The Press Box - ESPN Bets on Itself and the Orioles’ Massive Blunder. Plus: The New York Post’s Mike Vaccaro on Two Decades of Column-Writing

Episode Date: August 10, 2023

Bryan hits on headlines from the week from ESPN’s new billion-dollar deal with Penn Entertainment to the Orioles’ miscalculation with announcer Kevin Brown. Then, The New York Post’s Mike Vaccaro joins to discuss his career as a sports columnist for 20+ years. He talks about the power of a sports columnist, writing about sports in New York, and his relationship with Adrian Wojnarowski and experiencing his first Woj Bomb. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Mike Vaccaro Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by destination NBA, a G-League Odyssey. It is available to stream on Prime Video on Tuesday, August 8th. It is produced by Religion of Sports and Ringer Films. Oh, yeah. This is our documentary about the 2022-23 G-League season. We immersed ourselves. We followed five future stars or possible stars who are competing in the G-League, the NBA's Development League, as they try to achieve their lifelong,

dream of making it to the NBA. It's an awesome documentary. Again, August 8th, go check it out on Prime Video. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox's final edition. Brian Curtis of the ringer here along with producer Erica Servantes. Five minutes, I got a treat for you. It's a chat with the New York Post, Mike Vicaro about the art of the tabloid sports column and the end of the sports page era. But first, we're trying out a new feature here at the press box, where we catch you up on three big headlines from the week. Folks, Chris Hayes, isn't walking through that door. It's me with weekend headlines.

God, I love that music. You know, some reporters, they put their favorite songs on when they sit down on the computer to write. I play the action news theme from the 90s. Edline 1. I'll take ESPN plus 500. I want to double down on something Bill said on a Sunday pot. The biggest media story of the next year, or at least the most interesting, is what's going to happen to ESPN.

Lately, ESPN has been a full employment act for media writers. There have been stories about the layoff of Jeff Van Gundy, Disney's searching for a quote-unquote strategic partner for ESPN. This week, we got another big one. ESPN wrapped its arms around gambling, signing a $2 billion deal with Penn Entertainment, which will allow Penn to call its sports books ESPN bet. Now, that story has some interesting facet.

from the signal ESPN sense to the world by embracing the point spread to the position ESPN's insiders could find themselves in to, and this is the funniest part, the fact that ESPN is replacing barstool as Penn's park. Some reason I keep getting the image of those slot machines in Vegas that are branded with old sitcoms. Anyway, I've been writing and talking about ESPN for 20 years. Today, I have less of an idea of what ESPN is than I ever have ever. have before. And I have no idea of what it's about to become. ESPN people will tell you, and in fact told me this summer, hey, bet on us. We got two Super Bowls coming, first time in ESPN

history. We got tons of SEC football. We still have people you like on TV, no matter what you read, all which is true. An ESPN could come out of this with a partnership with Apple or a sports League and get some of that early 2010 swagger back. But there's also a sense, again, the most I've ever felt in 20 years, that ESPN is vulnerable, that ESPN isn't in control of its own destiny. If you bet on ESPN a few years back, you were going all in on a brand, on an editorial sensibility forged by Dan and Keith and Boomer, on this economic juggernaut that was powering the Disney company long before the MCN.

If you make a bet on ESPN now, it's like making a bet without knowing all the players on the field. Headline two, hitting them where they ain't. Back when there used to be magazines, I had something called the Letters to the Editor Theory. Good magazines, I thought, published letters to the editor that were critical of their stories. At bad magazines, every letter began, Dear Sir, your recent article felt as if Joseph Mitchell's ghost composed it on his MacBook Pro at McSorley Saloon. You could also apply that theory to Major League Baseball teams and their play-by-play announcers. Good teams allow their announcers to be critical, or at least human.

Bad teams are the Baltimore Orioles. Awful announcing broke the news that Kevin Brown, an O's TV play-by-play announcer, has been removed from the booth. Brown didn't do any of the things team announcers have gotten chided for over the years, like mentioning empty seats or rehashing bad personnel moves. No, Brown read a stat about the O's struggles when playing a Tropicana field. See, the Orioles are actually good this season. That apparently threw off owner-type guy John Angelo's,

who, according to reports, took Brown off the air for pointing out that the team was less crappy than it had been before. I know Kevin Brown a little bit. He's a guy who, if he'd been born 20 years earlier, would have been your classic, wise, cracking, shit-eating grin-wearing sports center. When SportsCenter became less of a thing, Brown turned his attention to play-by-play, and now where's that grin while calling O's games in college sports for ESPN? It's easy to say the ORLs behaved stupidly. They did.

But the other part of this story is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a team announcer, which we sometimes fondly call a homer, is supposed to do. being a homer is not about kissing a team's ass. It's about doing a broadcast that speaks to fans of the team. It's about knowing stuff about the Orioles, the national announcers who aren't there every day don't. It's about connecting with O's fans in a way the national guys, even the great ones, never will. Kevin Brown knows how to do that. John Angeloos does it.

Dear sir, you're a moron. Headline 3. My Lunch with Barack. Did you see that story in the Washington Post last week about the lunch that Barack Obama and Joe Biden had in the White House? Now, I hate being, yes, the source guy. I don't wake up and look in the mirror and think, this is the kind of media critic I want to be today. But this interesting piece by Tyler Pager made my mind wander in that direction. Pager reported that at the lunch with Biden, Barack Obama, voiced concern about Donald Trump's political strengths, including an intensely loyal following, a Trump-friendly conservative media ecosystem, and a polarized country, underlining his,

that is, Barack Obama's, worry that Trump could be a more formidable candidate than many Democrats realize. In other words, don't be stupid and think a rematch against Trump as a layup. Now, who are we hearing Barack Obama's ostensibly private? message to Joe Biden from? Is it from Team Obama making sure the warning got through? Are we hearing from someone on the Biden side who's sending a message like they would in internal slack? Or is it just another bat signal for resistance Twitter? Like those sponsored tweets I keep seeing from John Tester telling me Republicans are targeting his seat. Sometimes there's nothing that cut and dried in a scoop and it's a reporter like Pager doing really good work. But I'm always fascinated by stories that

sound like they're sending a message, especially a message between people we know as friends. That's weekend headlines. When I was on the East Coast this summer, I got to do something really cool. I got to read Mike Vicaro's New York Post sports column in print. We've talked a lot on this pot about the death of the New York Times sports section. Well, the Post in many ways is its exact opposite. The New York Times Sports page might give you the odd feature from around the globe. the Post gives you the Mets.

Times reporters might give you a little writerly soft shoe in their stories. The Post is more direct. After reading a sports story in the Post, you never ask yourself, gee, what was that writer trying to say? After 21 years at the paper, Mike Vicaro finds himself

as one of the last general tabloid sports columnists in New York City, category that once included Jimmy Cannon and Dick Young. Vicaro can also boast of being one of the last guys in this business, to spend his entire career at newspapers, never chasing shiny digital objects like some of the rest of us. So with that day's New York Post under my arm,

Hunter Biden was on the cover, I took a train to Vakero's New Jersey home to talk about tabloids, the end of the sports page era, his adventures with young Adrian Wojnerowski, and how he idolized and then fell out with Mike Lubica. Oh, in the column Vak talks about writing that day, it turns out it was about the Mets. Here's Mike Foucaro.

All right, Mike, let's start with the state of the sports page. New York Times just liquidated its section and replaced it with the athletic. The L.A. Times and other papers are radically rethinking their approach to sports. What does this moment look like from your vantage point? Honestly, Brian, it's depressing as hell because part of the reason why I wanted to get into the business, but also getting the business in New York is I got to go up in a time when you know, you would pick up four or five papers a day every day and read through them. And the Times was one of those was one of them.

And, you know, the fact is it's been depressing for a number of years because the daily news isn't what it used to be just in terms of personnel and impact. And, you know, when you're at the post, you know, the thing you're supposed to do first thing in the morning is obsess of what happens to the daily news. Times obviously has gone through its times where it's been, you know, every bit of the competition from a tabloid standpoint, so to speak, as the, you know, as the daily news was. And we don't have that anymore. And, you know, a lot of times now from your standing the standpoint of the New York Post, you know, we're trying to. trying to kind of push ourselves to do different things without the outside pressures of competition. And that's just, it's not good for anybody. I mean, you know, it's, I think if you're self-motivated, you can do that to a degree.

There's nothing better than the fear you wake up in the morning. You want to read the guy in the next paper. And you're like, oh, my God, he beat me today. What am I going to do today to beat him? And that's missing now. So from the standpoint of, you know, inside the business, it's just, it's just very sad. And to see what's happened at the times. I mean, there's some good people there.

and it's just, it's just, it's so depressing to see what's happened both of their careers, but also to that section, because there was a time not so long ago when that section screened with the biggest names in the business, the Vessies and the Andersons and the Selena Robertses and the Mike Wisees and on and on and on. And that's just no longer the case. It's really sad. Still a lot of sports writing in the world. What do we lose if sports sections continue to melt away? Well, I think every city's sports section was kind of part of its identity, I think. You know, I worked in Kansas City. And, you know, look, there's a lot of things in Kansas City that may get a cool place to live,

but the sports section of the Kansas City Star was an everyday part of who Kansas City is and who Kansas City has always been. And, you know, when those things get diminished, I think the city gets diminished. Certainly the sports teams get diminished. And that's a shame because I think that, look, I mean, I'm not diminishing the other kinds of outlets where people get their news. But there's something about picking up the newspaper in the morning, I think, that gave people a little bit of an understanding of, all right, this is what's going on in my city every day,

both sports and elsewhere. And without that, there's just a diminished city, I think a diminished way of life. You've been writing your New York Post column for 21 years. What's a tabloid sports columnist job? You know, I think more than anything else, the thing my first boss, Greg Gallo said, was, I want you to be able to grab the guy on the subway, the strap hangars, grabbed by the lapel and say, read this. and you know sometimes look I came like you know my previous jobs were the Newark Star

Ledger and the Kansas City Star and you know the columnists there were expected to kind to be more literate and kind of like you know kind of work their wordsmithing into oh by the way and this is and this is what happened in sports yesterday and that's not what we do at the post it's not what you do with tabloids I mean you kind of get to get into it right away I can't tell you how many times over the course of 21 years now at the post I've started my literary column and about five paragraphs in I realized well okay now I got to start the column because now I got the writing out of the way. I can dump that. Now I'm going to get to the point, you know, and I think that's great. At first I resisted, but then you realize

people are very busy, you know, I'm busy. I mean, I read a lot, but there's only so much I can, so much time I can give to a column that meanders, you know, and I think I've learned to not meander because you can't meander because part of being at the tabloid is like Greg Gallo told me, grab that guy by the lapel, put him up against the subway wall and say, read this. This is important for you today. I think sometimes people, misunderstand tabloid sports sections as being negative. But they're one thing is that they're direct. Absolutely.

They're probably also more positive. Yeah, you know what? I mean, people always say that and it's hilarious, right? So, you know, back in the day, people would say, oh, you're just trying to sell newspapers. And now it's, oh, you just want clicks. It's click bait. And, of course, my first answer to that is, yes, we're not a nonprofit. We do want you to buy the paper.

We do want you to click. So, but the other thing is, yes, people say, you always go for the negative. But the fact is, this is a truth of the newspaper business. I don't care what city you're in, but let's talk about New York. When the Giants are in the playoffs, you can't find a New York post on the newsstand. You know, when the Mets are in the playoffs, you can't, you know, sometimes our server shuts down because so many people are interested. Good teams are good for our business in addition to their business. People will read when it's negative.

They'll go angry and certainly go out for the outrage and there's something to be said for being outrageous and for, you know, firing a manager for, you know, training a star right field or what have you. But the fact is that nobody is, nobody more happy anywhere in the newspaper, in the stands, among the readership than when the teams they care about are doing well. It's like the dirty little secret of tabloids. It's like, we, I mean, believe me, there hasn't been a championship in New York that's passed by in the last 50 years where the post hasn't sold a 75 page or 100 page commemorative edition, you know, two days later or sometimes a year later, sometimes 20 years later. And we're still feeding off the 86 Mets the same as the 86 Mets are. You ever miss those first five paragraphs, those artful paragraphs that you threw away? I do sometimes. And look, you know, I've also written a couple of books. And so sometimes what's good is that to have that as kind of the place where, okay, that's where I'm going to be my literary self, you know,

and here's where I'm going to be my tabloid self. You know, every now and again, they'll give me, you know, space to do it, to do a takeoutish kind of column. And, you know, I can kind of, you know, revisit that. And it's funny, when I'm done with that, I'm always happy that I did it. But then I'm like, Who am I going to rip tomorrow? What game are going to go to and talk about how cool it was to be there? And I think after 21 years, you kind of get a rhythm of the tabloids that's kind of hard to shake. That's really, you know, sometimes I look back at the stuff I was writing in Kansas City in Newark, and it seems like it's a whole different person who wrote those things.

Even though the words are familiar, I just know that given the same subjects in the prism, through the prism of the New York Post, it would have written it a lot differently. What's the trick to writing four or five columns a week? I think part of it is just loving this job. I mean, you know, people always talk to me about thinking, you're not tired of the games yet, and I'm not. And part of the thing is, I mean, at the post week, we still care that, you know, that the Mets and the Padres played on Thursday,

and the Yankees and the Royals play on Friday. We want to tell you about those, I mean, you know, I think a lot of times now sports actually have become too big picture. And I'm not denying the fact that there is big picture stuff that needs to be in the newspaper. But I also think that some people, I get it, they don't come, the New York Post and say who won the game, they know who won the game. But they kind of want to know why they won the game, why they lost the game, you know, what this guy with the picture in the paper thinks they can do to better the team. I still believe that. And I think, look, in New York,

it's certainly easier to write four and five a week because we have so many teams. And, you know, we're still the center of the media universe, at least in our mind. So, I mean, when something happens that's important in California, you can comment on that also. But I think part of it is really, I mean, I woke up this morning, and the first thing I did was exchange emails with my assignment editor because I wanted to figure out what I mean. I don't know what I talked to you today. I don't know what I'm going to write yet, but we've got like three or four ideas. And, you know, at some point today, we'll figure it out. And that's to me the fun part.

It's kind of, you know, there's that line in the great movie of the paper where I think Robert Duval says every day we start from zero. And he talks about just how hard that is. But to me, I think that's great because every day is a new opportunity to write something that, you know, you didn't write yesterday. And to, you know, many people read them. I mean, I think that's the fun part, is attracting people to try and say, you know what, give me your five minutes, you know, with your coffee, over lunch, and read this. And to me, that's a great challenge. I love that.

That's my favorite part of it all. You once told the sports writer Mike Vorkenov that the key to doing your job well is choosing the right column, which is different than choosing the right opinion. Right. What's the difference? Yeah, that's the one thing I think I know after all this time writing a column is that is if mad at a game or I see a new story develop, I can identify what the column is. What is it the people want to talk about?

Now, you might not choose the right, you might not be on the right side of history 20 years ago. I mean, there was a young columnist I know who might have had my name who said that hiring Rich Kotai was a wonderful idea. Well, you know, I'd probably disown that opinion now. But the fact is that in the moment, that was certainly the calendar right, one way or the other. What do you think about Rich Kotite? And sometimes it's that easy. Sometimes it's not that easy. I think the thing is, I think what the post pays me is to identify what it is.

that people are going to want to talk about. And, you know, sometimes that means thinking outside the envelope, and sometimes it means convincing your editor, you know, I think it's worthwhile for you to just trust me. I know it drives them nuts when I say, you know what, I've written 3,000 columns for you. I think I'm going to get this one right too. But that's hard to sell in a meeting at 11 o'clock meeting.

What's Vicaro writing? Well, he's going to write a Vicaro column. That's not good enough. I get it for them. But, you know, sometimes I think after 3,000 columns, you just kind of get the idea. Like you said, I might not be right about what I say. It might not be proven right as time goes on, but I think I know what people are going to want to talk about.

I think at that, you know, at the very least, I can identify what it is that the New York Post reader wants to read when they, you know, click open my column. So let's do this exercise today with the idea that you had the right to change your mind at 4 o'clock this afternoon. We got the Mets fire sale that they're claiming is not a fire sale. Right. We got Aaron Rogers defending Nathaniel Hackett's honor at Jets Camp. is anything there feel like something people want to talk about? It kind of goes back to what you're saying. How do you write four or five columns a week, right?

Sometimes I think if I wasn't married, it would be impossible not to write 365 columns a year just because it's New York. You know, thankfully, I had my wife to give me something of a life. But you're right. Those are obviously the two things to write about. Obviously, Aaron Rogers being a jet means you can write about Aaron Dodgers every day if you want it to from now until December or January or February, if you want to be a judge fan and believe. I think probably what I'm going to write is the Mets because it's the immediate. There is a lot of, you know, murkiness on both sides.

You know, is it a fire cell? Is it in a fire cell? Are they giving up or they're not giving up? I mean, do you trust the people who are saying, well, you know, we're going to trust to, you know, trade a little bit of our present for our future? There's a lot of meat on that bone. I think that's probably where I'm going to go. And that was what my editor and I were talking about this morning.

It's probably we'll revisit, you know, after lunch. But, you know, here's the thing, though. There's a chance that, you know, famous person X could die. And all of a sudden, that's my column. There's a chance that, oh, my God, the Yankees made a trade. Look at that. How about that? Maybe that'll be the column.

And that's one of the great things. I mean, you know, writing sports in New York is like one of the great buffet tables there is because you can, you know, and you don't have to worry about eating the French toastics every day. I mean, you got the French toastics, you got the bacon, you got the eggs, you got everything. And that's one of the great things if you look at it that way about doing this job. Yeah, you got the machine that makes pancakes, which in this analogy is probably what the devil, something like that. I would say the devils are sadly nine out of nine.

I've written a devil's column, I think, in my days of the post. But I guess I put in my time back at the Star Ledge where I used to write the devils a lot. But I guess someone's got to be nine out of nine. It's the devils right now. I heard you're incredibly fast in the press box. One of your pals told me the rest of us look like fighters who have gone 15 rounds and Vax just packing his shit up. How did you become a fast writer?

Well, two things there. One, I spent, you know, a good chunk of my career. People always think you were born as the New York Post columnist. And, of course, I wasn't. You know, I spent a lot of time at newspapers in Olean and Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Middletown, New York, where I did a lot of high school roundups. And there's nothing that'll make you more of a fast writer and an accurate fast writer than when you have to do 30 volleyball games, 25 soccer games and, you know, 10 football games,

by yourself. And by the way, if you spell any of those names wrong, you're going to get fired because they want to cut those names. You know, if you misspelled Darrell Strawberry's name, you know, no one's going to care, let alone Darryl Strawberry. You know, you misspelled Brian Curtis's name. You can't get the Y or the eye right. And all of a sudden, you know, for the West Hills volleyball team, you got some problems

because, you know, mom and dad want to buy 10 copies of paper and you misspell the kid's name. And you're going to hear about it. So, I mean, you have to get good quickly and you got to learn how to write fast. And I think that's really where the fundamental – now, every moment I did that across the first seven or eight years of my career, I hated it. of it. No one likes to take high school roundup school. That's a terrible shift in the newspaper. We both know that. But it does, obviously looking back at it now with 35 years of distance, now when I have, you know, 15 minutes to write the end of an NLCS game or a World Series game, it doesn't

bother me because I know it's going to get in because it always has. I've been blessed with the fact that I've, at least in terms of my deadline writing, I've never really been afflicted with writers block. I mean, I can't explain why. I just haven't been. And I think that a lot of that just goes back to the training of realizing this has to get done. And I think also, look, I'm in a job now that I'm very comfortable in terms of I'm not always looking to impress everybody. I mean, not every word has to be, I mean, way. I know I've got this job. I'm going to have the job tomorrow. And so I guess knowing that, you don't feel like every column is going to have to be prizeworthy. I mean, it's going to be good enough to get you tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow's will be a lot

better. And you have an opportunity to do it tomorrow. The other aspect was a piece of advice, the great Dave Anderson, the longtime columnist for the New York Times gave me, probably the third time he met me. And it's my great privilege that a lot of the older people in the business that I grew up revering, a guy like Dave Anderson, a guy like Jerry Eisenberg. And I worked with Jerry Eisenberg in Newark for four years and couldn't have been more generous, more helpful, just a wonderful mentor to me. And so was Dave Anderson.

And so one time we're having lunch before a Giants football game. And he said, here's the only thing you got to worry about in this business. Be faster than anybody who's better than you. I mean, better than anybody who's faster than you. And, you know, whether that happens or not, I think it's a great way to aspire when you're trying to still write on deadline. And it's interesting because, you know, deadline writing, I think, has become a little diminished because, you know, so much of it is the news posts when it posts. But, you know, in the New York Post, we still do have three deadlines a day. And you have to hit those three deadlines.

And if nothing else, you know, I think I can make my boss asleep night knowing that at least the copies are getting it in. Now, whether it's any good or not is the second part of the equation. but writing on deadline is definitely something that I just learned young and, you know, it's like anything else. You get plenty of repetitions. You're going to get proficient at it. You've never missed a deadline once in the post. One time, not the post.

The only time my career have ever missed a deadline was because I was out of position, game five of the 2001 World Series, okay? You'll remember game four of the Yankees down to run in the ninth and I was Tino with the home running game four. Game five, that's not going to happen again, so I filed my second edition column, and I went down to look to the locker room to make sure I was there. And, of course, I watched on TV when Scott Brocious is at the home run. And so I basically had to call paper and say, you, that can't run. You got to keep my early.

So there was nothing that appeared in that edition's paper. But yes, that's the only time. That's the only time. You know, and you can think about all the things that can go wrong, equipment problems and all kinds of so forth. I mean, you know, one of the great things about iPhones. I mean, if worse came to worse, I can file you, you know, 15 inches, you know, on my iPad notebook. I mean, again, that's not necessarily going to be when you're going to submit to the committee, but it's going to, you know, allow you to stay in business for another day.

If you and I picked our favorite AI chatbot and asked it, who are the great New York tabloid sports columnist? We'd get the list with Dick Young and Jimmy Cannon and Milton Gross and all the rest. You're one of the few remaining general sports columnists at a New York tabloid. What does that feel like? An awesome feeling of responsibility, to be honest, because I know the people who had the job at the post before me. I know Larry Merchant had that job. I know that Dick Young had that job.

I know that Jimmy Cannon had that job. Milton Gross had that job. An incredible guy that not too many people remember named Stanley Frank, who was the first writer in New York to write about Satchel Page in a mainstream column in 1941 had this job. you know, Wally Matthews had this job. Jerry Eisenberg had this job while he was also doing it in Newark. I know the roster of people who did the job at my paper, so I know who I represent.

And that matters to me. It does. I mean, I have a sense of history. I don't think that goes to my mind every time I write a column, but I certainly know that, you know, that I occupy a pretty cool space of real estate, you know, the sports columnist of the New York Post,

and it matters to me. And I think that's part of what people would tell you if they read me a long time, as I understand that I'm kind of just holding the baton right now for a pretty long lineage. And I think writing tabloids sports in New York is, I can't imagine a more fun gig. I mean, you know, people love to, even all these years later, Rip Dick Young because he chased Tom Seaver out of town. But just think about that. A sports writer chased Tom Severe out of town. For better or for worse, that was the kind of power that sports columnists had in those days.

I mean, it's remarkable. You know, and, you know, look, I'm one of thousands of, uh, of probably New York area kids who grew up reading Mike Lupica, you know, and saying, you know what, the way that guy does this job, that's how I want to do this job. And, you know, we can have a whole separate conversation on if Lupica continue to honor that over time. But, you know, I certainly believe that there's a way that a New York sports columnist is supposed to work, behave, act, you know, in press conference and so forth. And I don't mean outlandishly. I just mean professionally and understanding that people are relying on you. Even now, you know, in the diminished state news

papers may be, you know, you wouldn't tell that from my inbox because I still get flooded with with opinions from readers. So that's the, that's the greatest feeling in the world every morning, knowing there's the evidence that people are still reading the New York Post and turning to the New York Post for their sports opinions. Let me ask you about coming up in the business. You didn't just want to be a newspaper sports columnist like a lot of us did when you were growing up. You wanted to be a New York Post sports. Yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's, this is the God's honest truth. I've told the story before, But, you know, my father took me to old timers day at Shea Stadium, 1974. I was seven years old.

And, you know, of course, I'm wide-eyed like any kid the first time he goes to a baseball game is. And my father points out, there's the dugouts, there's the batting cage, there's, you know, and he points out the press box. And I'm like, well, what happens to the press box? And he said, well, that's where the sports writers go afterward and write their stories. And I said, well, what do you mean? He explained, you know, you read the paper the next morning. That's what they do.

These are sports writers. I said, that's what I do for a living? And they said, yeah. And so, you know, my father, we, we're doing it. We lived in Long Island. My father went to work in New York, and as many commuting fathers did, he would buy the daily and he was going into work because that was the morning paper. And he would buy the Post coming home because that was the afternoon paper.

And so every day he would come and he would throw me the newspaper. And I grew up reading the New York Post from the time I was seven years old thinking to myself, that's the only job there is, that's the only job you want. You know, what other job could you possibly want? I love telling Serbia that I grew up reading him because, you know, he loves hearing that story. He's like, he's like, that's not possible. I'm only 37. But that's the truth.

And I literally, that is the job I wanted. You know, how many people really get to do what they wanted to do when they were seven years old? The exact thing. The exact same. I wanted to write for the New York Post because I just, that's a paper I read every day, you know. But it's amazing. And how many people really do get a chance to grow up to be what they wanted to be when they were seven years old? Maybe I should have had higher ambitions.

Maybe I should have wanted to be president of the United States and taking my shot, but I'm pretty happy with the way that worked out, actually. You went to college at St. Bonaventure. You worked for the school newspaper, and one day a freshman at St. Bonny's whose name was Adrian Wojnerowski knocked on the door of your dorm room and announced that he wanted to write for the paper. That's correct. What was young Woj like? Young Woj was every bit what you expect he would have been unbelievably talented, precocious, tireless. I mean, he and I would stay up in college and go to Perkins for, you know, 3 a.m. Tunam melts and just talk about, not just sports, but the writing is sports, you know.

And I never said, I never met a guy who was who matched me in terms of ambition, in terms of vision, in terms of having an idea of how I wanted to do this. Now, maybe it was kind of fuzzy, how we were going to get there, but we both just understood that this is what something we really wanted and we were going to do everything we could to make it happen. I mean, we took millions of road trips together to the Lendington Basse, basketball tournament to Atlanta time basketball games. And he was two years behind me. I actually stayed behind for two years.

My first job was in town. So basically I was around for all four of his years. I was his editor for, you know, for two semesters, but, you know, became kind of his traveling partner, you know, in a lot of ways. And I like to say that I was there for the, for the first woeage bomb because we were, the basketball coach got fired at Bonaventure and, you know, we're trying to fight against the other media to try and, you know, break, you know, break the story of who's going to get the job. And between the two of us, we figured out who the guy's, who the guy was going to be,

got it solid. But the problem was we got this on a Wednesday, and we didn't publish till Friday. And so clearly on Thursday, he was going to be announced or was going to get out. So on Wednesday, he and I started calling TV stations in Buffalo to say, if you give us credit, here's what's happening. And Channel 7 in Buffalo did. According to the bottom of the newspaper, you know, Tom Chapman's going to be named the new new head coach. And of course, the funny thing was, this tells me what kind of a guy I am in the Friday paper. I got the only byline.

And the way I explained it to Worage was, you know what? I'm a senior. I need a job. I said, you got two more years to get more of these. But it was definitely his idea to call the, we got the story together, but it was definitely his idea to call the Buffalo TV stations to make sure that the bottom venture newspaper got credit. And so, you know, I don't think anybody who knows Wodges' work, the 15 billion followers he

has on X will be surprised by that story. That is fascinating. So the first Wojbom or co-woge bomb as it were. No, it was his idea to call, but I didn't think about that. I mean, I just would have put in the paper and we got beat. Even though we had the story, it would have gotten beat. It was his idea to make sure that we didn't get beat. I mean, you know. But it was credited to an issue of the newspaper that did not actually exist. Exactly. Well, right, so we were ahead of our time. I mean, you know, if it was today, we just would have posted it on our website. It's a tweet. It's a tweet, right? And so,

So I like to think of as being like 30 years ahead of our time. I never thought about that until just now. He had two memories the other day when I called before we talked. He remembered you sending a note to the aforementioned, Mike Lupica, and that Lupica wrote you back. Yeah. And then everybody there was just staring at this letter in the dorm room. Yep.

It's true. After my freshman year at Bonaventure, and look, like I said, I grew up reading every word that he wrote. And I just sat down one day and wrote him, wrote him a note just saying I think of the best I think of the greatest you know just one of these fawning notes and and I still have the note that he sent me it was it was a two-page typewritten corrected with like uh with with with with you know hand corrected and also with like white out I mean it took some time to write this put it in an envelope sent it to me um and it was it was the

most generous uh letter you could possibly imagine an established star of the business sending a 19 year old kid at a small school upstate New York. And it was incredible. I mean, and his advice was great. You know, he gave very specific advice about the kind of stories you should be doing. You know, he knew I was going to be the sports editor of the paper. He said, don't worry about the green eyes shade. Write your column.

Just be a columnist. You know, he quoted Red Smith. Let them smell the cabbage cooking. And I still have a letter. And, you know, he was kind enough to say, and he said, please send me your stuff from time to time. I didn't over abuse the privilege, but over the course of the rest of my college career, And early in my career, I would send him stuff, and invariably he would send me a very nice typewritten letter.

I mean, I would tell these stories to some people who knew him, and they're like, are you sure it wasn't like? I mean, no, and of course I know it was. And early in my career, I mean, he couldn't have been more generous when I was at the Star Ledger. I mean, it's very nice, you know, very, very happy to see that I'd, you know, achieved a level of success. And look, I mean, I think it's just part of the nature of the way this business used to be that once I, you know, once I landed at the post, all of a sudden, you know, I was the enemy. And I understand that. I mean, I'm sad and buy it because it's, you know, it's, it's, but, but look, anybody wants to rip Lupig's fine. Anything is, anything is in play.

He's a very high profile guy. And by the way, he's exactly the kind of guy that a lot of the people who rip him aspired to be at one point in their life. But all I know is that when I needed a friendly voice, he actually was there for me, and not just once, more than once. And I've tried to kind of remember that, you know, because now I'm the guy who's getting a lot of emails or letters from aspiring journalists. You know, how can I become, how can I get your job in 20 years? And, you know, I try and be patient because I know exactly what it's like to be on the other side of that correspondence. Another memory, Woj had was when you guys started your careers at various newspapers across the country. You would put your latest writings into a Manila envelope and mail it to each other.

Oh, yeah. And what was the purpose of that? Well, yeah. I mean, specifically, there were three of us. There was Woj, there was me, and there was less car, particularly who now is at the Washington Post. And he's had a terrific career. and we would just send these stories to each other. And, you know, once a week, maybe once every other week, we would, you know, have these, like, you know, because of course, in those days, they weren't payment plans.

I mean, you couldn't just call Connecticut from Arkansas, which is where I was or, you know, and just, you know, talk for hours. You had to wait until after 1 o'clock in the morning, right, to get the cheap rates. But we would get on the phone and we would read each other stuff and read each other things we're working on. And it seems incredibly innocent and funny. But, I mean, that's, that's, I have no doubt that all three of us got better because, you know, we realized that we were. making the same mistakes, we were running into the same problems. Career-wise, we were sometimes running into the same frustrations. But, yeah, I'll never forget those.

I mean, and then at the beginning of the Internet, we all, like, you know, when AOL costs like $35 a minute, you know, we would be on instant messaging all through the night, you know, running up these insane, insane dialogue bills, you know, doing the same thing only in chat rooms now. And, you know, and it's funny because, you know, just a couple weeks ago, Adrian, Les and I were on a text thread now. Now, we weren't sharing each other's work because we needed access everybody's work now. But we were just kind of bantering about a subject and it felt very much like 1992.

And I was in my darkened living room in Arkansas listening to these two guys in Connecticut, you know, tell me their, you know, read me their leads about the glories of the Connecticut Huskies. It was, it was, those are good memories. I find there's nothing that spurs me to do better work than when a friend of mine does good work. And I say, damn it. Yeah. That just can't stand. Yeah, because, you know, it's funny because people always like,

They went, oh, you know, they talk about people who are some kind of saint because they're happy for their friends to succeed because, you know, here, the inside of us, everybody wants our friends to fail. You know, you want to be better than your friends, but you want to be because they're really good, but you're just a little bit better. That's the way I look at it. That's a sweet spot. Right. You know, and I remember a very similar situation that I would ran into many years later when I had my first job at a real, you know, at a metro newspaper in Kansas City. You know, the two columnists there were Jason Whitlock and Joe Paz-Dansky. Well, guess what?

you know, if you look at that objectively, you're going to be third there. But, you know, when you get your shot, you know, I would get a chance to write a column a week in addition to doing takeouts. You know, I wanted that column to at least be able to stand with them, you know, and that's so important, you know. And that's kind of, again, when we talked about earlier about, though, the absence of that daily comparison now, you know, I just don't run to the daily news or the Times anymore. You know, a friend of mine asked me, why do you read Newsday every day? I'm like, because, you know what, for better or worse, that's really all we have is a competition. So you know what? I want to see what Neil Best or David Lennon or Tom Rock or Laura Albany's are writing

because it's just, you know, I'd like, in theory would like to be better than that. And, you know, sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not, but it's great to be able to compare. And that's the only way you get better. And certainly, you know, younger, my younger is I was allowed to be able to be around other talented people, which I think was, you know, kind of show me what I needed to do to get where I needed, wanted to get. You mentioned Arkansas a few times. This is 1991. Mike Vicaro, the son of Long Island,

ships out to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to write for a paper called the Northwest Arkansas Times, and you got fire. Oh, I got fire. Sure did. What happened there? There's two stories you can tell. One is the one my wife likes to tell me when she wants to be grounded,

which is that I was the worst sports editor in history. And I probably was. I mean, you know, she likes to remind me that one time I kind of forgot about the French opened and put in the paper, oops. But also, I know that I went there with the, with the idea and also with the blessing of the person who hired me, you know, yes, we want you to be a sports editor, but we were hiring you to be a, because you can write. We want to see, and so I, you know, my thing there was to be a column. And I wrote seven days a week there. I wrote every single day. Um, like I was 23. I mean, of course I'm going to write every day. I wasn't married. I was, I was in Arkansas. What else am I going to do? And Arkansas was a fertile place with between the basketball and football, you could write, again, that's another place. You could write 365 if you wanted to. Um, and the problem is, I mean, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I guess I was a little too young, a little too smart from my own good. And so what happened was, to summarize, I got into a situation where I want to kind of encode criticizing the publisher of my paper in a column, which, you know, I just thought it was kind of funny and which, you know, the next day I got fired.

And they didn't say that was what's that. It wasn't a terribly complex code, put it that way. You know, it was pretty obvious. The publisher was trying to migration himself to Frank Royals, the all everything in Arkansas. saw and wanted to get invited to go play to Gusa National, and he did some things that kind of made that obvious, and I kind of took a shot at it. And, you know, it wasn't hard to figure out. Look, I deserve to get fired. Thirty-five years later, I can absolutely say I deserve to get fired. Now, maybe in the moment, you know, I didn't believe that. And certainly that provided unbelievable

fuel to my fire over the next couple of years, but it also sent me into a two-month tailspin where I thought my career was over 25, because who's going to hire somebody who's not only, only worked in Oli and in Arkansas, but actually got fired from one of those places. You know, it's why a name no one will probably ever know in the annals and newspapers, besides the people who worked for him, but Bill Burr, not the comedian, but was a sports theater in Middletown, New York. He took a shot on me, you know, allow me to kind of resuscitate my career in Middletown, New York, and I'll be forever grateful for that. But you know what? I'll say this. And in the moment, a lot of people who I trust had said, this is the best thing

that'll ever happen to you. And it was. And not just because it, you know, kind of gets you on the, It kind of forces you to want to move on to the next run of your career. But also because, look, I mean, every day I know, every day now I realize that, you know, somebody else told me one time, you're more apt to get fired for something you write on an expense for than something you write in your newspaper column. Point being, you know, make sure you just got to make sure you're on point all the time. You know, just don't do, don't fire back an email to an idiot reader who wants to try and go to you, which is the hardest temptation that I have personally.

And realize that, you know, for everybody who's trying to do that, there's, you've just received 20 really nice emails people selling you, thank you for this column. And sometimes that's hard because the brain works in weird ways. But I mean, obviously, I'm not going to say that I wouldn't have gotten to what I've gotten if I hadn't gotten fired, but it certainly was an incredible piece of fuel. And I'm not going to say I'm grateful to people who fired me, but I'm grateful with people who fired me because it probably put me on a proper pathway to understanding how to be professional in the business. You got the post column in 2002. Did you see your competition as all the other columnists in New York?

100%. It was immediate. And look, I mean, I was friends with a lot of these guys. I mean, you know, Conner's one of my dearest friends. You know, one of the great things was when I was in Newark for three years, I went head to head with the Bergen record columnist who was Adrian Woznerowski. I mean, we literally went head to head for three years because we were covering the same stuff. And, you know, my boss always say, make sure you're in Warjorn sharing stuff.

I'm like, if you think that we would even think about that, you have no idea what kind of our friendship we have. But absolutely. And look, I mean, that was still at a time when I would, you know, I would go to my local gym and I would go there with a stack of five newspapers. And that's what I would do on the treadmill. You know, it's probably why I didn't really ever get much work done on in the treadmill. But I mean, that's what I would do. And it's, you know, you absolutely measured yourself against everybody. I mean, against Dave Anderson at the Times and against Jerry at the Star Ledger. And Steve Politi, who then was coming up with the Star Ledger. And, you know, all these guys that I would go up against every day, Harvey Arriton. And, you know, and Mark Kriegel and Lisa Olson, on and on. I mean, these are all people that, and every time I read them, I said, well, whether it's whether I'm better or worse today, whether they're better or worse than me. I mean, that's something I hadn't thought about. Okay, great.

This is the way you can do things. And I think that's one of the great things about this job, Ryan, is that you can always kind of add a different pitch. You know, one of the great things by being a columnist is, you know, it's kind of like being a pitcher with four pitches in your repertoire. And maybe sometimes you throw a, you, you find a screwball and you try that. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But that's one of the great things about writing as often as I do is I can take a shot once in a while and then kind of go back to the comfort zone if that doesn't work. The relationship with Lupica deteriorated right away?

It did. I mean, and look, I mean, I don't think it was entirely his fault. I mean, I think part of it is, okay, here's the new guy in New York. And, you know, certainly weren't going to be friendly anymore. You know, during the course of doing business, I mean, things get said and so forth. I'm sure some stuff maybe got back to him, my frustrations. That's fine, you know. I wish he was better.

Are there some things I wish I would have done different? I guess. I mean, I wish I would have been, but I don't know what it would have mattered. I mean, I just think that in those days, it was so hyper competitive between the Post and the Daily News. And look, I mean, there are some things that happen. I mean, one thing I know that, this is kind of a funny story. I mean, it's just, this is the truth. You know, early in my tenure there, the Post did some house ads, you know.

And they put one on me. And they said, and this was none of my input, but it's certainly attached to my picture in the house ad. And it says, Mike Vicar, he takes no. lip from anybody. Well, who's that a shot at? Right? And Bob Klappas is a dear friend of mine. Got a phone call later that day, and it was Lupeg, and he starts to just rail, and he's

like, Mike, that wasn't Mike who did. I don't care, blah, blah, blah. And of course, Bob was listening, and you could hear that in the background, it was the beach. You know, Mike has a nice house on the beach in Bridge Hampton. And he's like, Mike, what are you doing? You've won, what's wrong with you? And well, that's the, but that's the nature of competition. I get that, you know? And

I'm sure those are all kind of things. things that probably, you know, we were probably just destined never to be friends because we worked at competing newspapers. That's fine. I mean, I, I, you know, he was not a contemporary mind or I have his. So, you know, it's just, it's just the way things are. But, uh, I mean, I miss, I mean, but all that said, you know, in the first, you know, certainly five or six years when, when, when, when, seven, eight years maybe, when, when he was still writing a lot and I was, I lived in, in terror that he was going to expose me as being just to complete fraud. And, and that's, probably as much as anything drove me because I didn't want to be exposed as a fraud.

I don't want people to figure me out. Do you find you write better columns when you rip somebody or praise them? Sadly, when I rip, and it's funny because I think one of the reasons why my rip jobs become effective is because I don't do it a lot. I mean, for better or for worse, I'm out of hot take artists. This is probably the reason why I've never, you know, I've never, you know, wander toward other aspects of the media. It's just not, I just don't like it.

I'm not comfortable with it. I don't enjoy it. And I've been able to, I've been lucky enough that, that, you, you know, I've been able to do that the way I do it at the post. But what I do, you know, as a friend of mine says, light up the blow torch. It tends to, it tends to, you know, have an impact. And I, you know, I do write very well angry, I guess. And, you know, the one example that I can give is, it was just a unique example

because it was the Metro playing a day game before July 4th, a couple of years ago, eight years ago now, 2015. And Sandy Olson was kind of dickering at the, at the trade deadline. I wasn't making any moves, and I knew I was going to rip them anyway. But they went like, when he talked to the writers, he said, like, excuse himself because he needed to take his dog for a walk to do his business. And so I had the line in there that, you know, something like an old person's dog is doing, what's anything doing to the Mets season all year. And so, and the hilarious part is so, like I said, it was like July 4th. It wasn't July 4th.

It was like the day before. Day game, driving home, stuck in traffic. So, you know, I was just going back and forth between the Two Talk radio stations. and the paper posted it right away. And so in a very surreal moment for the first time, I was driving home in like in real time was seeing what the impact of this column was because on both stations they were like reading it paragraph by paragraph

and readers are calling in and just, you know, I'm ready to storm the Bastille and so forth. And that was kind of a reminder of what the power of what the job is. I mean, maybe it's not Dick Young where I can get St. Yoles and fired. Not that I call from to be fired, but, you know, it's still a pretty powerful pulpit. You know, it's not, maybe it's not,

quite as high or as quite as bully as it was in 1977 or 1957, but it's obviously still something people care about and motivate, you know, a good strong opinion can motivate people's other strong opinions. And that's to me, that's the fun part of sports. That's the water cooler part of sports, right? You said on Pazananski's podcast that you helped create the cult of Derek Jeter. How and why did you do that? Well, because it was impossible not to. I get the skepticism that seems to be prevalent in a lot of other precincts about that if he hadn't played in New York,

he wouldn't have had nearly the kind of attention or whatnot, but he was still a pretty good player. And you saw him every day, and you saw him every year, and it seemed like every time the Yankees needed him to do something, you know, this is where he became Captain Intangibles. He really would, I mean, it's a joke now, but he really used to do, I mean, the flip play, is just the emblematic part of it.

You would see this stuff all the time. You know, they needed a home run, he needed a home run. They needed to sacrifice. He did he do this stuff. And you saw a day after, I mean, I would love to be skeptical. But, I mean, A, the guy was smart enough to build a career where, you know, forget about being on page one. He was never going to be on page six. So it's like when you have that kind of a guy who was understanding about what his places and what, and then he delivers as he did for 20 years.

I mean, so yeah, so most of what came out of my typewriter was, was glorious. And, you know, I don't apologize for that because what, you know, it. To me, it's like, the problem I have with hot takes is a guy who knows that Derek Dieter is a really good player, but decides, you know what, he's not a Hall of Famer. He knows why. Well, that's a ridiculous opinion. But, okay, if that's how you're going to go there, I respect your right to say it. But, you know, again, and I think when you see it as often as we saw it, the myth making becomes almost automatic. And I think that's what happened.

I mean, but I don't think, you know, like I get it. I mean, sometimes it could get to be a little bit much for people who aren't Yankees' fans. fans or aren't Jeter's fans to read the constant, just hagiographies that seem to appear in the newspaper every day. But the fact is, the guy did a lot of stuff. I mean, he was awfully good, you know. And I think in his time, if you saw Ted Williams, he probably wouldn't have felt the same way. Did I read that you were constantly on no-hitter watch with the Yankees and Mets,

ready to drive to either stadium if there was a no-hitter in progress? Oh, yeah. I probably did that about seven or eight times, including one time it was in the third quarter of a Nets playoff game and and somebody was throwing a no-hitter Yankee Stadium and my boss said, forget the basketball game, get to Yankee Stadium. And we kind of came a dual joke because now I'd never seen a no-hitter. Now, if you want to go back to that day, that day my father took me to my first baseball game. John Matlack threw a one-hitter that day. And the only pitch, the only hit was by the opposing pitcher, John Curtis. So you probably can't come as close to

saying a no-hitter as that. That was the first guy I ever saw. I remember my father was we were walking out, so you have no idea how close you came to send. And I said, I'm sure I'll see a bunch before I'm through it. I'd never seen one in person. I mean, obviously, I've seen them. And so it was kind of a personal thing, but it also, look, I mean, and I think we'd still do this, but it became a thing where, you know, I know I'm at the, I wasn't in town then, but when David Wells threw in, through his perfect, perfect game, I know Joel Sherman wasn't covering the game, but he wanted to, it's, it's something that we do, you know, because it's, it's, if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's,

And so obviously the day that Johan throws his no hitter, it's the fifth inning. And I was watching the game upstairs here at my house. And I'm like, do I get out? I mean, he already had like 80 pitches. I'm like, he's not going to get it. It's the Mets. They're never going to throw one. What am I doing?

It's Friday night. But I'm like, you know what? I do this. I might as well do it. So I got in the car and just through a series of breaks because there was no traffic on a Friday night for a change. Mike Baxter heard himself making a catch. I got there like in the eighth inning. And got there for the last two innings of it.

Now, I don't know if I can count that as saying I saw a no hitter. It's still the only one that I've seen the 20s I'm without to in person. But I got there and I was glad I did because I, and of course, here's the funny part about our business, right? So I'm like, oh, this is great. I finally did this. I thought I wrote a good column. Couldn't wait until I could read the paper in the morning. I got the paper and this column sig said, Mike Puma.

They got the column sig wrong. And I just started to go crazy. And it turns out it was just for the second edition. We get the second edition here. So for the last edition and also for the, you know, on the app and whatnot, it was my SIG. But, but yeah, that was that was sort of a poetic story there. But, yeah, I don't think I've done it since.

It's because, look, I mean, it has to be kind of a perfect storm of events. You're not at the game already. You're in town. They're in town. And so I'm glad I did that, though, yeah. And it's funny because on the trip in, it became something that people knew about. So it was almost like Santa's journey on Christmas Eve that people tweet about now. I mean, I was like, you know.

Norad tracking you in the way the city field. It's kind of what it was like it was. Later on, I was reading like all these tweets. Like, Vax on the Garden State Parkway now, you know, Vax's making the turn on the Northern Boulevard. It's like, oh, man, this is kind of weird. The 21 years you've been running the column, the Knicks have never been out of the second round of the playoffs.

What's it like to have a Knicks-sized hole in your column? Oh, it is a huge hole because, you know, honestly, I mean, you know, was that the ledger? They went to the finals. And this was still during the good times of the Guard and when the access was good. You know, if you like basketball and you knew basketball, you could really write, you know, basketball without. And that was, that was glorious those times. Yeah, I mean, it's really unbelievable.

I mean, I've been there since 2002 and they've beaten, they beat the Cavaliers this year and they beat the Celtics in 2013. And that's it. And they've only been to the playoffs four or five other times. It's terrible because, you know what, basketball is one of my core sports. I mean, I love writing basketball. Basketball is just, to me, is an endless supply of stories and interesting tales and characters. I mean, the Knicks matter to me in a huge way because I grew up knowing all about them and so forth. Even though as a kid, I kind of, I sort of grew up a Nets fan because I was a Dr. J kid.

But, I mean, just certainly you can't not be affected by the Knicks if you're a basketball fan in New York growing up in New York. and it's just been, and the next thing, you know, along with the Rangers, the only team that actually play in Manhattan, right? So it's like, and like I was around enough during the good times in the 90s. And I still tell people this, you know, as big a baseball town as New York is. And as big a baseball town as New York was in the 90s, when the Yankees were already starting to win championships and baseball season didn't begin until the day after the Knicks were eliminated from the playoffs.

That's the way it was every year. I mean, you know, baseball was something you thought about, but it was the Knicks. It was the Knicks. And I really haven't had that. And, you know, I sometimes have to try and check myself. You know, sometimes I can get a little bit too excited if the Knicks are looking, like it's got something going, you know. And if I'm mostly even during these playoffs, even as they got up, you know, 3-1 on the Cavaliers,

I'm like, yeah, but, you know, I didn't write this, but I'm in my mind. I'm like, don't get too ahead of yourself, you know. And, of course, I necessarily get head to myself when they play the heat, and I got burned for it. But it's definitely, when the Knicks are good, sports in New York is terrific. They're the boat that lifts all other boats because of Manhattan, because of the atmosphere of the garden, because of the garden itself. You know, this is how important the Knicks are. I mean, as bad as they've been, you know, they're Jim Dolan proof to a degree because fans still come, Phil still want to come.

The garden is still, you know, fans can slander the owner all they want, but they still come. They still fill his coffers. And, you know, I don't blame them. I mean, of course, if you love something like Nick fans love the Knicks and love, you know, competitive basketball, you're going to keep coming back. That's probably last year was such a fun thing. You know, for me personally, it was great just because it was kind of coming back after I'd been on the shelf a little bit.

But it also was the return of the Knicks to like a really prominent place. And I thought that was really, you know, to hear other people like acknowledge that the Knicks were worth their time to talk about. You know, that really made it really, you know, all the time that we spent covering them. It kind of justifies that. And then you see what the response of the fans is. And it's so you can't wait for the next season to begin. Let's talk about being on the shelf.

You wrote a column this summer about having the lower part of your left leg amputated and replaced by a prosthetic. What was it like to get your mind around that procedure? Well, you know, it was, it was, you know, the most challenging thing that's ever happened to me. Brian, I mean, look, I mean, it was a lot of years coming. I mean, it's a combination of a lot of things. I mean, you know, 30 years of playing basketball and spreading my ankle a million times and never properly treating it.

So that was kind of a problem. Type 2 diabetes takes a toll on it. And then I wound up having a couple of infections just that, were independent of both those things and all those things kind of was a perfect storm and my leg had disintegrated over a course of time so I kind of just was learning how to grapple with how to kind of be ambulatory and a doctor that I had kind of told me this might be something I might want to look at long term just because it might you know improve my quality of life but nobody wants to think about an amputation that's just like wow that's that's that's that's something

that that that war heroes get because you know because the enemy you know blew them up um but But, you know, it was about two weeks after I had the conversation with the doctor when actually my leg kind of took a kind of a permanent turn for the worst. And it was so I was in a frame of mind where I was already thinking about it, which was very helpful. And I really kind of immediately embraced the idea, well, this wasn't really great the way I was scuffling around, you know, before. So maybe this will, maybe if this happens and I embrace all the possibilities, then I can get better on the other side. And thank you that's exactly what happened. I was incredibly fortunate. I had incredible doctors.

I've had unbelievable physical therapists who have gotten me. I mean, it's, you know, in two weeks, it's going to be a year since the procedure. And, you know, I'm ambulatory. You know, I mean, right now I've got other issues, which, you know, but I can still walk around to cane. Sometimes I walk around without canes. I've played golf again. I've been able to do my job again, which is the important thing. And, you know, I was really lucky because, you know, I don't want to say that this is a benefit of COVID,

but certainly a result of COVID is that we were forced in sports departments without sports to actually cover to kind of relearn how to be good at our jobs without having a crutch of going to a game all the time. And then ultimately, sometimes we weren't allowed back to games. And so we had to kind of learn how to do that job differently. And kind of the taboo of writing about things that you weren't actually witnessing in person was kind of suddenly gone. And I also worked for a newspaper that allowed me to, as part of my, almost as part of my mental therapy, to keep working, you know, even though I wasn't able to actually physically get to games or so forth. And, you know, for 35 years, you have enough names in your phone book if you need to make calls and so forth. I'm lucky, lucky that degree too.

So a lot of things, I was very fortunate in a lot of areas because I was able to keep working. I wasn't able to be at the games necessarily, but to write about them. And that was a huge benefit. And now the idea of being able to go back. And, you know, again, occasionally I have yourself to take care of things a little bit more than the average guy does. So sometimes I may have to skip a game to tend to that.

But, you know, just to know where I am now, as opposed to where it was this time last year, it's incredible. And to be able to do the job the way I want to do it again is, you know, it means. everything. You say keep writing. You were filing from the rehab center. Oh yeah, absolutely. And I was lucky because I also had a doctor, you know, and I guess I guess this is one of the perks of the job, right? The doctor knew who I was. And so like, I mean, literally like two days after I'm, you know, after I had my leg cut off, he's like, what are you writing today? I'm like, I don't think I'm anything for a while. He's like, well, why? He's like, you can still write. I mean,

he said, he didn't amputate your hands. He said, why shouldn't you write? And I said, that's okay with you? And I'm like, he's like, not okay with me, but I think that if you didn't write, you probably go nuts. And I don't even, I don't even a crazy person trying to learn how to, how to, how to, how to, you know, work on a prosthetic. And it was actually armed with that doctor's testimony that, that I told the bosses. I'm like, well, they say it's a good thing for me.

If you're allowed with it, well, we'll allow it, but we just don't want you to impede your rehab. I'm like, no, it's actually going to improve it. And so, yeah, in fact, last, last year during the baseball playoffs, I was, I was, I had this little setup in my, you know, in, in my rehab room. And I was able to, you know, kind of watch multiple games at the same time, but cover the Yankees from my rehab bed, which probably isn't the ideal way that you're supposed to do it. And it's not the way that I would recommend doing it. And it's not the way I like doing it. But I was able to, you know, write about Yankees Indians,

even though I wasn't at the game. And, you know, there was a trick to it, though, which I learned during COVID, which I mean, I try to make it apparent somewhere in a column that I'm not at, that I'm not there, whether I quote somebody on TV, whether I mention something. I don't want to give the impression that I'm there when I'm not. I think that's important. I don't go over the top with that. But I know that I've said that I'm not here. So I'm then going on from there.

Your own little dateline buried in there somewhere, just a nod to a reader. That's right. That's right. I mean, exactly. I don't have Dateline Kestler Rehab Center, but in my mind, I do. You just resigned with the post for two more years. I did, yes. Do you want to finish your career having worked for nothing but newspapers?

You know what? I would love that to be the thing that they say about me when I retire or, you know, or other. Yes, because I still believe in newspapers. I get it. That sounds sometimes like you say, well, I still believe in the horse and buggy is a wonderful method of transportation. But I still believe in newspapers. I believe in the post sports section. I mean, they, you know, we're still committed to covering sports properly.

and it's just a joy to be a part of that, considered a privilege to be a part of that. And yeah, I love that. I really would. I mean, I usually think in my young and stupid days that there was nothing more romantic than being like Grantland Rice

and dying at your keyboard. I don't want that to happen. But, you know, when the time comes when I think it's, you know, it's okay to retire. And, you know, it's in New York, New Jersey. It's kind of mandatory to retire to Florida, right? So whenever that comes, you know, I like to say that if I can look back,

say the only primary paychecks I ever got from the time I was 22 years old was a newspaper, that'd be fine. I mean, I'd be more than comfortable with that. Because I still believe in the medium, and I still believe in what we do. And like I said, specifically at the post-sports section, I believe in how we do it. And I love the fact that I'm a big part of that. When will you know it's time to retire? When it's not fun, you know? I mean, and I get it, you know, there's nothing that, I always know when other people have been kind of spying the end, when they gripe about having to go to the World Series. You know, and I get it, you know, get on a plane,

is a pain in the neck now and being away from the family and so forth. I still look forward to a big event. You kidding me? When, you know, if the Jets are in the Super Bowl this year, or in the playoffs this year, I can't wait to get to get in the road and go on those games. Be there. You know, tell people what it was like.

That's why I got in the business the first time. I'm still that way, heck, I'm still excited about going to a Yankees Tampa Bay game tomorrow. I am. I like going to the game. You know, a lot of my friends say, well, you know, you've proven you can do it at home.

Why don't you just do it at home? again, I'm like, well, when I have to, I will. But if I have the option to be there, I mean, that's part of it. I think that's part of why I've been, whatever success we've gotten the business is because I still want to get there. I don't want to, I don't want to mail it in. I want to, I want to get there and tell people what it was like to be there for the eight to, you know, meaningless baseball game on August 1st. But I mean, to me, it's not meaningless. When it starts to be the, you know, when I wake up in the morning, unlike this morning and, you know, I'm like, oh my God, is my editor going to ask me about a

column today. I'm not really supposed to write. That's, I think, when it's going to be time. But it's not there yet. I mean, like I said, I woke up this morning and the first thing I did before I even checked in my email was if I got in touch with my editor and said, what are we doing today? And that's to me when the days start differently, that's when I know it's probably going to be time. You can read Mike Vicaro in the New York Post where he will be filing on time to preserve his perfect record. That is correct. Mike, thanks for coming on the press box. Brian, thanks so much. I appreciate it. That's the press box. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic. As always, by Eric Cervantes. Press box pick of the week is Ian Parker's New Yorker profile of New York City Mayor

Eric Adams. The online headline is Eric Adams's administration of Bluster. I love this piece because it had lots of fact-checking, lots of muckraking about Adams. I loved it because it's like magazine pieces of your in the sense that it has more than one meeting with its subject. and it gives off an idea greater than, hey, I talked to a famous person for a few hours, and here's what they said. I also loved it because it's very New Yorkery, or maybe very parkery, every sentence written just so,

every paragraph turned perfectly. Kids don't try this at home, but I do recommend reading Ian Parker on Eric Adams. I am headed to Sweden this week for some important corporate activities, and I will be coming to you there with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you Monday,

And back here for Pressbox Final Edition. Have a great weekend.