The Press Box - How the Media Covered O.J., Masters Observations, and The Rock Backs Away From Politics.

Episode Date: April 15, 2024

Bryan and David kick off the show by discussing Verne Lundquist, who recently called his 40th and final Masters. In turn, Bryan brings up a memory he and Lundquist shared (0:53). Then, they discuss O.J. Simpson, how he became famous, and how the media covered his trial (13:01). They also react to news that broke before recording the show: CNN cancels Gayle King and Charles Barkley's ‘King Charles’ show (33:20), The Rock doesn't endorse President Joe Biden, and more (36:42).Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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On Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. David? Yeah. Can we start with some talk about the Masters? Sure. Vern Lundquist, David, was calling his 40th, 40th and final Masters. It was an amazing moment. Now that's her retirements are always a little.

little bit like wrestler retirements. You're never quite sure whether they're retiring for good or just for now. Sure. It's not that long ago. We had a Super Bowl where we were fetting Al Michaels and, you know, patting him on the back. And now Al Michaels is calling national games on Thursday nights. Well, yeah. I mean, I'm sure, you know, if Amazon or Apple comes calling, Vern Lundquist might be motivated to end his retirement.

early. Oh, yes, he will be. He retired from SEC football back in 2016. Sunday was his

golf retirement. He was at his normal place, the 16th hole at the Masters. And part of the reason this was very perfect was

the tournament had gotten completely sideways by the time the leaders got to 16 on Sunday. It was over. So the crew

was able to just get out of the way and let Vern talk let that voice that has been made even more gravely by the two packs a day of cigarettes

he told me once he used to smoke back in the old days let that voice come out over the airwaves and bring us home and it was wonderful you could almost feel

Vern getting choked up he had a line like it's been an honor and a privilege almost as if he thought of announcing like a sacred duty like politics. It was really, really cool. It was one of those moments too where because the tournament

wasn't really in doubt, you got to pay attention to Vern. And also because golf is funny, right? If it were a football game, Vern calls the final play. We do the sideline interview. And then he comes on and gives a few final words. With golf,

things are. continuing past him at the 16th hole. Yeah. We got to get to Ian Baker Finch at 17. We got to get to Jim Nance at 18. We got to get to Butler Cabin. So Vern sort of waves goodbye and the golfers keep going. Mm-hmm.

Which is just very cool way to say goodbye. It is. It's sort of like, like if you say if you're like out with a bunch of friends, or on a trip with a bunch of friends and somebody has to take off, you know, like two days early, because they have to get home for. something and say there's something much more wistful about that than the sort of organized formal goodbye that you're all emotionally prepared for did you see the picture of tiger woods saying goodbye to verne i did well supposedly verne i i can't verify personally that that was him by the picture

because it's a hand coming out of a tree trunk yes so we had this beautiful emotional goodbye verne of course had a famous tiger woods call just like he had a famous jack nicholas call and a famous Christian Letner call and everything else. Tiger goes over to pay his respects, but we only see an arm coming out of a tree. One of the saddest missed television shots of all time. It seems so staged. Like, it cannot possibly be real. It cannot possibly be real.

But also, don't you think a wonderful metaphor for Vern Lunquist's career before he got SEC football? Oh, absolutely. He's just a voice. Yeah, he's a guy on TV. That's what he was for a really long time. Classic number two guy on a number of sports for CBS. Somebody who had this, you know, quiver of famous calls, the ones I mentioned, he was Nancy

Carrigan and Tanya Harding in 1994 Olympics. I mean, Byrne was a guy, but he was not somebody, I think, that people outside the business would be like, oh, yes, Vern Lundquist. Yeah. They wouldn't necessarily have a defined memory or, you know, to find sport that they could put him with. And then in 98 he gets the SEC. When he's 48 years old,

the SEC turns into the number one conference in college football, to put it very mildly, but also this sort of national televised late Saturday afternoon event. And Vern becomes a star. And he winds up having the second half of his career that's just glorious.

He's calling huge games every Saturday afternoon. Multiple sign-offs, like I said, from the SEC in 2016 and now for the Masters. It was just an amazing arc. Yeah, I mean, he's an absolute legend. Has any announcer gotten a better and more apt nickname than the one Spencer Hall gave to Lundquist, Uncle Vern? Yeah, maybe not. All announcers try to be a.

a vuncular on television. But the real-life verne, in addition to the television verne, was avuncularity on steroids. Point of phrase. Is avuncular an only in journalism word? Do people throw that around? Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely 1,000%.

I went to an SAT prep word. We remember that one. I went to interview Vern. in Austin for this podcast a couple years ago, he was, again, it's very hard to describe somebody for whom their television presence and their real presence is exactly the same. There's no difference in it. He has a beautiful apartment there in downtown Austin, and we did an interview. Then after the interview is over, he turns to me and he says, you know, my wife,

Nancy and I have this wonderful place down by the river here where we like to get coffee and brownies. Would you like to get coffee and brownies? with us to which my answer is absolutely I would like to get coffee and brownies with Vern Lundquist in Austin, Texas. And he drove us there, the three of us, and we get to this parking lot. And it's one of those really tight new Austin parking lots where you can just barely get the car in.

And it was going to require like an 18 point turn for Vern to get the car into the parking space. while kind of laughing at the predicament. And he just said this, holy catfish. It's Fern Lindquist. Wow. That's amazing. He had a line to me in that interview where he said, I think people at home can tell which announcers are assholes in real life.

They can see through all the trappings of, you know, friendship and, you know, slickness that an announcer puts on. And I think that's more or less true in my experience. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, sometimes you don't mind the assholes, but, you know, I think we generally have an idea. Vern, definitely not, not an asshole.

Two more notes on the Masters. So we had a fantastic final round on Sunday. It was a four-way tie. And it was a four-way tie between four very interesting golfers. Scotty Schaeffler, world number one. Colin Morikawa, multiple major winner, multi-time major winner, I should say. Max Homa, David, who is golf Twitter's number one boy. I mean, no laying up, golf Twitter, he is the guy.

Very media friendly tweets a lot. You know the profile. And then the fourth was a 24-year-old named Ludwig Oberg, who is from Swedish. Fresh off his heel run or WrestleMania. He has a big monster that Hulk Hogan finally defeated. Ludwig Oberg, you'll be interested to know, is from Sweden via Texas Tech. Would love to know what he made of Lubbock sometime when we have some free moment.

So it's a four-way tie atop the leaderboard. And then the three non-Scottie Schepleer golfers just get eaten alive in Amen Corner. You get a trip double bogey. you get a double boge you get a double boge and besides clearing out the field for Vern to have his moment on 16 you could just feel

the entire broadcast team deflate on television I mean just wilt before your eyes and ears because we know everybody on Twitter says that guy's biased against my team

he's biased against my favorite golfer the thing they're actually biased about is they want want a good game. Yeah. A good Sunday at the Masters, a good match. And when that fades right before their eyes and it did fade in the non-golf sense of the term suddenly and ferociously on Sunday, it was like, oh.

Oh. Also, a lot of people are calling Oberg the young swede. It's like a very only in sports television kind of term. final master's note for you are sports announcers the only people in the 21st century who say goodbye by saying so long yes i mean sports announcers i got radio people don't do that anymore um no so long no if you and i were grabbing drinks and princeton or l a lai and we gave each other a big hug at the end of the night. I was like, so long, you'd be like, why are you doing a bit from the 20s? Yeah, it's sports guys. People in sound of music reprisals. The, uh, we should bring so long

back. So long, it's, it's, I think it's so long's time. But all the sports announcers say it, dude, I was watching the NCAA tournament. I'm pretty sure this is Andrew Catalan. Forgive me, Andrew Catalan if it was not you, but it was like, so long from Memphis. where the number one seed has fallen. They all say so long. Goodbye. Is there a problem with goodbye? See you later?

Farewell. This is like whenever you're closing a semi-formal email and you just spend like 15 minutes trying to put it, trying to figure out if you, would your, what your closing should be. Is it just thanks, comma, Brian, or? I got it. I mean, huge thanks for your time. Brian. that's your that's my closer the signature yes every time but you always end up settling on something that's just kind of the least offensive right that you don't object to for a reason maybe

it's so long it's just they decided that threaded whatever needle for you know a million years ago if you're sending an email to somebody you know if you're asking for a favor but not for the first time huge thanks comma as always that gets you to the signature All right, coming up on today's show, a huge segment about OJ and the media from the Bronco chase to If I Did It. Plus, Charles Barkley got canceled, at least in the cable news sense of the term, and the rock doesn't want to talk about politics like he once did. He's not the only one. All that and much more on the press box, a part of the ringer, podcast network. Media consumers, hello.

Oh, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, and producer Brian Waters with you. David, can we attempt the tricky transition from the Masters Tournament to O.J. Simpson? Gosh. I wish you would have just done it and not roped me into part of this problem, but go ahead. I got it for you. You know who else like to play golf? Oh, no. O.J. Simpson died Thursday at age 76. And dude, I have been like a racehorse just. paw on the ground with my hoof since then because there are so many things I wanted to talk to you about. God, okay.

First up, OJ's particular niche as a media figure. Media in the broadest sense of the term. Because you and I came of age and got to know the late 80s, probably more early 90s, OJ, when he was famous mostly for being OJ. Is that fair? Like you and I never saw him play football. His football career was certainly well known.

That was his reason for being famous. Yeah. But at that period in history, it was just like he had attained this kind of stature where you didn't even have to know that he had played football or know anything about it. He was OJ. Yeah.

I mean, I think people of the generation younger than us, or even five years younger than us, would be forgiven if they thought that he was famous strictly because he murdered his wife and got away with it, right? I mean, and that's because that's, if you paid any attention to him at all in the past 20 years, like that's sort of enough to understand. But in fact, the trial itself was as big a deal as it was

because he was a super-duper star. we were sort of one generation removed from that, which is what you describe. Like, we weren't, we didn't watch him play. And we weren't, we didn't even watch him kind of ascend the next tier of celebrity. You know, when he, we saw him doing Hertz or whatever car rental ads he did, but we didn't see like the first iteration of those. We didn't see him call any games, you know, we didn't see that a lot of them, I mean, any movie, any acting that he did until the naked gun. which, you know, I think sort of fit squarely into our demographic.

But you understood, I mean, listen, as a kid, you would see him in something else and be like, hey, look, Nordberg's selling car rental, you know, advertising car rentals, that's weird. But there was still this sort of implication that he was a major star. That's why he was in all these positions. And even in things like the naked gun, it was almost kind of taking the piss out. I mean, he was playing off his celebrity. Or the directors were playing off his celebrity may be better put, right? They're taking this guy who people know and using him as a shorthand for laughs.

Yeah. I thought Bill's monologue on him on his podcast, Bill Simmons, our boss, was very well done. And I think gives you the perspective of sort of like the level of celebrity that we're talking about here. I mean, it was sort of unheard of, especially for a football player at the time. He was just sort of transcendent. And that is in some part why his, well, I don't even, I mean, it's all weird euphemisms at this point, but why all the, everything that he did. I mean, murdering his wife and everything that followed was just kind of so galling, you know. I mean, and so, and such a kind of cultural touchstone.

Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman were murdered on June 12th, 1994. Five days later, June 17th is the famous low-speed chase through the freeways of Los Angeles. O.J. is in the famous white bronco with his old Bill's teammate, Al A.C. Cowlings. Just an unbelievable night as a media spectacle. the New York Times said that 95 million people were watching television. That is a Super Bowl-sized audience or really close to a Super Bowl-sized audience. You and I probably have a particular memory of that because the Rockets were playing the Knicks and the NBA finals while the chase was happening. And in the days before second screen was a term NBC went to a split screen.

where they had the NBA finals game and then the Bronco chase happening at the same time. Yeah. And I was said this on the pot on Thursday, but I was at a Texas Rangers game sitting up in the upper deck. And I remember a handful of people, because the NBA Finals was going on, had those old televisions that were about the size of a shoebox

and had the rabbit ears actually coming out of the TV. This is 1994, remember? and they had brought them to watch the game so they wouldn't miss the basketball game while they were watching a baseball game. Then the chase starts happening and all of us start gathering around or craning our necks

so that we can see the OJ chase happening while we're watching baseball. It was unbelievable. Also the way the OJ saga tractor beamed in all these people because he was on television. He was famous. He knew sports announcers to name one subset of humanity.

So Al Michaels is on the air on ABC News with Peter Jennings, the night of the Bronco chase when the Bronco finally gets to OJ's house on Rockingham. ABC put someone on the air that they thought was OJ's Brentwood neighbor. And here was the beginning of the prank call era of American life. I just can ask everybody to be quiet for a moment. We have on the phone with us as well, Robert Higgins, who lives in the neighborhood, and is on the ground and can see inside the van. Mr. Higgins?

Yes. How are you? Just about as tense as you are, sir. Oh, my Lord, this is quite the tenses. What can you see? What I'm looking at right now is I'm looking at him looking. Can you see him doing anything specific? Is he merely sitting there?

He is just sitting around, you know, just looking like he'd be very nervous. Can you hear anything, Mr. Higgins? It's just too much commotion. I be in the back of our news. So I can't really hear that good, but... Thank you, Mr. Higgins. And bababooie to y'all. The driveway of O.J. Simpson's home in Brentwood,

clearly an effort being made to have him come out of the vehicle in the doorway of the house, his friend, Al Cowling. Peter, by the way, just for the record, this is Al Michaels. That was a totally farcical call. Lest anybody think that that was somebody who was truly across the street. that was not. He said something in code at the end that's indicative of the mentioning of the name of a certain radio talk show host. Okay, thanks, Al. So he was not there. All right, we have them on every coast. Thank you very much. Not the first time nor the last time will have been had.

Weirdly, that became a legendary moment for Al. Because he knew it? Because he was the only one that could suss it out? Uh-huh. Because he was, again, this is, there's not Twitter to check or something. And then he knew instinctively that that was a Howard Stern fan who had somehow gotten onto the air on ABC with tens of millions of people watching. Do we know who the Howard Stern fan was? Did that ever come out?

I don't know that we're all super well, but I've seen the suggestion maybe it was Captain Jenks. please double check that if you're using this information. So Bob Costas, by the way, speaking of sportscasters on the Today Show, and he had an amazing story, which he said that OJ Simpson attempted to call Costas from the white Bronco. Called the NBC switchboard. Again, this is with 1994 era cell phones. And the person on the NBC switchboard did not be.

believe it was him and hung up on him. So O.J. Simpson, the single most wanted television guests, perhaps in American history at that point, gets hung up on, but that guy got through the ABC News. Unbelievable stuff. The trial was on television, David.

That in itself was newsworthy. Oh, yeah. Because stuff was not streamable. in the way it is now where I can go watch any high school basketball game I want. But Judge Lance Edo, another name who became so big during 1994, says we're going to just put all of this on TV. We're going to allow cameras into the courtroom. And that opens up this enormous wormhole of media coverage.

Because Larry King is out in L.A. doing a postgame show every night. So-called quality publications like The New Yorker and the New York Times are covering this. the inquirer and the tabloids are covering this. There's something here for everybody. And there was a little squeamishness, I think, at the beginning of the trail. Oh, my gosh, this is just celebrity and murder and this is, this is tawdry, and maybe we should stay away from this. All of that evaporates.

Oh, yeah. Very, very quickly. And one story I wanted to tell you was about Jeffrey Tubin. Have you heard his name anytime in the news recently? Jeffrey Tubin, former New Yorker writer. I am familiar with his byline. Yeah. So summer in 1994, Jeffrey Tubin,

working at the New Yorker for Tina Brown. This is a month after the murders. Tina Brown sends him to Los Angeles. And he winds up getting a huge scoop, which is he finds a file in the LAPD archives, which shows that Mark Furman, the detective investigating the case, one of the detectives,

had a history of what he calls being the, quote, archetype of a bigoted bullying L.A. cop. Tubman goes. Now this is interesting. So he goes to the office of Robert Shapiro, one of the lawyers on the OJ dream

team, as it was called. The elevator in the building where Shapiro's office is located does not go up to Shapiro's floor. Like it's blocked off because he does not want visitors. He does not want to see Jeffrey Tubin or anybody like Jeffrey Tubin. But Tubin

is able to take an elevator to a different floor, take a spiral staircase up to Shapiro's floor and a peer outside of Shapiro's office, where he loudly mentions, you know, I've just seen these interesting documents about Mark Furman, at which point Robert Shapiro says, why don't you come on in here and starts talking about this defense that they're going to use, introducing the idea that perhaps Furman planted evidence at the scene that Mark Furman is, as he says later in the New Yorker order, a racist cop, et cetera, et cetera. So Tubin has this chat with Shapiro.

And then he says, can I quote you by name? And Shapiro says, no, that's too much like an interview to which Tubin responds. Okay, so it's okay if I say a member of the defense team. Shapiro says something like that. So he is quoted in that week's New Yorker. as one of the attorneys or one of the defense attorneys. And that is the moment that the defensive strategy,

which will ultimately help get O.J. Simpson acquitted is printed. This is in, again, the timing here surprised me. This is the summer of 1994. The case doesn't even come to trial until 1995. The verdict is a year later, October 1995. Wow. That was already printed in the New Yorker. you can read that online

and by the way it has a Richard Avedon portrait of Robert Shapiro included with the article which is the perfect 1990s magazine touch the verdict David October 3rd 1995 were you with me in the

Pascolle High School Library when we were herded in there to watch it live no I was in and was it Pascoe high school I was in what I believe a math class and

two ships passing in the night when somehow we understood the vert was about to come down and I because at this point we were seniors and kind of had a run of the school I just left the class and went to the library

and self-checked out a television I just said I just think I lied and said the teacher asked for a TV so you get those big rectangular rolling stance with a TV on top and a VCR on the middle shelf. And I just rolled it right back to the classroom.

And the teacher was like, what are you doing? And I just, I don't think I just plugged it in and turned it on. And, you know, we all got to watch the verdicting class. What a cross performance by you. Yeah. The librarian was the mother of one of our best friends. So, you know, we had a little bit of made things a little bit easier. But yeah, we just, I remember watching it there.

It was quite a moment. Again, we just, like, we're so oblivious. I mean, just looking back on the way that we were viewing that, it was almost strictly as a media construct, you know, I mean, the idea that there were people's lives that had been lost, it just sort of seemed like beside the point. But we didn't know how to process so much of what we were saying. Like you said, like we didn't, we'd never seen a trial before, part one, because of our age, but also because this is a new media thing.

It's just like being on a new social media platform for the first time as a kid, I'm sure. It's just like you're just kind of staring with wide eyes and pretending like you understand. You never and you don't until years later. Yes. And I don't remember our teachers making any effort to explain how this case touched on issues of race or violence against women or the city of Los Angeles or the Los Angeles police department, anything like that. My dad sat me down and had that talk with me because I think he could sense how just sort of. like unsuriously. I was absorbing all this stuff.

So yeah, I'm grateful to him for that. The afterlife of O.J. Simpson was very interesting. He's acquitted 1995. He's found liable to civil trial two years later. A dozen years after his initial trial, he contemplates a book called If I Did It. It is unbelievable that this actually happened or almost happened.

Judith Regan at Regan Book. books was the publisher of If I did it. And am I describing Regan books correctly as this was the publishing imprint that would take on authors that other people would not take on? Well, some of them were just really high profile celebrity books. But yeah, there was definitely a willingness to publish some stuff that would have been seen in the industry as sort of beyond the pale, which was a huge. I mean, that was the success.

this was the you know this was this was this was it was it was it was just right for the picking um and obviously there was some like conservative voices there too and think people that you know obviously the the market is corrected in publishing to a large degree although there's still some of those biases that are big that are built into it um but yeah i mean i think the certain set of people that it just kind of met with a dismissive attitude you know Howard Stern who would want to read that, you know, that sort of thing. And Mick Foley, who's going to want to read a book by a wrestler? Exactly.

And I mean, by the time that Mick Foley came along, I think, too, it was Judith Regan's reputation, I mean, was, I'm sure she was the first and only submission for a lot of books of that sort, right? People were just like, this needs to be, like, we want Judith Regan as much, even more than you want this book. but yeah I mean that was

I remember when that book was announced and was it if I did it and then it was eventually published by the Goldman's as I did it or do I have that backwards was it and they changed the title because it was just too inflammatory

yes they got the they got the rights to the book and then of course they wind up getting all the income from the book which it was noted this week Jacob Bernstein has a big piece in the New York Times about if I did it speaking of piece is exactly what I want

wanted to read this weekend. Yeah. That explains this. And that was some of the only money, you know, they won this big judgment against O.J. At the civil trial, very little of that money was actually paid to the families. But it's some of, they got some income from the remixed if I did it. But the original book, this was the idea, and this is Bernstein in the New York Times, he would describe, that is O.J. would describe in hypothetical terms, what might have transpired

on the night of June 12, 1994, when Ms. Brown, Simpson, and Mr. Goldman were found outside her home in West Los Angeles stabbed to death. OJ would also do an interview on camera with Judith Regan, it turned out, because that was going to run as a separate special when the book came out. And this whole interviews recounted here, too. Keep this in mind. This is hypothetical, OJ said, and then gives this hypothetical description of what might have occurred in 1994.

one of the strangest things I have ever heard of. It is a really, really weird part of this whole scenario. All right, David, coming up in 30 seconds, The Rock doesn't want to talk politics anymore. Why many of us are his tag team partners. But first, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time.

Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always, always gratefully received. today's Twitter joke comes to us from listener Matt Womack. It is about big surprise OJ. It was a very overworked Twitter joke to write. Cancer will continue to search for the real killers. Thank you to Matt. If you got that last one in,

congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, the notebook dump, David. This just in as we record this podcast, CNN has canceled King Charles. Oh, wow. on a show you and I were glued to

in the two or three Twitter clips we saw from it. New York Post reports that the show was limited by Barclay's schedule. The NBA Hall of Famer could only do the show on Wednesdays due to his other commitments, namely his role as a co-host of the popular inside the NBA on CNN's sister station TNT,

according to his source close to the network. King Charles of the Post continues was a distant third to its competitors. Fox News's gutfeld in the last word with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC. Yeah. I can't say I'm too shocked. No.

I mean, is this just the, I don't want to say use any trite phrases, like nail in the coffin, but I mean, this kind of seems like the, I mean, all the, like the, the, to the final testament that, you know, cable news as we know it is not going to be saved by. invading down the same hole. Does that make it? It seems like this is about as far as they could have taken, like getting big names to talk about the news, like all the kind of like milk toast innovations. And I think frankly, I don't know what there is to save,

not that it should be burned down. We've said we've talked about this a million times before, but like cable news to some extent kind of is what it is. And, and, you know, we talked about CNN and international news and all the different ways that, the ways that,

you that you know that we that we enjoy and want to take in that cable news but to try to innovate to try to raise viewership it just seems like you know what better shot would you have had than charles barclay and gale king yes i mean i remember when chris licked signed this deal to to throw out a name that hasn't been on the press box in a while you and i our first reaction was like you got Charles Barkley? Yeah. Interesting. Oh, you've got Charles

Berkeley weekly rather than doing a nightly cable news program. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Like, how are you going to create

any interest around that? Yeah, it's really hard. So if you're going to iterate, if you told me, okay, you can take a chunk of your primetime lineup and just have Charles Barkley talking about stuff,

I'm interested at least to, in theory. But if you're going to have Charles Barkley on TV once a week, when he's already saying stuff like this on TNT and on any podcast he gets invited on, I don't know. But isn't that the point? I mean, wouldn't you rather hear if they had just said, forget the studio, well, we're just going to be signed Charles Barkley to a contract, Charles Barkley and Gil King to a contract to like hop on Zoom whenever anything interesting happens and talk for five minutes, like, wouldn't that be a much more functional version of this?

With like emergency podcast, King Charles edition? So they can't do that. But it's just... Yeah, but you just described an emergency podcast featuring the two of them, which is a good idea. Yeah. But doing the nightly or the weekly cable show. Yeah, well, emergency podcasts are the wave of the future. I don't know if you're...

The way of the future. imagine all the mailchimp money that CNN would be making if they took that on in other political news did it surprise you that the rock declined to re-endorse joe byton oh my god you're setting me up here the rock has done so much right over the past several months okay the beloved sport of pro wrestling that one kind of caught me off guard it did to an extent i mean in a way it's not surprising right the people who would have been all in on the resistance train four years ago would now be backing off a bit for a series of reason. I almost thought we could do a little bit of a half-ass think piece here. Go on.

Because we had Danny Parkins on the show. Danny Parkins is drive-time Chicago radio personality. Really good at sports radio. And he's also one of those sports radio guys who is happy to tweet about Donald Trump, who is happy to get his hands dirty with subjects that do not involve Caleb Williams. And I asked him about this,

and he told me that to a certain extent he has backed off doing that. That doesn't feel differently about Donald Trump, but he has backed off political engagement online, at least to the degree he was once doing it. And what do you say? get a, well, we'll play a clip from here in a second, but it just made me think that that probably describes a lot of people in our corner of the media.

Yeah. Their feelings about Donald Trump have not changed all that much. This is the half-ass part of it. See, this is where we're crossing a bridge with some evidence in hand, but not all of the evidence in hand. Mm-hmm. But they're not engaged online in the same way that they once were, or in their colleagues. in their podcasts. And when I saw that,

when I saw Danny Parkinson and I saw that when I heard Danny Parkinson and then saw what the rock said, I thought, oh, that, that just feels familiar because the world feels like it's changed in a certain way in the last four years. So I was thinking about the reasons for this.

One is Biden presidency. There is less tweeting. There is less anger and outrage than there was four years ago. That's certainly part of it. Trump, we forget now was dabbling in sports constantly. Trump and LeBron was a feud. Trump was going after Colin Kaepernick.

Donald Trump called for Jamel Hill to be fired from ESPN. It's crazy. It's that sounds now. There was a moment during the Trump administration when it felt like the walls were coming down at sports media outlets. It's like, oh, it's okay now for the personalities here to talk about politics. Yeah.

Well, what's happened at ESPN, for instance, then. The walls went back up. Yeah. Jimmy Patero particularly said, we don't want to be in that business. If there's some kind of sports politics connection, maybe we're interested in going there. But normal course of business, we're not a political network. We don't want anybody to watch this and think we're going to be a political network. Sure. Danny Parkin said this on the show. I'll let him explain himself. Why is he tweeting less about politics? One of the things that I've learned is not sticking to sports. I never stick to sports, but that how valuable is it if you are either preaching to the

choir and then you're in the echo chamber or you're just people are coming to you for spaghetti and you're serving them broccoli and then you're pissing them off and alienating your audience or making them turn away. Because even people who will agree with me might be looking for spaghetti and I'm giving them broccoli and it might upset them. And so I do think that you've seen it in sports media. We've kind of learned and adapted on some of that stuff. Yeah, I think the broccoli spaghetti metaphor is dead on. I think that it's, that it's, you know, it's unnecessary. It's like having, keep bringing this back to family and friends comparisons, but it's like having your family over for holiday dinner or something like that. You know, there's some topics you

just don't broach if you want everything to run smoothly. And, And I also think that, listen, I mean, there's probably people listening to this who think that what we're talking about is the most important decision that they'll ever face in their lifetimes and how can they possibly not be saying it out loud at every moment. And I think that that's totally valid. I mean, you know, we could be talking about something else, you and I right now. But I think what you see from people, like maybe the rock is that like maybe they don't think this is the most important decision. that they'll ever have to face in their lifetimes. And so they're just going to take a seat while other people yell about it. You know, I'm sure The Rock didn't mean to be The Rock.

I'm sure Mr. Johnson didn't mean for this to be an anti-endorsement and the way that it came off. And he probably could have avoided the answer, you know, more tactfully. It probably sounded good when he was prepping. But, or maybe the point was to, you know, kind of surreptitiously endorse. Trump, I don't, I don't know. I can't, I can't predict his Iraq's politics. Like I can predict his heel turns. But yeah, I mean, I think, I think that that's, I think that we're probably going to see a lot of that. I think, I think, I think if we're reading people's minds, I think there's a group, there's a group of people who think this is the most important

decision or one of, you know, the most important decision part three of my lifetime. I just don't want to be publicly involved because I don't like the consequences of being publicly involved. I don't like the blowback that I'm getting. I don't want to be. I think there are a lot of people in sports media in particular who during the first,

during the Trump administration, we're like, I want to be Howard CoSell. I want to try on that canary yellow ABC Sports Blazer and be in this. And at some point, for whatever reason, decided they don't want to be in this day to day. Yeah. And, you know, everybody, again, has a different interest in, in what they're, you know, in being in it, to what degree they're in it and the way they talk about these things.

But it does feel like we've had, broadly speaking, and again, half-ass think piece here, a stepping away to a certain degree from people who were very, very loud about this. at a different time. It's an interesting thing to punt. All right, running departments, David, we have some only in journalism words that have stacked up since we last spoke.

Great. Jason Jarrett sends in the word mercurial. Referring to Mercurial Texas Longhorns Guard Tyrese Hunter. Kind of an only in sports writing word, which I would say is used to mean, inconsistent on the court and maybe inconsistent off the court.

Yeah. Mercurial. Sometimes he scores a lot of points. Sometimes he doesn't score a lot of points. I think it's more off the court, yes. This is one of the few times where an only in journalism submission has made me take a word out of a story draft I was about to submit. Full transparency, I went and took the Mercurial out. So thanks to Jason Jarrett there for the edit.

you've used a word too many times in a story, you often then pivot to a second word that is something of a synonym. So if you're writing about Shohei Otani's interpreter allegedly stealing money from him, on second usage, you might use the word pilfering. Yeah. As I saw in one article this week, if you're writing about the judge and the first of the many Donald Trump trials, you might call him a jurist. on second usage.

New York Times says known as a no-nonsense drama-averse jurist. Yeah. Some serious only in journalism there. And then I was reading the New York Times morning newsletter this morning, and I saw an old favorite boon. Oh, boon's a great one. A political boon to Donald Trump. Listener Cyrus J. Cooper says it's also only in Magic the Gathering.

I'm going to let you and him take that one offline, but Boone definitely only in journalism. It's true. It's funny when you talk about the repeating of the words. I know this is the hardest thing in the world, and you're not writing in a linear fashion, and I totally understood how this happened, but I read, not at the ringer,

I read someone else's NFL mock draft, and they used the phrase the trenches to describe the offensive line in, I think, four out of five consecutive pick. But the trenches is like, is the synonym? Yes, exactly. But it's just like you got to find that you have to, yeah, you got to go back and forth.

Some editor has got to be watching this. It's like when, I remember, I can't remember who said this once, but just like when you're writing, when you're looking for words other than said, maybe this is Elmore Leonard to have a character said, just write said. Yes, exactly. Unless you really need to explain. the way they said it don't have so-and-so explained

so-and-so offered. Nobody needs to intone. Nobody needs to exhale. If exhale is something, I mean, in a very specific case. They're breathing out. Yes, then you can have that.

You can take another sentence if you need to go into greater detail. All right, it's time for a feature that never uses synonyms. It's time for David Shoemaker. Guesses a strain. headline. Yeah. Our last headline about watching the eclipse from the path of totality was sun, moon, and stairs. Today's headline comes from a bunch of people. I'm going to give it

to Ethan Glore. It's from the Washington Post. David Caitlin Clark of the University of Iowa played in the women's NCAA tournament final in Cleveland the day before the eclipse. before mentioned eclipse that everyone got so excited about so we got Caitlin Clark we got solar event happening right after she plays in the final what was the Washington Post

strain pun headline Caitlin Clark is it something about Hawkeyes in the sun? No no Caitlin Clark NCAA NCAA finals eclipse yep um um and it was a big eclipse i mean it was total what would it be total total

total total eclipse of the something just just keep working totally it's katelyn'tlark it's katelyn clark total eclipse of the clerk total eclipse total eclipse and the clerk oh and the clerk okay yeah Okay. It's in Cleveland. I believe it's a total eclipse and the Clark. Yeah. Big moment for Cleveland. He is David Shoemaker.

I'm Brian Curtis. Braxia Magic by Brian Waters. Coming up on Thursday, David, guest host is going to be Derek Thompson. Yeah. Derek Thompson, that Derek Thompson of the Atlantic in his Ringer podcast, plain English coming to pay us a visit on the press box. Plus, of course, I'm sorry, 3, 2, 1, Brian.

And then on Monday, Shoemaker returns. More lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.