoe high school Wall of Fame still exists? I think it does. And if so, has it been updated since we left? Because I might have to start the petition to get Brian Curtis

under that wall. We're going to file dual petitions for each other, I think, at this point. But he went back to Fort Worth for this piece and he was like listing off Fort Worth's various characteristics. And number one was Fort Worth still does not have an ocean. That was, you know,

that was Dan taking stock of the old hometown. The second part of Dan, I think, is just actually as big as the first. And probably, you know, since we're talking about him, he would hate us spending too much time in the analysis. So, which is Dan the guy. And him kind of creating, helping create this kind of sense of this is how a sports writer is supposed to act. Here is Johnny Carson introing Dan when he appeared on the Tonight Show sometime around 1979 or 73. This is a book called Semi Tough by. Dan Jenkins, who is a senior editor at Sports Illustrated, and it is a funny book. It's a devastating,

fictional account of a Super Bowl game between the New York Jets and the New York Giants. And Dan Jenkins, from what I hear, he receives probably more hate mail than any other sports writer in the world, because he's very honest. And he says what he thinks about sports. And unlike many sports writers, is not particularly in love with all sports. What you can't see there is Dan strolling out to the set of the Tonight Show with a cigarette in his hand after Johnny introduces him. He was famous when he was coming up in New York in the 60s with his pal Bud Shrake, another Pascal graduate, by the way. As Bud once told me, of always having a scotch and water in front of him, a backup scotch and water, and a coffee. He had those three drinks in front of him at all times.

And you and I, David, did not get into the he-man journalism coastplay when we lived in New York together. But I think the one thing we did do, we never went to Elaine's, and I'm kind of proud that we never went to Elaine's. But the one thing we did do is we did go to PJ Clark's for bacon cheeseburgers, out of solidarity to Dan Jenkins and Bud Shrek. And I'm not sure we ever quite pulled off the backup scotch and water. But that was like the one.

I don't know we could ever afford the backup scotch and water. That's true. That's true. We wouldn't have let it sit there on the bar for more than 30 seconds anyway without drinking it. But, like, he was this kind of ideal of just how to be about how to act. I got this interesting conversation day with Josh Levine and Stefan Fatsis over on their Slate podcast. And they were saying, well, there was this generation of journalists after Dan who were kind of cosplaying and they were learning from him. But Dan was the original.

And I said, I don't, I think Dan was cosplaying too. I think Dan watched movies in the 40s, and that's how he got the idea of what being a debonair gentleman of the big city was about. Sure. You know, it'd be really fun to imagine that all our sports writing forebears just knew how to do this. Like Dan learned it at TCU, how to, you know, lay a few hundred dollars in the bar. Bullshit. You know, Dan learned all that stuff from the movies,

and then a whole generation of sports writers learned it from Dan. You know, that era of Sports Illustrated was sort of, so iconic that, you know, there being as recently as, I mean, certainly when we were there, there was, there were outlets with the same sort of ethos of,

you know, when you, when you move to a new office, the first thing you do is find your bar, you know, and, and, you know,

take up residence there after work. I guess in Jenkins Day, they started taking up residence there after lunch sometimes, but, yeah, but sure. I mean, yeah, I mean,

there was a, you know, the stories about, him are justifiably legendary, but I think you're right that they, that, you know, every walk of life probably has a Dan Jenkins type figure and the fact that they were just sort of living life in the way that it was perceived that you're supposed to, supposed to do it back then. But that also kind of goes to his, you know, like I used the phrase work a day before, the sort of just like workmanlike blue collar sort of attitude he had towards the craft, right?

that he would work until he would drink and then he would drink until he would sleep and then wake up and work, you know, and that was, it was certainly a lifelong daily vocation, but there was, you know, there was life on the other side of it too. Absolutely. He was more romantic about drinking and smoking

in the times I spent with him than he ever was about writing. When I was doing the photo research for your wonderful obituary or recall him about him after he died. I was always taken aback by the number of cigarettes that popped up in those, even into like the late 80s,

there was him just posing proudly with the smoke, which is just fantastic stuff. He smoked in his author photos. That's how cool Dan Jenkins was. Yeah. The Ted Beichmann, who's a newspaper, he was an old newspaperman in Philadelphia and Los Angeles sent me this email after Jenkins died.

And he said, the first time I met Jenkins was in November 72 at the Polo Lounge here in Southern California. I was interviewing him for the L.A. Times, Howard CoSell walked over to our table and sat down. Dan says, fuck off, Howard, go try to impress somebody else. We're working here, which I thought was fantastic. Who tells Howard CoSell to fuck off? Dan Jenkins does. Yeah, that's great. I mean, in some ways, just any discussion of Dan Jenkins and, like, you know, is just sort of groping our way through the things that he's done and trying to, trying to eventually land on some sort

of grand unifying theory. I don't think it will ever get there, but I didn't notice that there's that Larry King called him the quintessential Sports Illustrated writer and the best sports writer in America. And I'm not quite sure what either of those things mean. They mean less. I mean, it's harder to wrap my head and hands around them as we like, the more that we talk. But it's like those things are sort of undeniably true. And I'm not exactly sure what anyone saying that would mean. Yeah. And when he said, when Larry O. King said that, it was like pretty obvious what that meant. And now in our days of a diminished Sports Illustrated and, you know, what the hell does sports writing mean in 2019? It just seems kind of funny.

By the way, you know it his Twitter thing. Speaking of the coolest guy in the world, he was good at Twitter. We say like Twitter's kind of like Dan Jenkins. Dan Jenkins was Twitter. Like he was on it. And he didn't even type his tweets. He got somebody at Golf Digest to type his tweets because I think his line was, I'm allergic to electricity. But he was like a thing on Twitter, which I thought was amazing.

And by the way, his, when we talk about Dan Jenkins as a character, the other thing is he made Texanness really cool. You know, there was this whole generation of kind of young Texas writers in New York at that point coming from magazines. And they were milking that for all it was worth, that they were, you know, from some place that, you know, by New York standards, was kind of exotic and was kind of different. And that a lot of people had only seen in movies. And they put that language into their stories. They played it to the hilt. They were unembarrassed about being from Texas, and I think that's important, too. I think we should touch before we leave this topic on the unsavory aspects of Dan Shakin,

which is, as I tried to write a little bit in the story I wrote last week in the Ringer, this idea that if you read Semi Tough, which is again published in the early 1970s, Dan is sort of doing Mark Twain. He's taking a bunch of benighted guys who, white guys, mostly who are in a NFL locker room and trying to reproduce how they actually talk and think about things. And he is kind of as a satirist saying, I'm going to lay it all bare and you are going to be able to laugh at a few things, but you'll also be laughing at them and sort of understanding that this is, you know, this is satire. And this is how, this is what I'm doing

is kind of showing them warts and all, ignorance and all. And I felt, you know, he got a note from Alex Haley, who wrote roots after that book came out, after Semi Tuff came out, that said, Dan, I get what you're doing. This is good. I'm into this. You wrote him a letter, which is just amazing to me. Alex Haley and Dan Jenkins, not two people you'd think would be in the same sense. But later on, and not much later on, I'd say by the 80s, he's sort of moved into this

kind of reactionary, stridently anti-PC zone where, you know, you know, you're not. His novels become, I'm going to make a racist joke. And it's not clear if I'm doing this to satirize an ignorant character or if I'm just making a racist joke. And it's also, it's not clear whether I'm just doing this to show you I can get away with making a racist joke in 20, whatever it is, or 1990, whatever it is. And I think that's got to be part of his legacy. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, part of that is the passage of time and not just losing one's proverbial fastball, but, you know, you lose the, he's beyond the point where he can make people come to him to use, you know, your,

your turn of phrase from before, right? I mean, you're sort of another, I mean, just another sports writing legend in a sea of them, uh, cranking out material. And, and, uh, you know, if people don't know exactly who you are or the context or the, the, the sort of, again, to turn a phrase, the sort of playing field that you've invited them into, then, then that's, that's a huge risk that you're running. But even, Even given, you know, giving the benefit of the doubt, he made a lot of questionable choices. And on Twitter, too, you know, I mean, he ate crow more than a few times. Yeah, well, he didn't actually eat crow, but he was put in a position to eat crow because he never actually served.

He was served crow, yeah. He pushed the plate away. Yeah, I mean, it's certainly part of his legacy. And, you know, not a situation that's unique to him. Nope, or unique to his generation of people in Fort Worth, Texas, by the way, which you and I know quite well. No, and that's why I think you and I would, I mean, or at least I can say I would, you know, I'm always tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt

because it's like the longer it goes, the more kind of like the good-natured satire of the, you know, 70s takes a turn towards the sort of snarling, you know, and so, but it makes that line so much more imperceptible. Yeah, and I just think at bottom he didn't like to be told what to do. I think that's totally right. If you read his novel, you've got to play hard. It begins with a writer.

imagining that he's going to murder his editor. Yeah. Dan didn't want anybody telling him what to do. And, you know, I think his columns and his writings over the years, look, this is a dude who was writing during the 60s and 70s. But there's probably more than a few people who liked his sports writing because you could kind of pretend that the 60s and 70s didn't happen or didn't happen exactly in the way that they actually did happen, right?

Dan's not hanging around Muhammad Ali. You know, he's not, he's not, he's not, he's not, he's not, Dan and Bob Lips site or not on the same on the same junket. So I just think, you know, again, he was conservative in the political sense, especially late in his life. But he was also conservative in the sense,

I think that he liked it. He wanted the world not to change. And that's probably on, there's some stuff about, you know, what he could say. But it's also stuff on like, hey, he was born when college football was king, before pro football was king.

And he wanted to stay that way too. Yeah. I mean, and it's got to be said that it's, you know, the longevity of his, career, especially to the profile, the level of esteem that he had up until the end is pretty remarkable, right? I mean, there's not, not a lot of people, writers in particular, who are still, you know, playing in the majors after all those years. But, you know, he did, he did, you know, focus on a couple of sports and, you know, later golf in particular, which, you know,

were sports that, that were defiant to change in their own ways, you know. And, and, and, you know, And he was able to sort of embody that calcitrance with enough good humor that, you know, it felt acceptable. There you go. Perfectly. Do you want to bring it back around really quickly to Simituff? Because, you know, we talked about that at the, you know, the story about your wedding. There's a lot of people that are, I mean, that book is going to outlast anything that he did. There's certainly the movie will.

I agree. Do you think that Where do you think that I mean that that That book exists in the sort of Sports novel Pantheon or just the sports book pantheon Because it really did give a You know it pulled back a curtain in a way that some nonfiction books would later

I mean do you do you think it's important or do you just think it's Good One I think it's great I was I was sitting on I remember last time I went to interview him I was sitting on the car rental shuttle Rereading it and I'm just laughing at out loud, which I'd never do at anything. So it's incredibly funny.

Yeah, I think it was big because I think it's what you said. It sort of was taking stuff that was happening in nonfiction at that time with sports, and it made it into fiction. Here's how athletes really talk. Here's the stuff they're really interested in. Sex, money, you know, their teammates, race, things like that. These are, these is what, this is the stuff you're not reading about in a polite family magazine. or your polite family newspaper.

And I remember, you know, I asked him once if he, I thought he had sort of based it on, you know me, Al, you know, the old Ring Lardner novel, because it's kind of the same. Instead of a football player talking into a recorder, Lardner had a baseball player writing letters. He said he didn't think Ringlearner's novel was very funny, which is a very damn thing to say.

But he, I think he probably based it on instant replay, the Jerry Kramer book, which is like a season diary that he told to Dick Shapp, a few years before that. And Dan was kind of like, there's a fictional way to do this. And it can be even dirtier and raunchier because Jerry Gramer's got to answer

to Packers fans and I don't have to answer to anybody. And that's what he did. So yeah, I think it will be a big sports book and I think, you know, in any list of sports novels that are worth reading and that have literary merit, whether he was chasing that or not, it'll be top ten. Yeah. All right, David, now it's time for 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. David, we've got an overworked Twitter joke for Lent as in the Christian

holiday Lent which began last Wednesday. You know, that Lent. Yes. U.T. Austin's very own Kyle Rather sends in this one for Lent,

I'm just giving up. It sounds like a J. Leno line but I look, there's like dozens and dozens of tweets. We just break that out every year. I'm just giving up. Thanks to Kyle for that one.

David on Friday, was announced that Bill Shine was out as White House Communications Director and is going to work on Trump's 2020 campaign. Shine was the sixth person to have that job under Trump.

Jesus. CNN reports that Shine's job was diminished to someone who, quote, adjusted the lighting and focused the cameras. It was an overworked Twitter joke to say that Bill Shine's tenure

lasted exactly 24.6 scaramuchis. Thanks to Lumac for that one. And finally, last Monday, the London Evening Standard made the rounds, David. Quote, women's cycle race in Belgium halted after fastest woman catches up to back of male peloton.

Okay? Okay. Fastest woman caught up to the back of the men and then they stopped the race. It was an over Twitter joke to say this Belgium cycling race was a perfect metaphor for our times. Thanks to Terry McDonald for that one. All right, David, topic number two. Let's talk about what happened last Wednesday when the Democrats told Fox to take a

Hyak, Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, read Jane Mayer's piece in the New Yorker, which we talked about on this podcast last week, about Fox being state TV and said that Fox is, quote, not in a position to host a fair and neutral debate for our candidates. He did not say fair and balanced debate. Let us cut to the chase on this one. I think it's a pretty simple story. Yeah. This is, to me, this is less a kind of moral high ground moment than the Democrats saying, we have a highly rated TV. show that we don't want to give you. You are state TV and this is a power struggle and we're not going to give you a good TV show to put on your network that is state TV. What do you think about? I think that's right. A lot of the conversation after, I mean, since that decision was announced, has been about whether or not Democrats should be interested in reaching the viewers of Fox News and, you know, if they're going to defeat Trump, then, you know, they need to speak to those those swing voters that Trump shocked everybody by getting last time around.

I mean, I'm sure there's some level of truth to that. I think mostly that's beside the point to, yeah, I mean, it was clearly in reaction, or there was a direct correlation to the Jane Mayer piece. And I think, you know, as much as anything else, it's a question about optics. the conversation about whether or not the Fox viewers, you know, will be offended and not vote Democrat, I think that is basically a question of optics, right? It's not about whether or not the debate is on the Fox News channel. It's about whether or not the conversation about the Democrats snubbing the Fox News channel is going to amount to anything, right? And beyond that, I think more specifically it's a question about optics to the Democrat base that at this,

moment in time with a party that's regardless of where it ends up is pushing towards the left, especially on the grassroots level, that they just are not going to, you know, they're not going to be perceived to be acquiescing to Fox News. It's really just that simple. They can't, I mean, whether or not it's a moral conviction, it's probably some deep level of confusion and uncertainty masquerading as confidence or conviction. But they, they, they, The fear is that they're going to turn off their own base by looking like, you know, they're working too closely with Fox. So it's like they'll, so Democrats are the ones that'll be mad. So whatever, whatever outreach they don't gain in with the alleged Rust Belt voters that watch Fox.

Yeah. Their calculation is we'll make the Democrats mad because we'll be on Fox at all. Yes. Yeah. I mean, to me, it makes as much sense as anything. We don't actually think the debate, the debate would not be hosted by Sean Hannity. Jesse Waters. A debate would be like Brett Bear, Chris Wallace, Martha McCallum.

So it's not like... And those are the people that Fox specifically referenced, I think, when they were trying, when they were sort of semi-seriously asking the Dems to reconsider, Colbert had a good line about how ridiculous it was to have a 24-hour news channel and only have three journalists that you're proud to mention. I just think that like the questions would be exactly the same as if it were in normal, quote unquote, normal debate on CNN or MSNBC or NBC or whatever. I mean, maybe.

Yeah, I think so. Those guys play a little bit more to the Fox base. Yeah, I think it's about the question. I mean, I don't think that it would there would be any, I don't think it would be unfair. I don't think it would be, I don't think they would go out of their way to seem, I mean, to be fair and to, and to not, you know, overtly attack anybody. I think it's, you know, there would definitely be, you know, one, they would each get a question in that would be a little bit foxier just for the, you know, know, just to sort of keep their Fox News bona fides, I would guess. But I think if there's a real structural question about this, about, you know, about the debate

being on Fox News, it would be that if you are, I mean, if you, if the audience is, are those Rust Belt voters, if the, you know, if the, or if it's just playing to the Fox News crowd, even if you're not going over the top, it might skew the conversation or it might skew the the the the polls towards you know the most republican of democrats right i mean the perception would be um i mean it's it's conceivable that that that would be a problem that they would face right that is the most centrist the most centrist candidate would look the most reasonable through the lens of fox now who knows i mean if they're if they really play things down the middle then that wouldn't be the case but um but you know no matter how no matter how righteous the the that the

the people asking the questions where if there's a debate on Fox, then the after show on Fox is going to be the one that gets the most eyeballs. And that'll certainly skew the perception. It feels like we're in a sort of, you know, recurring Groundhog Day thing here where Democrats have these moments where they say, Fox is not a legitimate news network. We're not going to treat them like that. I mean, Obama, remember, had moments like that at the beginning of his administration. But then Obama would eventually go. Hey, guys, it's Liz Kelly, and welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. I want to tell you about our new show.

Can I still leave for a second? The ringer's guide to Colton's season, streaming now on Hulu. The show is an inside look into Colton Underwood Season of the Bachelor, starring Ben Higgins, Rachel Lindsay, Lauren Zima, and our very own Juliet Lippman. Make sure to tune in before Monday's finale for never-before-heard insight into all things Bachelor Nation. Streaming now on Hulu.

David, Donald Trump called Apple CEO Tim Cook. Tim Apple? the other day, and then used two different excuses to deny he'd made a mistake. What other names of various captains of industry would sound funny in this construction? Before you say anything, by the way, can I say his funniest excuse was that he said Tim Apple as an easy way to save time and words? Something he's deeply interested in is brevity. Easy way to save time and words. Man, yeah, like his best defense was that there was a comma that no one really noticed, like an implicit comma between Tim and Apple.

So what, the other like Titans or the other Titans of Industry on the tech field? I mean, you have like Mark Facebook and Jeff Amazon. I mean, none of those are quite, Bill Microsoft is not quite as, not quite as funny. Jeff Amazon sounds like a professional wrestler. Yeah. You could go Vince wrestling if you want to go into professional wrestling genre. That's pretty good. I thought Ben BuzzFeed was kind of funny

but I think that's like the reverse of his actual His actual Twitter handle Adam New York Magazine Oh man We could I mean I don't know if If he's technically like the biggest guy But you know you go like Roger football Oh Johnny football is kind of a thing

We could always We could talk about our boss The sports guy Bill Ringer I don't know if you could Yeah I don't know I hope somebody calls him like Donald America at some point in the future just to sort of,

he'd probably like that though. We are the Brian Press Box and David Grantland of podcasting. This is the Press Box, a part of the Ringer podcast network. The Press Box is the media podcast. We are not allowed to defend Megan McCain. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here again with three topics for your pleasure and amusement.

First David, let us raise a glass of J&B and a backup glass of J&B to legendary sportswriter Dan Jenkins, who died Thursday night. how should we think of the man his own self? Second, do the Democrats who are probably in some state of disarray have the right to stiff Fox News for a primary debate? We discuss.

And finally, David, a quick note on ESPN baseball analyst Jessica Mendoza moonlighting as an advisor to the New York Mets. Can you call a game and also work for a team? Plus the notebook dump and, of course, the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, damn it, we got to start here. Dan Jenkins, legendary golf and college football rights. died of heart and renal failure last week at the age of 90.

Jenkins was not only a great sports writer. He and you and I were all graduates of Pascal High School, dear old Pascal in Fort Worth, Texas. Dan was our guy. He was our lodestar. And can we start this whole thing off by me telling the wedding story? Is that okay? Yeah.

Do I have your permission? Yeah, and we've talked about Jenkins before in the podcast. If we repeat anything, well, I'm not even going to apologize. This is the time and place to do it. So yeah, please tell the wedding story. To quote Dan, fuck people. If people complain, fuck people.

When I got married earlier in this decade, my wife and I were going through and trying to figure out what readings would we do from the pulpit during the ceremony. And one reading was you, David, reading a passage from Jenkins' comic novel, semi-tuff. The other reading was from the Bible. It was a sweet passage.

Right. One of those books is a guide for living a better life and the other book is the Bible. So I'm just going to put it that way. During the rehearsal, you get up there and read this passage and there's kind of these kind of stone face to angry looks around the church there. And then afterwards there's a huddle with the bridal party. And it's decided that this passage must be severely edited before it's read at the actual wedding. So the actual wedding, you get up there and read like 20% of a Dan Jenkins passage. Well, it was very long on the run through, but we did deliberately cut some of the crasser verbiage.

I think it dealt with infidelity, which is probably in hindsight not the best topic to bring up at that moment. But we did it. We read Dan Jenkins. Dan Jenkins made it through to the actual ceremony. I've never been prouder. Okay, I want to divide Dan into two parts here. First is Dan Jenkins, the writer. And the first thing I'd like to say about that is that I've gone through some of these old pieces over the weekend.

He was a deadline writer at Sports Illustrated, which I think gets forgotten. Because we think of Sports Illustrated as the great factory of literary sports writing of the 20th century, which it was. But he was the part of that factory who was watching a big golf tournament or watching a huge college football game on Saturday, sticking a Winston in his mouth and working the typewriter for a couple hours to write his piece. He was not laboring over these things for like weeks and weeks and weeks. And that to me is like an essential part of Jenkins as a sports writer is the fact that he was just cranking it. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think that you can, you can, if you're exposed him mostly through his fiction work, I mean, there's a little bit of a,

I mean, there's such an ease with the way he writes in general. But, but, but you, I think, I guess you can, you know, if you go back and read his Sports Illustrated stuff, it's, I guess, I guess you can read, you can take that ease to be incredible skill, and it was, you know, there wasn't, there was a lot, there wasn't, you know, kind of indescribable, just power and joy with, you know, in every sentence that he wrote. But, yeah, I mean, he was, he, he, I mean, I feel like, you know, I can sympathize a little bit growing up for a time in those same environs, but, but, you know, he wasn't steeped in, in literary aspiration so much as he was, he was a, he was a workaday writer. He just happened

to beat a hell of one, you know. I mean, he was just incredibly, incredibly gifted at every, at every line that he wrote was just a treasure. Yeah. I want to light on a word you use there, which is joy, because I think he's also important and interesting in that he's one of these sports writers who comes along, and our boss on the subject of the NBA is, another one, who takes something that is not topic A in sports and makes it sound like the most interesting thing in the world. And so you as a reader wanted to pay attention to that sport more than you normally would just because the writing is so funny and so interesting and so, you know, not worshipful, but just so full of passion about the subject. I was trying to make a list

of people over the years. I'm sure Grantlin Rice is in this category about college football. Like I said, our boss. I put Brian Phillips and tennis in this category because he sure as hell made me read a lot more tennis ready than I would have otherwise. Definitely. Dan did that for golf and college football. And, you know, he's a guy who as of 2017 had covered 229 golf majors. And, you know, again, golf is a sport that he certainly didn't invent golf writing in America. but I think for that generation he made those British opens and U.S. opens and master's tournaments just seemed so big

and he made those Nebraska-Okloma game and Michigan State Notre Dame games so big and that was part of his thing too is just infusing that stuff with so much joy and interest in nerdery that it felt like you had to pay attention to it. We grew up in the halcyon days of golf books being a big deal in bookstores everywhere we went. I remember saying Dan Jenkins, my first exposure to Dan Jenkins was before I lived in Texas, was, you know, just seeing

his name on the covers of books. Yeah. My old line about golf books used to be a golf book is a perfect gift for the father you hardly know. But go ahead. I think that was the publishing industry mentality too. That and you know like war books, military history, really big stuff. But yeah, I mean, I mean, certainly, Jenkins has an incredible bibliography. And part of that, like I said, is just the era. You know, I mean, his, but he published a whole lot of books. And that was my first exposure to Dan Jenkins was reading about golf. And, I mean, a sport that I'd probably never read a word about, despite, you know, my dad being a fan.

I mean, but I just, I was never interested in it until it was through the lens of Dan Jenkins. And it's only, and it's probably because of that that I felt like I was really able to appreciate. what he was doing. I mean, I didn't know, like you were saying about Bill or whatever, I didn't know about the sport. I didn't read a line and think that, you know, and immediately understand it. He would, he, he was, he was the guide. And I think, you know, he was such like an affable character. And his character really came through in everything that he wrote. That, that, that, that, that, you know, he made even a subject you weren't interested in, a welcoming environment. He was, as I said a second ago, a big nerd about these sports. He could tell you from memory. every Heisman winner from the beginning by year. And then he could also rattle off who should have won the Heisman that year. He could tell you every major winner going back to before he was born. He just had that sense about him. But what's so funny is he became kind of the reigning poet of those two sports without being terribly poetic and without being worshipful.

He was not the keeper of college football in that way. He was not the romantic keeper, right? He was stat guy. He was nerd guy. He was cynical guy about those sports, if anything. But somehow became their number one writer. And I think that's just so funny too because it's like, you know, when we think of like the great baseball writers, we think of people who are kind of doing nonfiction field of dreams and, you know, who are the true believers in the game. And Dan was in literary affect just absolutely the opposite of that.

Yeah. He was not a true believer. If I think, he was a big cynic. But still at the same time, the poet laureate, which is just a kind of a very interesting place to wind up. Yeah. I mean, and clearly he influenced everything that came after him. But, you know, I think as with so many other things, and particularly when you look at every different, I mean, every different, you know, line of work and it's whatever, it's glory days, it's, you know, was.

You know, he influenced everything and probably, you know, and not always in the best way. But I think it's hard. I think that you can, you can trace his lineage through the present day of sports writing really clearly, both in the style of, you know, the simple, punchy, but like, you know, deeply informed style of pros, but also in just like you said, the nerdy side, the historical side and but but I think that it's you know again as with so many other lines of work what he he was such a natural at what he did that it's you know impossible to really say that there's another like him or that there would ever be because if you went searching for the next

dan jenkins you would search for one one attribute or two and and you would fail utterly at finding the next 10 jenkins you know oh absolutely it's what he did was you know effortless is is is not the right word, but it sure felt that way at times. And to have, you know, that much kind of character and that much knowledge coming across on the page at the same time, you know, it mean, it's, it's just really, it's just really impressive. And I always say, you know, when there's not a next Dan Jenkins, it's not a failing of anybody who came after him. It's just that the world changed. Sports Illustrated was never going to have that hammerlock on American society in the way it did. No.

a certain period of time when he's there 60s, 70s, and into the 80s. He has this incredible advantage on all the work-a-day columnists who are writing three, four, sometimes five, six times a week because he can spend a week thinking about all this stuff, absorbing all this information, and then he has to type out his piece. They have to write every day, right? They don't get to go and write one piece from the masters like he does. So, you know, and even those guys, I think when I think of his accolites, I think of that generation of columnists that came of age the 70s and 80s like Mike Lupica, Dave Kindred, David Israel, those guys who, as you say, they have a lot of elements of him.

But, you know, they weren't trying to be Dan because that would have been weird. Rick Riley certainly later, right? Yeah. They wouldn't. It's that and also that kind of joke book style of journalism of sports writing that is now, I guess we could find it. You know, maybe we can squint at Spencer Hall and see some Dan Jenkins in there. Yeah.

And we can squint. We certainly look at Twitter and see a lot of joke book going on there. But that style just also kind of went out, probably for the worst, but kind of went out of Vogue after Dan and Jim Murray and all those guys were doing it.

Yeah, I mean, I think that the real, I think Twitter is actually an interesting place to look because I think that, you know, to talk about a sports writer of this magnitude and then to be able to say, you know, he did college football on golf. You know, I mean, it's pretty stunning that he, you know, wasn't

a national columnist, you know, always writing about, you know, different like, you know, baseball and at its peak and football and later the NBA. But I think what, I think that, you know, what strikes me about the Twitter connection and about his influence on, you know, the modern world of sports journalism is that he did what he loved, you know, he paid a whole lot of attention to the things he was deeply interested in and just sort of to hell with everything else. Yeah. And there's a certain romance in that. You're coming to me, reader. I'm not coming to you. You're coming to me. Yeah. I mean, and just to think how many like Twitter accounts I follow because they're hilarious obsessives about one thing or another, you know, and not because they're in my wheelhouse. Those are the sorts of writers that that you flock to because, you know, as writers, you know, and not just as sources of information. And I think, you know, that's that's always been the line.

sports writing between those two things. And I mean, he just, he managed to, to, you know, straddle the divide to a large degree, but, you know, he was a guy that you read because he was Dan Jenkins. And I think another thing that's to me, when in terms of like Dan, Dan demanding the reader come to him is in terms of our hometown, which is Fort Worth, Texas. And sort of Dan saying, I'm going to write unapologetically like a Fort Worthian. and you're going to love it, right? You're going to think this is going to seem like the coolest thing in the world.

And I still have people, sports writers over a certain generation, when I say, I went to the same high school as Dan Jenkins. They say, you went to Pascal? Because all the characters in the books went to Pascal. And he made it seem, again, like the coolest place in the world. And by the way, we should know Pascal is a public institution in Fort Worth, Texas. This is not some private You know sports writer Ivy League breeding ground This is just a public school

It's just a place And it had a bunch of famous alumni But he always thought it was He went and I found this piece in one of his book One of his collections where Fort Worth For some reason had been named by W magazine As being in a particular year They had like an in and outlist

And Fort Worth was in Do we think the Pascolle High School Wall of Fame still exists? I think it does And if so, has it been updated since we left? Because I might have to start the petition to get Brian Curtis under that wall. We're going to file dual petitions for each other, I think, at this point. But he went back to Fort Worth for this piece, and he was listing off Fort Worth's various characteristics. And number one was Fort Worth still does not have an ocean.

That was, you know, that was Dan taking stock of the old hometown. The second part of Dan, I think, is just actually as big as the first and probably, you know, since. We're talking about him. He would hate us spending too much time in the analysis, which is Dan the guy. And him kind of creating, helping create this kind of sense of this is how a sports writer is supposed to act. Here is Johnny Carson introing Dan when he appeared on The Tonight Show sometime around 1972 or 73. This is a book called Semi Tough by Dan Jenkins, who is a senior editor at Sports Illustrated. And it is a funny book.

It's a devastating, fictional account of a Super Bowl game between the New York Jets and the New York Giants. And Dan Jenkins, from what I hear, he sees probably more hate mail than any other sports writer in the world because he has, he's very honest. And he says what he thinks about sports. And unlike many sports writers, is not particularly in love with all sports. What you can't see there is Dan strolling out into the set of the tonight show with a cigarette in his hand after Johnny introduces him.

He was famous when he was coming. coming up in New York in the 60s with his pal Bud Shrake, another Pascoq graduate, by the way, as Bud once told me of always having a scotch and water in front of him, a backup scotch and a coffee. He had those three drinks in front of him at all times. And you and I, David, did not get into the he-man journalism cosplay when we lived in New York together. But I think the one thing we did do, we never went to Elaine's. And I'm kind of proud that we never went to Elaine's. But the one thing we did do is we did go to PJ Clark's for bacon cheeseburgers out of solidarity to Dan Jenkins and Boat Shrake. And I'm not sure we ever quite pulled off the backup scotch and water. But that was like the one. I don't know we could ever afford the backup scotch and water.

That's true. That's true. We wouldn't have let it sit there on the bar for more in 30 seconds anyway without drinking it. But like he was this kind of ideal of just how to be about how to act. I got this interesting conversation day with Josh Levine and Stefan Fatsis over on their Slate podcast. And they were saying, well, there was this generation of journalists after Dan who were kind of cosplaying and they were learning from him. But Dan was the original. And I said, I don't, I think Dan was cosplaying too.

I think Dan watched movies in the 40s. And that's how he got the idea of what being a debonair gentleman of the big city was about. Sure. You know, it'd be really fun to imagine that all our sports writing forebears. just knew how to do this. Like Dan learned it at TCU, how to, you know, lay a few hundred dollars in the bar.

Bullshit. You know? Dan learned all that stuff from the movies and then a whole generation of sports writers learned it from Dan. You know, that, that ear of Sports Illustrated was sort of so iconic that,

you know, there was, as recently as, I mean, certainly when we were there, there was, there were outlets with the same sort of ethos of, you know,

when you, when you move to a new office, the first thing you do is find your bar, you know, and you, you know, take up residence there after work, I guess in Jenkins Day, they started taking up residence there after lunch sometimes, but, yeah. Yeah. But sure, I mean, yeah, I mean, there was a, you know, the stories about him are justifiably legendary, but I think you're right that they, that, you know, every walk of life probably

has a Dan Jenkins type figure and the fact that they were just sort of living life in the way that it was perceived that you're supposed to, supposed to do it back then. But that also kind of goes to his, you know, like I used the phrase work a day before, the sort of just like workman-like blue collar sort of attitude he had towards the craft, right? That he would work until he would drink and then he would drink until he would sleep and then wake up and work, you know, and that was, it was certainly a lifelong daily vocation, but there was, you know, there was life on the other side of it too. Absolutely. He would he was more romantic about drinking and smoking in the times I spent with him than he ever was about writing. When I was doing the photo research for, uh, for your

wonderful obituary, um, or recall him about him after he died. Um, I was surprised. I was, I was, always taken aback by the number of cigarettes that popped up in those, even into like the late 80s, there was him just like posing proudly with the smoke, which is just fantastic. He smoked in his author photos. That's how cool Dan Jenkins was. The Ted Beichmann, who's a newspaper, who was an old newspaperman in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, sent me this email after Jenkins died. And he said, the first time I met Jenkins was in November 72 at the Polo Lounge here in Southern California. I was interviewing him for the L.A. Times. Howard CoSell walked over to our table and sat down. Dan says, fuck off, Howard, go try to impress somebody else. We're working here, which I thought was

who tells Howard CoSell to fuck off? Dan Jenkins does. Yeah, that's great. I mean, in some ways, just any discussion of Dan Jenkins is just sort of groping our way through the things that he's done and trying to, trying to eventually land on some sort of grand unifying theory. I don't think it will ever get there, but I didn't notice that there's like that Larry King called him the quintessential Sports Illustrated writer and the best sports writer in America. And I'm not quite sure what either of those things mean. They mean less. I mean, it's harder to get to wrap my head and hands around them as. the more that we talk, but it's like those things are sort of undeniably true, and I'm not exactly sure what anyone saying that would mean. Yeah, and when he said, when Larry O. King said that, it was like pretty obvious what that meant. And now in our days of a diminished sports illustrated and, you know, what the hell does sports writing mean in 2019? It just seems kind of funny. By the way, you know it his Twitter thing. Speaking of the coolest guy in the world, he was good at Twitter. We say like Twitter's kind of like Dan Jenkins. Dan Jenkins was Twitter.

like he was on it. And he didn't even type his tweets. He got somebody at Golf Digest to type his tweets because I think his line was, I'm allergic to electricity. But he was like a thing on Twitter, which I thought was amazing. And by the way, when we talk about Dan Jenkins as a character, the thing is he made Texanness really cool. You know, there was this whole generation of kind of young Texas writers in New York at that point

coming from magazines. And they were milking that for all it was worth, that they were, you know, someplace that, you know, by New York standards was kind of exotic and was kind of different and that a lot of people had only seen in movies. And they put that language into their stories. They played it to the hilt. They were unembarrassed about being from Texas. And I think that's important too. I think we should touch before we leave this topic on the unsavory aspects of Dan Shagin, which is, as I tried to write a little bit in the story I wrote last week in the ringer, this idea that if you read semi-tuff, which is again published in the early

1970s, Dan is sort of doing Mark Twain. He's taking a bunch of benighted guys who, white guys, mostly, who are in a NFL locker room and trying to reproduce how they actually talk and think about things. And he is kind of as a satirist saying, I'm going to lay it all bare and you are going to be able to laugh at a few things, but you'll also be laughing at them. and sort of understanding that this is, you know, this is satire. And this is how, this is what I'm doing is kind of showing them warts and all, ignorance and all. And I felt, you know, he got a note from Alex Haley who wrote roots after that book came out,

after Semi Tuff came out, that said, Dan, I get what you're doing. This is good. I'm into this. You, like, wrote him a letter, which is just amazing to me. Alex Haley and Dan Jenkins, not the, not two people you, you know, think it'd be in the same sense. But later on, and not much later on, I'd say by the 80s, he's sort of moved into this kind of reactionary, stridently anti-PC zone where his novels become, I'm going to make a racist

joke. And it's not clear if I'm doing this to satirize an ignorant character or if I'm just making a racist joke. And it's also, it's not clear whether I'm just doing this to show you I can get away with making a racist joke in 20 whatever it is or 1990 whatever it is and i think that's got to be part of his legacy yeah i think that's right i mean part of that is the passage of time and not just losing one's proverbial fastball but you know you lose the he's beyond the point where he can make people come to him to use you know your your turn of phrase from before right i mean you're sort

of another i mean just another sports writing legend in a sea of them uh cranking out material and and you know if people don't know exactly who you are or the context or the the sort of again to turn a phrase the sort of playing field that you've invited them into then then that's an that's a huge risk that you're running but even given you know giving the benefit of the doubt he made a lot of questionable choices and on Twitter too you know I mean he he he ate crow more than a few times yeah we didn't actually eat crow but he was put in a position to eat crow because he never actually served crow yeah um he pushed the plate away yeah i mean it's it's certainly part of his legacy and you know not a situation that's unique to him but um no or unique to his generation

of people in fort war texas by the way which you and i know quite well no and and and that's why i think you and i would i mean or at least i can say i would you know i'm always tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt because it's like the longer it goes the more kind of like the the good-natured satire of the you know 70s takes a turn towards the sort of snarling, you know, and so you, and it, but it, but it makes that line so much more imperceptible. Yeah. And I, I, I just think at bottom, he didn't like to be told what to do. I think that's totally right. If you read his novel, you got to play heard it. It begins with the writer imagining that he's going to murder his editor. Yeah. Dan, Dan didn't want anybody telling what to do. And, you know, I think his columns, his writings over the years, look, this is a dude who

was writing during the 60s and 70s. But there's probably more than a few people who liked his sports writing because you could kind of pretend that the 60s and 70s didn't happen or didn't happen exactly in the way that they actually did happen, right? Dan's not hanging around Muhammad Ali. You know, he's not, he's not, he's not, he's not, Dan and Bob Lipsight are not on the same, on the same junket. So I just think, you know, again, he was, he was conservative in the political sense, especially late in his life. But he was also conservative in the sense, I think that he liked it, the war, he wanted the war. world not to change. And that's probably on, on, there's some stuff about, you know, what he could say. But it's also stuff on like, hey, he was born when college football was king before pro football

was king. And he wanted to stay that way too. Yeah. I mean, and it's got to be said that is, you know, the longevity of his career, at least, especially on the, to the profile, the level, the level of esteem that he had up until the end is, is pretty remarkable, right? I mean, there's not. Absolutely. Not a lot of people, writers in particular, who are still, you know, playing in the majors after all those years. But, you know, he did, he did, you know, focus on a couple of sports and, you know, later at golf in particular, which, you know, were sports that, that were defiant to change in their own ways, you know.

Mm-hmm. That's right. And he was able to sort of embody that, that calcitrance with enough good humor that, you know, It felt acceptable. There you go. Perfectly. Do you want to bring it back around really quickly to Simituff? Because, you know, we talked about that at the, you know, the story about your wedding. There's a lot of people that are, I mean, that book is going to outlast anything that he did.

There's certainly the movie will. I agree. Do you think that, where do you think that the, I mean, that book exists in the sort of sports novel pantheon or just the sports book pantheon? Because it really did give a, you know, it pulled back a curtain in a way that some, nonfiction books would later. I mean, do you think it's important or do you just think it's good? One, I think it's great. I was sitting on, I remember last time I went to interview him, I was sitting on the car rental shuttle, rereading it.

And I'm just laughing out loud, which I'd never do at anything. So it's incredibly funny. Yeah, I think it was big because I think it's what you said. It sort of was taking stuff that was happening in nonfiction at that time with sports. and it made it into fiction. Here's how athletes really talk. Here's the stuff they're really interested in. Sex, money, you know, their teammates, race, things like that.

These are, these is what, this is the stuff you're not reading about in a polite family magazine or your polite family newspaper. And I remember, you know, I asked him once if he, I thought he had sort of based it on, you know, meow, you know, the old Ring Lardner novel, because it's kind of the same. instead of a football player talking into a recorder, Lardner had a baseball player writing letters. He said he didn't think Rigginsler's novel was very funny, which is a very Dan thing to say. But I think he probably based it on instant replay, the Jerry Kramer book, which is like a season diary that he told to Dick Shapp a few years before that. And Dan was kind of like, there's a fictional way to do this. And it can be even dirtier and raunchier because Jerry Kramer's got to answer to Packers fans. and I don't have to answer to anybody.

And that's what he did. So, yeah, I think it will be a big sports book. And I think, you know, in any list of sports novels that are worth reading and that have literary merit, whether he was chasing that or not, it'll be top ten. Yeah. All right, David, now it's time for 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. David, we've got an overworked Twitter joke for Lent, as in the Christian holiday Lent, which began last Wednesday. You know, that Lent. Yes.

U.T. Austin's very own. Kyle Rather sends in this one. For Lent, I'm just giving up. It sounds like a J. Leno line, but I look, there's like dozens and dozens of tweets. We just break that out every year. I'm just giving up. Thanks to Kyle for that one.

David on Friday, it was announced that Bill Shine was out as White House Communications Director and is going to work on Trump's 2020 campaign. Shine was the sixth person to have that job under Trump. Jesus. CNN reports that Shines' job was diminished to someone who, quote, adjusted the lighting and focused the cameras. It was an overworked Twitter joke to say that Bill Shine's tenure lasted exactly 24.6 scaramuchis. Thanks to Lumac for that one.

And finally, last Monday, this tweet from the London Evening Standard made the rounds, David. Quote, women's cycle race in Belgium halted after fastest woman catches up to back of male peloton. Okay. Okay. Fastest woman caught up to the back of the men and then they stopped the race. It was an overall Twitter joke to say this Belgium cycling race was a perfect metaphor for our times. Thanks to Terry McDonald for that one. All right, David, topic number two.

Let's talk about what happened last Wednesday when the Democrats told Fox to take a hike. Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee read Jane Mayer's piece in the New Yorker, which we talked about on this podcast last week, about Fox being state TV and said that Fox is, quote, in a position to host a fair and neutral debate for our candidates. He did not say fair and balanced debate. Let us cut to the chase on this one. I think it's a pretty simple story. Yeah. This is, to me, this is less a kind of moral high ground moment than the Democrats saying, we have a highly rated TV show that we don't want to give you. You are state TV, and this is a power struggle and we're not going to give you a good TV show to put on your network that is state

TV. What do you think about it? I think that's right. A lot of the conversation after, I mean, since that decision was announced, has been about whether or not Democrats should be interested in reaching the viewers of Fox News and, you know, if they're going to defeat Trump, then, you know, they need to speak to those swing voters that Trump shocked everybody by getting last time around. I'm sure there's some level of truth to that. I think mostly that's beside the point to, yeah, I mean, it was clearly in reaction, or there was a direct correlation to the Jane Mayer piece. And I think, you know, as much as anything else, it's a question about optics. The conversation about whether or not the Fox viewers, you know, will be offended and not vote Democrat, I think that is basically a question of optics, right?

It's not about whether or not the debate is on the Fox News channel. It's about whether or not the conversation about the Democrats snubbing the Fox News channel is going to amount to anything, right? And beyond that, I think more specifically, it's a question about optics to the Democrat base that at this moment in time with a party that's, regardless of where it ends up, is pushing towards the left, especially on the grassroots level. that they just are not going to, you know, they're not going to be perceived to be acquiescing to Fox News. It's really just that simple. They can't, I mean, whether or not

it's a moral conviction, it's probably some deep level of confusion and uncertainty masquerading as confidence or conviction. But they, the fear is that they're going to turn off their own base by looking like, you know, they're working too closely with Fox.

So it's like, so Democrats are the ones who'll be mad. So whatever outreach they don't gain in with the alleged Rust Belt voters that watch Fox, their calculation is we'll make the Democrats mad because we'll be on Fox at all. Yes. Yeah. I mean, to me, it makes as much sense as anything. We don't actually think the debate, the debate would not be hosted by Sean Hannity and Jesse Waters.

The debate would be like Brett Bear, Chris Wallace, Martha McCallum. So it's not like. Yes. And those are the people that Fox specifically referenced, I think, when they were trying, they were sort of semi-seriously asking the Dems to reconsider. Colbert had a good line about how ridiculous it was to have a 24-hour news channel and only have three journalists that you're proud to mention. I just think that like the questions would be exactly the same as if it were a normal,

quote-unquote normal debate on CNN or MSNBC or NBC or whatever. I mean, maybe those guys play a little bit more to the Fox base? Yeah, I think it's about the question. I mean, I don't think that it would there would be any, I don't think it would be unfair. I don't think it would be, I don't think they would go out of their way to seem, I mean, to be fair and to, and to not, you know, overtly attack anybody. I think it's, you know, there would definitely be, you know, one, they would each get a question in that would be a little bit foxier just for the, you know, just to sort of keep their Fox News, bona fides. So I would guess. But I think if there's a real structural question about this, about, you know, about, you know, about,

debate being on Fox News, it would be that if you are, I mean, if you, if the audience is, are those Rust Belt voters, if the, you know, if the, or if it's just playing to the Fox News crowd, even if you're not going over the top, it might skew the conversation or it might, it might skew the, the, the, the polls towards, you know, the most Republican of Democrats, right? I mean, the perception would be, um, I mean, it's conceivable that that that would be a, problem that they would face, right? That is the most centrist, the most centrist candidate would look the most reasonable through the lens of Fox. Now, who knows? I mean, if they're, if they really play things down the middle, then that wouldn't be the case. But, um, but, you know, no matter how,

no matter how righteous the, the people asking the questions were, if there's a debate on Fox, then that, then the after show on Fox is going to be the one that gets the most eyeballs. And, and that'll certainly skew the perception. It feels like we're in a sort of, you know, recurring, ground Hog Day thing here where Democrats have these moments where they say Fox is not a legitimate news network. We're not going to treat them like that. I mean, Obama, remember, had moments like that at the beginning of his administration. But then Obama would eventually go on and do an interview with Bill O'Reilly. A couple of them, right? Yeah. And so it's sort of like, you know, the Democrats have had this sort of attitude where it's like they're totally illegitimate. We must shun them.

And yet we're going to do it. And you, by the way, Elizabeth Warren and other people are apparently, according to Chris Wallace anyway, are going to appear on Fox News Sunday to do a standard Chris Wallace interview. And I think you'll see a number of Democratic candidates do basic news interviews on Fox. Again, they're not going to be facing off with Hannity, but they're going to be on various parts of the network. So at some point, it's like, what's the difference between Democrats going on there and giving, you know, a Chris Wallace Elizabeth Warren thing other than the fact that that's just kind of a barely a blip and a debate. An actual climactic debate is a ratings thing.

I don't know. I don't understand. I mean, Tom Perez, of the, of the DNC said he's going to appear on Fox. So to do various things. And he has over the years. So I actually don't, it's not like, let's pretend these guys aren't a news network and never talk to them again. It's let's just not do the specific event. Yeah, I think that's right.

And I think that, I mean, obviously there's, I can imagine that there's more to be gained by going on solo, right? that if Elizabeth Warren acquits herself well on Fox News Sunday, then that becomes a story sort of in and of itself. Yeah, but you see, there's no moral component to that. If you say, well, we're just going to go on anyway and just not do the debate on, then what are you really proving here? I don't actually believe that there's a difference in the audience. I mean, that there's a significant number of swing voters that are only tuning into Fox on a daily basis. I don't believe that they're, you know, I mean, you can look at the 2016, the ratings for all the 2016 debates. And I don't know there's much to really divine from what the different channels, you know, provided to the different

debates. I don't think there was much significance. No. No. Trump skipped the Fox one, right? Because you don't like Megan Kelly as a moderator. So I think that the, I think that the, I think that the the political consideration, you know, for the Democrats is what is, it had to have been like, how is Fox going to react? And Fox reacted in a expectable way. But, you know, It remains to be seen if this is something that, you know, hangs over the party's head for the rest of the campaigns. I kind of doubt it. Topic number three, David, six days after Jason Witten left ESPN to play for the Dallas Cowboys,

baseball analyst Jessica Mendoza made her own move. The thing is, she didn't leave ESPN. Mendoza will work with the Mets on what they're calling player evaluation, roster construction, technological advancement, and health and performance. but she will still call Sunday night baseball for the network. I sort of been going back and forth on this. My knee-jerk reaction is that I don't like it. But help me with this part of it.

Let's say Mendoza does some side work for the Mets, and she's calling a game on ESPN Sunday night baseball with the Mets or otherwise. What is the ethical nightmare scenario here? What is, if we assume this is bad, if we say that think this is bad, what's the actual bad thing that will manifest itself on television? I can't figure it out. I think that the worst case scenario is that she's just like so constrained by whatever contract she signed that she's just, you know, deeply uninteresting. You know, I mean, that's that, I think that's the nightmare scenario for the, I mean, from a real practical standpoint.

I think you, I think if you look, I mean, and my guess is you're going to, I mean, you'll co-sign on this. the real, I mean, the real ethical catastrophe is less looking forward than it is looking backward that we have had a play by play, I mean, we've had a color commentator who is open to working for the organization for so long. But I don't know that that's a problem because that's

really, really common. You know, I mean, it's, you can't really weed that out, but, you know, if someone's restraining what they would say because of the perception of how it would be received, then, you know, that's not ideal, but that's not a moral catastrophe. Yeah, it's just, it's just totally different than somebody who is covering the Mets as a beat writer or covering baseball as a league writer. Because these people

aren't journalists. And I don't know that I've ever heard a play-by-play announcer or an analyst to me anyway call themselves a journalist. They're not. No. And Bob Lipside said that. I mean, that was one of the great quotes that kind of came out of the discussion when he said, you know, to get upset about this year, equating a broadcaster with some kind of journalist. Well, it's what Joe Tessator said to me when I profited him last year. We're not journalists. We're more like capitalists. Yeah. And I think that's a fantastic line.

And I think that's exactly right. I guess what I am persuaded most by, and Laura Wagner wrote about this in her in Deadspin, is something she got to at the end of her piece, which is just, there is this just massive blurring of lines right now. And we're in, you know, when you talk about the Kevin Durant boardroom thing and all this stuff where it's just you don't have any sense where. the media network ends and the sports

and sort of athlete industrial complex begins. It's always been a problem for sports television. It's not new. But at ESPN in other places, this is now just all running into itself. And to me,

if there's a, if there's a, you know, a specific objection to this, one is I wouldn't want, if I ran ESPN, I wouldn't want her doing it. I wouldn't want her doing it.

In fact, I'd just say like, isn't this big, isn't this a big enough job? Do we have, do we really want side work on top of announcing Sunday night baseball, the signature broadcast in America of baseball? Yeah. But the other thing is, I just think the effect, even if there's not a particular catastrophe with her doing met stuff, it's just that I don't like the sense that this is all over the network that we're now just sort of in business with the athletes at the same time that we're covering them. Yeah.

I mean, there is a whole lot of sort of blurriness when it comes looking at this. I mean, I don't think it's particularly new. I mean, I remember commenting at the time that Magic Johnson was doing the NBA studio show when he was a part of the minority owner of the Lakers back in the day. And there was, and no one raised an eyebrow with that. You know, I think partly because he was, he was, didn't seem to be a decision maker or whatever else. But still, I mean, if you're going to draw a line, you draw the line.

I think you really get at the, hit the right note. I mean, it's, it just seems sort of unnecessary. And, um, certainly. I mean, a color commentator, yeah, it's not a journalist. It's not a some position of great inherent moral rectitude or anything like that. But it just doesn't seem to job with the dual job, you know? I mean, it would make more sense to have, I don't know. It seems like there would be a better way to do a crossover if you were intent on doing one, you know?

But it's, and it's just, it just seems sloppy in a weird way. I don't even know what I think about it. Well, and I think if we learned that Chris Collinsworth had made a deal with the Cincinnati Bengals and his old owner, Mike Brown, to advise on whom the Bengals should draft in April. I think everybody would go nuts. And I think this is just a smaller broadcast, so people are kind of shrugging their shoulders a little bit. And baseball is just kind of at a smaller position. And Sunday night baseball is not as big as Sunday night football.

but I just don't think people would have that at all. I don't think if Troy Aikman was going to help Jerry Jones nail their second round pick this year. I just, I don't think people would be down with that one bit. So I think part of it's just that this is kind of a smaller thing and people are kind of like, oh, well, let's just go with it. Yeah, I mean, and certainly the front office is a different position, but we did have, you know, Greg Olson just sort of pop up

to call some NFL games last year. I wonder if going in the opposite direction if it would be more acceptable too. I mean, I don't know that people would be having the same moral argument if like, you know, the NBA on TNT had like Mark Cuban sitting at the table for, you know, because he's just funny

or just some other, if some other outspoken loudmouth who happened to already work for a team. I think moon, there's sort of a difference here between moonlighting. Yes, I think that's right. And sort of working, you know, Mark Cuban wouldn't be getting a check from ESPN. And I think it's sort of, it is, you're right. It is seemingly, it feels weirder when you go the other way from the broadcast booth into the front office.

All right, David, let's quickly do the notebook dumb. A couple items for you. I was listening to Simmons and Ryan Rusillo on the BS pod last week. And Bill starts talking about what's going to happen when unhappy superstar Kyrie Irving inevitably leaves the self. Let's take a listen to that. It's one of those situations. You know how this happens. A lot of times the, and we've, I think we've even talked about this where the guy leaves the team.

And then two days later, there's a story with all the stuff the beat reporter had wanted to put in his story. He's going to get destroyed. He's going to be the all time most destroy. Oh, my God. It's going to be worse than Manny. Oh, my God. What Bill's talking about there, David, is a form of journalism I like to call the now you tell us. Oh, yeah.

When the superstar leaves, the beatwriter or the columnist or whomever unloads everything. You know, his teammates didn't like him anyway. Let me tell you what I've been hearing for more than a year now. Some of it is just absolutely, you know, here we go. He's out of town. I don't have to worry about him anymore. Some of it I understand is also stuff shakes loose. when people leave because the front office people and his teammates suddenly are chatier.

But the now they tell us is really one of my favorite parts, my favorite forms of journalism in sports writing. And as Bill correctly points out, this is going to be the mother of all now they tell us is. And I can't wait for that. I honestly cannot wait for that. No, it's going to be fantastic. 2020 updates. John Kasich, former governor of Ohio, potential candidate for the Republican for the Republican.

nomination for president was at South by Southwest this weekend because apparently the whole field was at South by Southwest. Yeah. And this quote was noted by Dave Weigel, the Washington Post. Kasek said, quote, I like Post Malone, I like Drake, I like Bieber. I'm a fan of all these people. And the actual quote from the stage. I present it without context because I cannot imagine what the context would be. Also, David, in 2020 news, one of the weirder subplots was whether Hillary Clinton was going to run for precedent again. For months, she noticeably did. didn't rule it out. And then Clinton gave an interview to News 12 in Westchester, New York last week. Let's listen to that. I'm not running, but I'm going to keep working and speaking and standing up for what I believe. I'm not going anywhere. What's at stake in our country? The kinds of things that are happening right now are deeply troubling to me. So she seems to rule it out there. But then Maggie Haberman reported right after that error that a person close to Clinton said she wasn't trying to be emphatic and close the door on run.

when she spoke to the reporter and that she was surprised by how definitively it played. The person also said Clinton is extremely unlikely to run but that she remains bothered that she's expected to close the door on it when say John Kerry isn't.

She has told her team she is waiting at least to see the Mueller report. So this has just been and this has been going on for months with reporters writing Hillary Clinton is not not running for president.

Right. Everybody freaks out. I'm sure there's a drudge headline about it every single. time, the kind of people who would freak out about this. But Hillary is, I think, being human here and saying, you know, privately, of course I still want to be president. Of course, I don't take the fact that I lost to Donald Trump as the end. I don't have to rule anything out. And the only reason I'm being asked to rule things out is because journalists keep calling

and asking me to formally declare, which is, of course, their job, right? They want to know if Hillary's going to run for president. or not. Yeah. But it just seems like a kind of journalistic demand is running into the demand of a human being. And we keep seeing these funny little moments buried and outside all these stories. Yeah. I mean, I think that the, you know, the imaginary ideal of a presidential candidate is, you know, from a, from a voter's perspective, is someone who has some deep well of conviction, vision where the country should go and cannot and has no choice but to share that with the world sort of? From the candidate side, there's nothing that any of these people want,

I mean, they obviously all number one want to be president, but if you could put them all to a lie detector test, they would all want to be drafted into the race, right? They all want to be wanted to such a degree. You know, this is, you get hints of this with Biden and even like Sherrod Brown and certainly, you know, where Clinton's coming from. They want the, they want the Nixon and 68 scenario. Come save us. Yeah. Come bail us out.

And certainly there's, I mean, that's got to be part of it, right? Like, let her, let her keep that fantasy up for a little bit longer that someone might just come, come to her and bend the knee and say, you need to save the Democrat. And by the way, it's in her interest to keep the fantasy up. Why for, if you're her, why for clothes on it? What's going to happen if you don't declare that you're not running for president? Like, what in the world changes? except that you just keep being bothered by nosy journalists and Democrats maybe who don't want you to run.

I just a very, it's just a very, it's one of those things where she's acting like a human and journalists are acting like journalists, which is not to be confused with acting like a human. And those things just come together in a very funny way. In other news, David, barstool sports had a quiet week. Oh, God. And didn't generate any controversy that consumed sports media, Twitter. Oh, wait, that's not what happened. Comedian Meal Bridow, am I saying her name right? I have no idea

I've only seen it written. Revealed that she filed a digital media copyright act violation against Barstool and that they responded by offering her a $50 credit at their online store if she would rescind it, which is a little bit like the Covington Catholic guy basically being offered a Democracy Dies in Darkness tote bag by the Washington Post

if he would withdraw his lawsuit. What a freaking situation. Amazing, right? The Barstool online store. I mean, it's just sort of so perfect. So perfect. It's great. I mean, and they've, you know, they've managed to acquit themselves, Barstool, I mean, you know, by, by, I mean, Dave Portnoy kind of started with a, you know, sort of noisy but, but clear throated apology or, you know, mea culpa for what had gone down and then continued to, as he's wanted to do, just sort of go.

after the, you know, the comedian in question and make it, you know, after a week of whatever miasma make it look like he'd just been going, you know, that he'd been insisting on his innocence the entire time and fuck everybody else. But yeah, I mean, it's just a great kind of media murder mystery because at the end of the day, I think this is all about, I mean, it is a question about internet takedown request. and getting Twitter account suspended. And there's just nothing more modern day journalism than that. All right, Dan, it's finally time for my favorite feature.

This has become my favorite part of the podcast. David Schuemaker guest is the celebrity profile headline. Oh, my gosh. Before you guess, can I say that it's now legitimately hard to find magazines in drugstores and grocery stores? Oh, yeah. Do we notice that? I was at the drugstore today looking for this, looking for material. And the only thing you can find are those commemorative, let's recite.

our old articles things, issues, especially one. So I found entertainment. I bought one on secret societies recently,

but be careful. I found Entertainment Weekly Stanley issue. Parade magazine special issue on Betty White. And can you

imagine who is buying the Betty White special issue of parade magazine? And parades the secret

worlds of cats and dogs. Oh my God. So those are the three I was able to find. After nuclear winter,

they will still be printing this shit. Yeah. But our celebrity profile headlining question, are you ready, David Shoemaker? I'm ready. I hope I'm ready. Here we go.

Los Angeles Magazine profiles the two L.A. Times food critics who are replacing Jonathan Gold. Okay? Los Angeles Magazine profiles the two L.A. Times food critics are replacing Jonathan Gold. I'm going to give you a hint, and then I'll give you another hint. First hint, the accompanying photograph has the two new critics with bags over their head. to disguise their identity.

Okay, so that's... Oh. Mm-hmm. Think about it. You can throw out some words that you might use in food writing for... And I'll kind of give you some direction. I mean, I was going to...

I was trying to think of like, like, they're hungry, you know? Cold, cold. Damn. Okay, there's the anonymous. There's the... I mean, you could definitely... do something with like with with with gold uh oh that's good i don't even think about that that's not not the case here but that's that's funny man i'm at a lot all that glitters if if the if the critics turn

out to be bad right all the clitters isn't gold is that's your exactly where we're going here all right how about a meal that's eaten at the end of the day dinner mm-hmm supper dinner dinner okay like that and then perhaps the title of a 1960s movie starring sydney potier oh my look who's uh Okay, I don't even know what it's called. Guess who's coming to dinner? What is it called? Guess who's coming to dinner? Give David half credit for that.

No, that's who's coming to dinner. Guess who's coming to dinner? Guess who's coming to dinner? Yeah. When I used to write a lot of headlines, I used to just plug words into IMDB, and I'm really hoping how this one, that's how this one got made.

All right, he is David Schuemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Our producer is Jim Cunningham. Research is helped along by Chris Almeda. Back next week with more Luke. warm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, man. Oh, my God.

I like Post Malone. I like Drake. I like Beber. I'm a fan of all these people. Oh, my God. Everybody freaks out. I'm sure there's a drudge headline about it every single time. Who is buying the Betty White special issue

of Parade magazine? You know, the... And parades, the secret worlds of cats and dogs. I mean, if you're going to draw a line, you draw a line. Sex, money. Oh, my God. Yeah, it's just totally

different than I'm somebody who was covering the Mets as a beatwriter. You know, that's not ideal, but that's not a moral catastrophe. You're coming to me. I'm not coming to you.