The Press Box - Trump Takes on Amazon (Again), ESPN’s New Morning Show, and the Next Installment in the Chronicles of Tiger Woods | The Press Box (Ep. 449)

Episode Date: April 3, 2018

The Ringer’s David Shoemaker and Bryan Curtis discuss President Trump and Amazon’s latest spat (2:30), ESPN’s new morning show ‘Get Up!’ (18:05), and the latest Tiger Woods tell-all biography (35:51). You can find the official Ringer web store here: http://bit.ly/ringershop Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, everyone, the ringer has new merchandise for sale right now. Go to ringer.com slash shop to pre-order your official ringer merchandise today. David, Donald Trump called Roseanne after the premiere of her rebooted sitcom and drew 18 plus million viewers. What I want to know is, what other media members would you like to see Trump call? Is it too self-serving to hope that he calls Bill Simmons when the Andre the Giant documentary comes? I think that might actually happen. Or he'd probably call Vince. He'd call Vince McMahon.

It'd be Vince. Yeah. Absolutely. It's great work on that wonderful documentary. It is funny because in the old days, right, you got the presidential phone call when you won the Super Bowl, right? Bill Clinton was not calling the producers of ER and saying congrats on the great ratings, right? He may have been. I mean, we don't know.

I got a few more for you. He can call Mike Greenberg after the premiere of Get Up. Oh, yeah. I think I'd like to hear the recording of that telephone call. I think I'd prefer to hear the recording if he called Jalen. but go ahead. I'd like to hear that too, or Beatle even better. How about novelist Ernest Klein after the strong opening of Ready Player 1?

I was thinking of Spielberg, but that's much better. You have proved that a high concept yet poorly written novel can become a lucrative film franchise. I think that's kind of exactly what he would say. We are the kind of guys who aren't above a self-serving congratulatory phone call. This is the Press Box on the Ringer Podcast Network. The press box is the media podcast where you're not allowed to use the phrase, the bar stoolization of the sports media, because I got a tweet saying I use that phrase all the time. And I am ashamed.

We are Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer. If you want some recent content by us, you can read my non-review review of the new ESPN Morning Show, Get Up. You can listen to the Mask Man Show on the road to WrestleMania. And for you, golf fans, Shackhouse is all about the road to the Masters. Coming up this week. Amazing. But David, I've got three topics for you today. First is Trump's battle against Amazon merely a proxy war for his battle against the Washington Post?

Yes, it is. We'll discuss. Second, the debut of the new ESPN Morning Show, Get Up, we discuss. And finally, a new Tiger Woods biography in the high art of sports muckraking. Plus, as always, our overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, in honor of Amazon, let's call our first topic, customers who bought Trump's phony populism also bought. his rants against Amazon.

See what I did there? This Friday was unusually quiet by Trumpian standards in the sense that no high-ranking government employees were fired or humiliated online. But by Saturday morning, the Trump tweet train was back on the tracks, and the president was hammering his favorite recent target Amazon. Trump claimed the Postal service was losing money on Amazon deliveries, and the Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, was using post reporters as his de facto lobbyists. I think we should start here with the mandatory fact.

checks to any Trump tweets, right? Postal Service is not actually getting a terrible deal on Amazon. And as David Leventhal of the Center for Public Integrity points out, the journalists registering as lobbyist is not a thing. So anyway, just to put that on the table. What did you make of the president's new interests, shall we say, in Amazon? This is tough. It's tough to not be too arch about this, right?

I mean, it seems like, first of all, it's conspicuous that it's coming on the heels of everything that has been happening with Facebook lately, right? That there's one major internet media Goliath has substantively wronged many or all of its users and are on a national apology tour to try to make amends for fear that the government might do something to them. We discussed all this in relative depth last week. And Trump's either connected or not, it looks like Trump's responses to go after Amazon. Now, I don't. Another Goliath. Yeah. I don't want to compare any social media company to terrorism, but this does feel like Trump's al-Qaeda to Iraq pivot, where he just takes one bad thing and goes after a similar but unrelated thing.

Yeah. It's very strange. And on top of all that, all of his company, you know, there's a lot of a lot of sort of, sort of. you know, mind reading in the press about what is behind Trump's antipathy towards Amazon. But there's, you know, the one that keeps coming up aside from the Washington Post is that a lot of the people in Trump's here are like old-fashioned real estate, you know, moguls who see that brick and mortar, who see their chain stores, their malls, their, you know, their real estate values plummeting because Amazon is taking that. There does seem to be a very real, a very, a very like grandpa talking

about the internet feeling to the whole thing. This grandpa's just got a lot of power of taxation and whatnot to do something about it. This grandpa happens to be president. Yeah, I mean, I think we should just, no mind reading necessary. This is an attack, at least in some part, an attack on the media dressed up as a good government rant. I recommend Jonathan Chate's column in New York where he says, Amazon is the outlet for his hatred of the Washington Post. There are tweets as far back as 20. 2015 showing the connection, right?

And during the election, Trump used Amazon attacks as an applause line on the trail. Here he is in February 2016. I have respect for Jeff Bezos, but he bought the Washington Post to have political influence. And I got to tell you, we have a different country that we used to have. We have a different, he owns Amazon. He wants political influence so that Amazon will benefit from it. That's not right. and believe me, if I become president, oh, do they have problems?

They're going to have such problems. And it's so funny because I also feel with Trump, there's always naked self-interest, right? You mentioned his friends from the old school business world. But if Trump were hawking a book right now, Trump were not president and had just written a book about his 2016 campaign, would he be mad at Amazon right now? No way, right? Right. Because you need the sales, right? Yeah.

Trump at this point does not need Amazon. Yeah, I mean, he does have a relatively recent book that came out, I think, at the very end of the campaign. We'll talk more about the publishing world later on in the show. I think that's true. I mean, I don't know that the self-interest aspect is really that closely tied to. With Trump? No, no, no.

I think you're right. I think that there's an inverse to it that's not exactly true. You know, one could say that it would be, you know, in his best interest to be, you know, if not courting the favor, then playing nice with the Department of Justice and the FBI and foreign leaders and stuff. And that's not, you know, but I guess it's a different. it's a different degree of self-interest when it's, you know, and the thing that's actually promoting, the tool of self-promotion.

I also think that just for him, Amazon is not, you know, it's not a going concern in the way that Twitter maybe is, you know, or, I mean, he's had a few comments about Facebook

where he's just kind of vaguely said, oh, it's good for me getting my message out. But, you know, I think that he, I mean, I frankly think it's a miscalculation. Who knows if it'll end up working in a sense,

favor. But I think that he, when he says Amazon, he's speaking of some, you know, ominous corporate behemoth, and that's not the average Amazon user's impression of Amazon. Yeah. Well, we've seen his ability to make toxic lots of things that were not toxic before an American life, right, or at least to Trump's fans. The NFL is a good example, right? You'd figure there'd be an enormous amount of crossover between liking the NFL and voting for Donald Trump. And yet, right, he turned around by saying, ah, you know, it's a league of the full of protesters and they won't do anything. And, you know, it's all the football's terrible now and all the stuff. Right.

You attack the NFL and at least temporarily made it sort of toxic. Yeah. Well, it's easy to go on the attack and to do real damage. I mean, Amazon stock prices has taken a big hit since in the past week since Trump started going after them. But it's not like he's offering an alternative. You know, like Trump's attacks on the NFL may be effective to a point. but when he starts saying watch the XFL instead

or watch whatever the Ebersoll football program is when that comes on the air, I think we'll see a limit to what the power of the podium has, you know. Can you imagine if he endorsed Barnes & Noble.com? Well, that's exactly what I was going to say. What, like, get your pins and pads from staples.com or what? I mean, like, is anyone really making that jump because Trump says so? You know, the word came out this week that his own campaign ordered a lot of their office supplies from Amazon.

I mean, for so many people, Amazon is a monolith for those sorts of things. And that does, there are real issues that a president could raise about the power of Amazon. But that's not the attack that he's taking. Yeah. And I feel we saw that a little bit this week in the liberal media, so-called, people saying, now wait a second. Just because Trump is angry at Amazon for totally irrational reasons. Right. Doesn't mean that the critique.

of Amazon put forward by Frank Four and other authors is wrong, right? That they have too much power, right? That they should be regulated, like the same thing we were talking about Facebook last week. There is a liberal argument that Amazon in its current state and with its current power is bad. Yeah. And that you don't want to put yourself in the corner of defending it because Trump has declared it for whatever strange reason is. Yeah, but I think that we as journalists as hopefully thoughtful people, I mean, also need to be able to, to balance those two things and not. I mean, I feel like the response to Trump on Amazon has been pretty muted in the, at least in the media world. People have been covering it, you know, reporting that it happened. And there have been a lot of people covering Amazon stock. But I think it's important to point out when and where he's really wrong about these things so that the argument, so that a more thoughtful argument against the power of Amazon has more weight.

Yeah, and I would also say it's important to point out why this is bad, right? Trump attacks lots of things. Right. He attacks things all the time. So a couple things. One is attacking the press, the president attacking the press, especially because the press is not serving as his tool of self-promotion. That's bad. That's bad.

Number two, I point people to Adam Davidson's thread. He's a writer for the New Yorker. And he says, quote, it is an important economic act that is restructuring our economy, talking about what Trump is saying. This is an open negotiation and a clear message. Trump will transfer wealth to those who praise him. and take it from those who don't. Yep. Right?

And this has been his attitude toward business, basically since it's been president, probably before he was president, too. Also funny about this, there was a CNBC story from December saying that Trump's tax plan. I remember Trump is saying that Amazon is getting a sweetheart deal from the post office and ripping off you the American taxpayer. Trump's – the CNBC story from December trying Trump's own tax plane could save Amazon $2 billion in taxes. So Trump's saying they're getting a sweetheart deal from the postal service. But they got a sweetheart deal from Trump. Yeah. And I enjoyed this tweet from Vox's Matthew Iglesias, who said, K-Fabe is an important concept for understanding Trump-era politics.

Yeah. Right? Yep. And it's true. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of, there's obviously the taxation situation of any company as big as Amazon is going to be Byzantine. But there have been a lot of, you know, informative pieces that have come out that have basically said that, no, Amazon is paying taxes. Amazon is net positive.

for the Postal Service. By all means, Google those and read the ones that you agree with. But it's worth pointing out that the kicker, FoxNews.com piece on the subject was, quote, still, federal regulators have reviewed the Amazon contract with the Postal Service each year and determined it to be profitable. Right. So, I mean, that's Fox saying, you know, saying that very factually. Yeah. Of course it is.

I mean, just like one of those things like, well, course it is. Yeah. And even, I mean, there, I guess one of, there was a Wall Street Journal piece, I think, that alluded to the fact that maybe the, the deal that they had wasn't keeping up with inflation or that, you know, that was, which is, or that they're making postal people work on Sundays, which is, you know, because there's promise Sunday delivery right on Amazon, which is, sure, but, but, I mean, even if this, I mean, I'm not, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, you know, there's the lightbulbs argument, you know, like, if they're putting this much money in the postal service, even if it's not lining everybody's pockets, this is, this is, this is money that's, that's, you know, going to be used to keep the lights on, keep people employed, keep cashing checks, you know, you know, you know, you know, Before we move on, do you not detect a billionaire versus billionaire subtext to this? Definitely. I mean, I almost feel like it's too easy to go there, right? But there was...

But why not? But of course. No, I mean, I think, you know, Jeff Bezos, at least prior to the Amazon stock taking a hit, was, you know, somewhere around the $120 billion mark in personal wealth. The top spot on the Forbes' wealthy Americans list. And Trump's somewhere around $3 billion. I mean, there's certainly got to be some envy there. I mean, I don't know if it, you know, if this is going to be something as like Shakespearean as somebody made a joke that he's not, you know, there's all these young guys who were the new real rich moguls in the world.

Yeah. You know, but certainly that's, I can imagine that that sort of thing is on his mind. You started talking about the Washington Post. That connection, I'm sure, underscored whatever preconceived negative feelings he had towards Amazon. be it from other, you know, real estate involved friends or just, you know, just hearing about, I mean, for years their tax situation was bad. I mean, and now you can make the case that it's still not where it should be, Amazon I'm speaking of. So it's, you know, it's possible that he heard a lot of really, you know, true and things about Amazon that you and I would agree with and just sort of morphed it into this hatred for Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post, you know, by proxy. Personalized it and only the way that Trump can.

All right, David, now it's time for our 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. Yes. So baseball's opening day was last Thursday. I'm aware. And as baseball writer Jay Busby noted, we should give a group award to anyone who, upon seeing the results of opening day, said, quote, X team is on pace to go 162 and O or O in 162. Mm-hmm.

Also, that John Carlos Stanton is on pace to hit 162 home runs. There's a real knee-slapper for the start of every sports. season. Good job. Twitter. I love that joke. A big media story last week was Fox's Laura Ingraham attacking the Parkland students and getting a giant boycott of her sponsors in return.

Then Frank brother of Sylvester Stallone also attacked the Parkland students. After which it became an overworked Twitter joke to say, and here I'm quoting Judd Apatow, we don't have to worry about a Frank Stallone boycott that started in the late 70s.

Awesome from last week, did you notice we heard from noted plagiarist Benny Johnson. Johnson, who is now at the daily caller, took advantage of a tweet from conservative Ben Shapiro who was complaining about working in the liberal media to say, quote, try working at BuzzFeed. Johnson was fired from BuzzFeed for plagiarism, not for being conservative. The resulting overword Twitter joke, I quote from Tom Clutt of CNN, when something like this, I'm heartened that we can still come together. if only in the briefest demonstration of unity to dunk all over the unrepentant plagiarist. Okay, good, good gag, right? Then I look at Olivia Messer of the Daily Beast. In this time of deep division, at least we can all unite in the purity of dunking on Benny Johnson.

Do you see this? To go after the plagiarist, they did the same joke. Yeah. It's the same joke. That's meta right there, baby. That's fantastic work. Finally, David, here at Ringer Industries, we released part six of the Bill Simmons, Kevin Durant interviews. the sports-themed Frost Nixon of our time.

And at Durant went on an extended rant about blog boys, by which he seemed to mean any working sports writer. Yeah, blog boys. Blog boys, yeah. Now a t-shirt on the ringer, right? Then on Friday night, Durant got ejected from the Warriors game against the bucks, after which, as the basketball writer, Sean Hiken points out, people tweeted, he must have called the referee a blog boy.

Oh, my gosh. It all comes around, doesn't it, right? Yeah. What starts on the BS podcast is now an overworked Twitter joke here on the press box. It's the press box singularity. This is great. Congrats to everyone on Twitter for allowing us to create a human centipede of ringer content. All right, David, before we talk about the new ESPN show, get up, let's take a quick break.

We have exciting news for all you ringer heads out there. The ringer has new merchandise with a shiny new storefront that you can check out right now. We have hats, hoodies, and even an exclusive Shea Serrano disrespectful dunk t-shirt. Your friends will be jealous when they see you walk. down the street with an official ringer zip-up hoodie previously available only to ringer staffers we are letting you, our loyal listeners, get first dibs on the goods. Go to the ringer.com

slash shop to pre-order your merch now. These are limited run items that will not last long. Once they're gone, they're gone. Again, check out the ringer.com slash shop to pre-order your official ringer merchandise today. You can also find the link to the ringer web store in the podcast description. All right, David, our second topic,

I am loath to use the headline. I'm loath to waste the headline, colder pizza. But let's just throw it out there for now. Let's do it. Said my piece on the ringer today that I don't believe in day one reviews. Why not? Because Grantland got bad reviews before we even started. We were declared a failure in advance. Anyway, so I'm going to cut some slide to the new ESPN Morning Show, Get Up, which started on Monday. But a few thoughts for you.

One, it was sort of semi-controversial when ESPN built yet another giant, expensive new studio in New York, South Street, Seaport. Right. But it's cool, right? When you have a morning show in New York, you want to see New York out the window, right? Well, I guess what happened today? There was a giant snowstorm in New York. So they have this window that looked like a sauna behind them. It was just pure white. And it was completely, you couldn't see a thing for the first hour or two of the show. Pretty amazing. I love that. So that was a good use of money right off the top. The funny thing I think about getting up and watching this show this morning was, I guess, I think a lot of us or maybe just me, were expecting ESPN to kind of be jumping into the Good Morning America space. And in fact, it's more like, Get Up is more like a Frankenstein's monster of existing ESPN show. It's like they took all the things we like across the network and just did it earlier. Yeah.

Did you notice that in your? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if I had to, you know, qualify that at all, there's more space in the show. and I mean that both physically and metaphorically. I think that if you look back at Mike and Mike, obviously Mike Greenberg's previous post, there wasn't much space on the set. I mean, it was just,

it was more cramped to set than any other thing on ESPN. It was a radio studio. Yeah, it was a, well, they blew it out eventually. But they, but yeah, but there was a lot of, you know, it was allowed to be a little bit more ponderous. Now, I'm not saying this is great intellectual discussions or anything, but they had to fill up hours and hours of airtime as opposed to, you know, Sports Nation or something

where they're just like, it's quick hits start to finish. With Get Up, they have a little bit of that airiness, but also literal eriness too, because there's just more physical space between the various hosts of the show. It does, you know, we've compared, I mean, people have compared it, and I know you took exception of this in your piece,

but people have compared it before airing to Morning Joe as being the, you know, that sort of being one of the philosophical, you know, godfathers to get up. It definitely had some of that just in, terms of a sort of forced collegiality, you know, a kind of chumminess. We want to see people having fun in the morning. Yeah.

We want to see a gang. Morning Joe really did, right, besides, you know, briefly somehow become this go-to thing, thanks to Trump criticizing it all the time. Yeah. We just have like, here's my gang of people, right? We're all wearing zip-ups. We're all drinking Starbucks, chewing over the news of the day. Yeah.

And clearly, Get-Up wants to have some of that. Yeah, that Mike Barnacle Mojo. I did take, I mentioned this to you last week. I was humored. I mean, I enjoyed seeing the swaths of brick wall on the get-up set because there was a moment where Morning Joe redesigned their whole set, trumpeted it out to the media, and then the first day the entire thing was brick walls made to look, I guess, like a coffee shop, and that was gone like 24 hours later because it just looked so bad on TV.

Get Up has solved the brick wall problem. And they just have little pieces of brick wall that are that are very good. So kudos to them for that. But I do think that there's a little in so much as Morning Joe or anything else is a direct inspiration. My feet, my worry is that it comes from that sort of cloistered, you know, New York media mind. And I'm not, this isn't an issue about conservatism or liberalism. It's just like, you know, it's cultural. It's a cultural thing.

And yeah. And I, and, you know, Morning Joe is a very significant show. in its little hemisphere, but it's a show that means a lot more to TV producers in New York than it does to the other 99.9% of the potential viewing audience. Absolutely. And Washington, D.C. Sure. Right. That show's successful to the extent successful because, like, everybody, you know, you get a huge chunk of people in Washington, D.C., in politics, and then you get some people in New York, too, where it happens to emanate from. Sure.

We're interested in it. ESPN. We forget it just aims so much bigger than cable. news. ESPN, especially that kind of cable news, ESPN is everybody. Yeah. Right? It's the whole country. And you're right.

There is some, and it's funny because they were doing so many things, they were almost doing everything out of Bristol, right? And this is part of this new push to have a presence in New York, which is explained to me as we just don't know that we can get the most talented producers in the world to move to Connecticut. But we can get them in Brooklyn, right? So if we're going to have access to these people, we have to have stuff for them to do New York and not make them go to Connecticut.

Yes, I think that's true. And also, we've talked about the set and the New York production in general a number of times. Maybe I've just not been paying enough attention. We definitely know the salaries of the three main figures on GetUp have been reported. But when Mike and Mike were building their new set that never got used as far, at least not from Mike and Mike in New York, however many years ago that was, that was in an era of ESPN expansion. And the dollar figure of the set rebuild was trumpeted as a sort of, as a self-acallade sort of, like look at all this money we're spending. In 2018, I don't think I've seen a dollar figure as for how much they've spent on this new set.

And if they have, they certainly are not getting it into every press release. I mean, the amount of money they spent, I think, is something to be a little bit more shy about in this current year. Yeah, when you had two rounds of layoffs a preview year. Exactly. Right. Yeah. And that was certainly something people pointed out, wait, you're building. that you're laying people off you're building this set.

A couple of other things I was interested in. They have a very funny feature called This Day in Sports History. Yes. Right, where they were. Today was devoted to Kendrick Perkins traveling in 2015, like taking nine steps and not being called. That was a funny idea. I actually thought it was going to be straight when it started.

Yes. Oh, no. But it was actually very funny. They do something called Hot Take Factory. And it's funny because I think you can divide almost all ESPN personalities into two groups. There are the kind that do hot takes, It's actually pretty small. It's basically Stephen A and Max on first take.

And then there's a kind that don't want to do hot takes. And I swear everybody with the discipline of those Sinclair news anchors who were all reading from the script last year, would always say, oh, no, no, no, I don't do debate. I do discussion. Yeah. Like that was the catchphrase, right? And these guys do discussion. But they have this segment called Hot Take Factory where you get to consider the hot take. What is this morning's hot take?

Greenie coming out of the... Final four for the women's college basketball, it is this. No matter what happens tonight, this year's women's final four is better. That is your best, Final Four. Michelle Beatle, how hot is that tape? I honestly, I've been saying it all weekend that the women thoroughly entertained us, and the men didn't. So that you get the joy of the hot take, but then you get the kind of gravitas of not giving them exactly.

And it's notable that they have their producer reading the hot take. to them from off camera, so they don't even have the guilt, yeah, of introducing the hot take into the discussion. This is, I mean, it's transparent. This is what our corporate overlords are forcing us to talk about. Somebody made, some suit made us do this. Exactly, exactly. And it should be pointed out also that no one's wearing a suit on the show, not the,

not the people on the backstage crew or the people on the, on the platform. So my last trip to Bristol, I was just amazed by that, just walking around. It looked like an internet startup. Like, no, but people on the air. Yeah. You know, everybody was in, you know, Converse and zip-ups and everything. There were no suits.

Yeah. There were no more suits at ESPN. They're gone. Didn't Bill do it, didn't do an ESPN hit right during his very last days there where he was brought on the last second to discuss a trade that had happened, and he was wearing a hoodie in jeans and just looked like a crazy person compared to everything else around?

I don't remember that. All right. But anyway, yeah, no, it's changed a lot. And I think, you know, for the most part, change for the better. I mean, you're never going to, you know, completely, I mean, make a, you know, make every episode of SportsCenter seem like hanging out with the guys at the bar. I mean, they've tried and failed at that. But you can certainly make things feel a little bit more conversational and comfortable. Speaking of which, um, one big, you know, sort of surprise that you wrote about was that

Michelle Beatle, uh, opened the show. Yeah. She was the first one that spoke. She acted, she, she, she functioned as the host of the show more so than Greenberg throughout as much. Yeah. Yeah. more so. And, I mean, she certainly had that, has that demeanor down in a way, you know, that we're used to saying. Maybe that's a preconceived notion thing. But what did you take from that? I mean, you know, Greenberg has been, has loudly been saying, or maybe not so loudly, but has consistently been saying that he was never meant to be the star of the show. He has.

Yeah. And he said, you know, I just signed first. And the show wasn't going to be greeny and friends. It was always going to be an ensemble. I just happened to go first. I thought it was interesting because I said in the story, it was almost like there were two point guards out there. right? Because Greenie is a point guard, right? That's what he was on Mike and Mike. You know, I'm going to interview people. I'm going to, you know, dish it off to go and I'm going to have my takes,

but they're not going to light the world on fire. No, his takes are mostly ironic, right? I mean, his takes were, and I don't... What about being a dad or something like that? Yeah, but he would do the... I'm going to tell funny story on myself kind of stuff, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, Rasillo does it, I mean, has this, does a joke, or a bit, But like it's always a, you know, when you come back from commercial, I'm going to tell you why, you know, I'm going to tell you why LeBron James is actually the shortest player in the NBA, you know. The Greenie Tees was kind of legendary. But it's a good kind of playful sort of irony.

And, you know, I think he, I think, you know, Greenberg gets a lot of hate that's not, I mean, deserved or undeserved. I think it's sort of separate from his actual skills and his actual talent. You know, he's an easy target. And in a lot of ways, this feels, this felt like a pretty natural setting for him. And maybe part of that was, you know, he gets to play a little off the ball like James Harden when Chris Paul's on the court. We're now extending the basketball metaphor. You started it, man. I know.

I know. It's my fault. I do think it's interesting. When you talk about him, he is definitely a target in the Twitterverse. People with NESPN, I've never heard a bad word about him. Sure. I don't think I've ever, in fact, I don't think I've ever heard a bad word about it. He's very well-liked in there.

and lots and lots of pals in that universe. There were a lot of sports TV people when this was announced who came up to me and were like, oh, wow. They were really surprised that ESPN had gone in with Greenie on this. They just didn't see that coming, both because he had a lucrative radio show

that was going on, and because they just didn't figure him as that kind of talent. I think he's going to have to get used to being a TV guy. You know, he still talks pretty fast. You know, he just doesn't have that TV. He has a radio manner. He has like the radio simulcast manner. I can kind of be looking at the ground.

I don't have to smile a lot. Yeah. You know? But there is this. I don't think it's necessarily bad, but I just think it does not look like what's on television. Yeah, I mean, but like. Not that everybody has to smile from, you know, 50 yards across the 50 yard line, right? And that's not a.

Yeah. No, I think, but, you know, morning TV does embrace that sort of awkwardness, right? I mean, Joe Scarborough is not a conventional TV guy. He's obviously a lot, he's a lot more polished now than he was when he started. I mean, Mika Brzezinski was the. was more of the polished anger when the show launched. I mean, even if you look over it like the, you know, what George Stephanopoulos is of the world or whoever,

Charlie Rose when he was doing the morning, I mean, there's an awkwardness to all this. There is an awkwardness. It's a fatherly awkwardness. But it's, you know, it's, it's, every morning show is not, you know, Ryan Crestcheon, you know? No, well, I was actually thinking of the archetypes,

the morning archetypes on the way in today. There was the thinker, like George Stephanopoulos and Bryant Gumble. Yeah. That was the thinker. And then there was kind of the smart. You know, Matt and Matt Lauer, though I think Matt kind of like later kind of tried to transition. You wanted to be a thinker. You wanted to be the thinker, right?

But those were kind of the two male archetypes on morning television, right? Yeah. And, you know, maybe it's a greenie just isn't exactly either one of those guys, you know? He's just kind of a different third category. Yeah, I mean, I think there's something to that. I think that he's, you know, I mean, he's thoughtful, but not the thinker. And he's certainly not the smiler. But maybe that's just going to be a measure of him getting comfortable in his new skin and his new literal chair.

Here's a question I want to ask you about get up. And I say this, I say this completely neutrally because I think we think about, and I loved it, and I prefer to think about how these shows work and what does it. But the hardest thing, right, is launching a talk show right now in 2018 with the way everything is moving. What would make you watch a show like this? Like, what would be, how would you admit this into your morning routine? Because I just wonder, like, you know, everybody you say, you know, It's not that they don't want to watch it. It's just that people get up and read Twitter and...

They do different things. Or they just are interested in political news in the morning in Trump world, as we said a minute ago, and that this is sort of like, you know, just something else. What would it take for you? Well, I can speak in firsthand experience. One day deep into the get up experience. I woke up today and turned on news. And then, you know, five minutes later, registered that this was the first day of get up.

And I flipped the channel. And I got to tell you, I really enjoyed watching it. I mean, it was a, for my purposes in the morning, which is like to have a voice coming out of a box that simulates a human being being in my presence while I work and get a shower and stuff. It was very nice. And I think that that's sort of the baseline, right? I mean, that's certainly the, it's like you were saying about Morning Joe, it's like my group of friends. And it's sort of as the viewer, it's your proxy group of friends, right? I mean, my mom has, has.

has relatively deep relationships with, you know, people that only exist for her on, on, like, Morning Joe, you know, because she watches the show every day. And she's, you know, and she picks the right ones, frankly. I'm not going to say who they are, but, you know, she, um, but that, glad she chose wisely. Yes, but, but, um, but, you know, that for a lot of people is what it is, you know, people that'll talk about, people that'll talk about, you know, whoever, Stephen A and Max is if they're people from the bar, people from, from work or something like that. So, I don't know what exactly I look for. But I do think that, you know, the show took, I don't know how vocal it was if it was just a Twitter thing, but the show took a little, get up, took a little

bit of a knock when they announced Beatle and Jalen as being two of the three hosts because I think the kind of joke was we already have a show with them on it. And it's not, it's not setting the world on fire, right? We get to see them on NBA games, you know, all this kind of stuff. But their comfort with each other, I think, was the greatest asset of the show. so far. Totally. And they had a segment where they're just like, we're just going to talk about NBA stuff for a while.

Yeah. Do you want to talk about the NFL? Yeah. I just say that, look, this is too simple. But Scott Van Pelt's show launched in September. He had NFL, you know, coursing through the veins of his show for the next six months. When Michael and Jamel launched the sixth, they did it the day after the Super Bowl. They had no NFL.

They had off-season NFL. And no games. And the NFL is just, you know, as Steve Bornstein, former president of ESPN, once it said it is the crack cocaine of ESPN. Especially as the NFL is going to an almost every day a week sport, right? Absolutely. It's not just news that ferries you through Monday, you know, after from Monday night until Sunday morning.

There's games now, you know, on Thursdays and they're just building and building the infrastructure. And I think the hardest thing about doing a sport show, they're just, it's very hard to find the single thing people are talking about on a given day. You know, people just care about their teams and stuff, and they'll come up for air for LeBron and, like, the Cowboys and a couple of things. But it's just very hard, a big boxing match, right? Tomorrow they'll be, you know, time they'll be interested in the NCAA final. But there's just, it's hard.

And the NFL is like the one thing that, you know, that everybody kind of on a schedule for a long period of time kind of comes together on. So, you know, and maybe the theory is, you know, we can kind of work on the show by the NFL season, it'll be rolling. But yeah, if I were starting a dog show on ESPN, I would want to start in September. That's when I would want to start. That would be my, that would be my de facto producer. Yeah, I mean, they've done a lot to hype get up, you know, over the past. I mean, it doesn't seem like it's been as big a rollout as I might have expected. The superhero commercial promo that they were running was sort of like, you know,

deliberately ridiculous and it was fine. And I'm sure that we'll see more and more of that on other ESPN programming as we come. up. And one note on that, they got criticized for over-promoting Michael and Jamel. And I wonder if they, you know, turn the volume down from 11 to like an 8 because you're just worried about. There was, there was backlash over there. I mean, listen, we talked about the green, you know, Greenberg saying that he's, he was just the guy who signed the first contract, he was never meant to be the star. I mean, that's also evidence of a failed media rollout, right? I mean, and certainly the top of ESPN has changed since that, since these plans were put into motion. So, you know, we'll, we'll,

I think it'll be interesting to see how they sort of brand it in-house, how long the in-house ads are trumpeting this every day. And I think they're going to get a long, long runway. And they should. I mean, it's a good experiment, and it was a good, if too familiar first day, I'll say. Our final topic today, let's call The Chronicles of Eldrick. Send your kudos to David Shumaker for that headline. I was a little thrown by Wright Thompson's blurb of the new Tiger Woods biography, which began if King Lear had been about golf.

But the book, which is by noted muckraking journal's Jeff Benedict and Armicottian, is fabulous. It really is. And not only as a work of reportage, but as a mood piece, I second critic Dwight Garner's line that it's, quote, a big American story that rolls across barbored lawns and then leaves you stranded in some all-night Sam's Club of the Soul. Here's why I want to start on the Tiger Woods book, David, which is a big American story. is you are a veteran of the book publishing racket. Oh, okay. What makes us hungry for this book right now?

What is the timing here? What is the industry excitement for such a book at this moment? I mean, there's, there is, in micro, it's, it's the Masters and it's Tiger's big comeback, right? I mean, that's, I'm not a huge golf fan, but I pay enough attention that I will say that I was like a little bit. I guess I've been surprised every time our brethren at Shackhouse are making a huge deal about Tiger's return. I just kind of thought we were done with Tiger, both as a media sensation and as a gall and as a capable golfer.

His power is persistent and undeniable. So, and I think that, you know, we're timing it right now in the year 2018 because of the masters. That's the, that's the small bore answer to your question. bigger than that. I mean, I think that, you know, there's a lot of different factors that go into this. But one of those is certainly this is the book that these authors wanted to write right now. And they, you know, it became possible for it to happen.

But I don't know if it says something about where we are in history right now. I don't know if, you know, you want to throw this into the Trump. metaphor generator. But there does seem to be a certain, this does seem to be the, you know, the time to reconsider Tiger Woods. It feels very natural.

And I'll say, I'll let you jump in, but when we were doing, you know, I was researching everything for this segment. I watched Tiger's apology press conference in full from, remind me what year that was? 2010. 2010. And I could not have been more,

caught off guard by how insignificant that whole thing seemed. Let's listen to a little bit just to give listeners a feel of this press conference. Every one of you has good reason to be critical of me. I want to say to each of you simply and directly, I am deeply sorry for my irresponsible and selfish behavior I engaged in. And I completely agree, right? You're like, wait, what was he apologizing for? He was apologizing for having a bunch of affairs?

Yeah. We were mad at that. We all got involved in that. Yeah. We demanded blood. And do you know what else we did at that press conference? So Tiger comes out and gives this extremely emotional and awkward kind of rendition in front of the media, in front of the sports media. Do you know what a bunch of people said?

Well, geez, it was so awkward. I wish he'd said this, this, and this, and we're recommending slicker ways to apologize. No, no, no, no, no, we got the real tiger. Yeah. Don't help him trick us. That's the Nike. We don't want the Nike commercial tiger apologizing.

This is the real tiger. Yeah. This is absolutely. And by the way, Nike made a commercial based on me. The only apologies. We didn't need any help. And I think that even if you took a more, you know, a more skeptical point of view, if someone wrote this script for him

if this was a, and they said go out there and be awkward, you know, try to make it seem like this is the natural you. It was a thorough apology. And if he had no, if this was all fake,

he had to confront some things in the process of laboriously reading this statement that most celebrities going through this sort of situation never actually confront. You know?

So, yeah, I mean, it was weird. I mean, not to dismiss anything, anything that he did, but the level of, I guess just the tone of, like you said, the media reaction to the situation just seems so alien today. And the media coverage was one of the most interesting parts to me of the book, of just the way we thought about Tiger Woods, because I'd forgotten about this.

So on the one hand, Tiger is, as Earl Woods said, the chosen one, right? He will change nations more than Gandhi and that's an amazing quotes right. But he was considered, at least by a huge amount of the golf press, like this is what we are looking at once in a lifetime athlete and a cultural phenomenon. All that is absolutely true. But as early as 1997, when he wins his first masters, immediately Bill Clinton calls up and says, I want you to fly with me to Shea Stadium for this tribute to Jackie Robinson.

You just won that. How symbolic would it be? How cool would it be for you to come to this? And Tiger goes, nah, I'm going to go on vacation. And immediately, everyone got really mad. There was a Maureen Dowd column all about this from 1997. Like, she paused in making fun of Bill Clinton to make fun of Tiger. And so even then, and of course, Earl Woods was considered the ultimate, just zany, over-the-top, ridiculous sports dad from the beginning by writers like John Feinstein.

It comes off quite well in this book. So we had this kind of two-track coverage of Tiger, chosen one, and then people just sinking in the knives. But I had forgotten about that. I thought that was later. Well, I mean, I think some of that is he's, he's certainly embraced, or at least he abetted Nike's embrace of the chosen one mystique, right? And so that, you do that and you invite the night, you open yourself up. I have not read the book. You've read the book in full.

You said it was fantastic. In a day. I don't ever do that. I think that. I don't want to offer a blurb here that it was the king leer of page turners, but I honestly just really wanted to finish the book. I think to go back to your earlier question, we should say that, I mean, I don't know that it's necessary, but as a publishing industry insider, is published by Simon & Schuster. Their publisher, I believe also president now is Jonathan Karp, who is, you know, is good an eye for the huge book as anybody in the business. I mean, he, he, that's sort of his little, publishing is a dinosaur industry, book publishing in a lot of ways.

and all efforts to modernize it inevitably fail. But, you know, Carp had a good idea at sort of refashioning it when he started 12 books, which is just we're going to do a book a month and we're going to blow out the PR push and everything else. He pretty quickly ended up at S&S. And he's, you know, I think that it's just one of these weird things about publishing.

And you see it in the magazine world, the online writing world, too, that, you know, it always takes the right editor. But it also takes the power and the backing and the, you know, of the right publishing house to be able to say, no, this is the book and you're, you know, and everyone out there is going to believe it when we say it. Absolutely. And I think timing is interesting because you mentioned the comeback, right? The authors could not have known that he's going to be in the midst of this huge comeback, potentially at the Masters this weekend when they come out of the book. But there is a sense that Tiger has now fallen to the lowest point. Fell into the lowest point with the affairs.

And then he fell the lowest point with injuries. Just imagine LeBron James just went away for three years but was still in some sense a viable basketball player. And that would be incredible, right, if we were in the middle of that. That's essentially what's happened here. But it feels to me reading the book that everybody was ready to talk because Tiger wasn't as much of a viable entity anymore, right? The friendships were ruined. Some of the sponsors had walked away. Enough people had been fired.

Right. You just read it and the authors, not to diminish their skill at all, but were able to get key people that probably would not have talked in 2003. And, of course, you wouldn't have seen the full scope, right? You wouldn't have seen what is the greatest sport story, right? Rise, fall, rise again. Yeah. This is the arc, right? This is the mother load.

Yeah. And so they just came along with the right time. And part of that is just perfect timing. And when you, I have read so much about Tiger Woods. Is there any athlete other than Mohammed Ali who's had more books than Tiger Woods? I'm only slightly exaggerating. I don't think there are more Babe Ruth books than Tiger Woods. It might be close.

Mickey Mantle, something like that, right? But it's like I thought I'd kind of read everything. But when you just see everything lined up, and of course building on this corpus of literature, it helps when you have all these books already written, right? You know the beats of the story. It's just an amazing story. It's funny that you put it in terms of the rise, the fall, and the rise again. In some ways, that's the best way to look at the media.

narrative and and this book's publication is being part of it right oh we love because at his greatest height you know there were like you said there've been books about tiger before but they're either you know approved by tiger woods and it should be said that he was not interviewed for this book right for because he because he had many too many demands he put too many demands on the authors for his time the author said he wanted to know who they talked to and what kinds of questions he asked them right at which point they were like no we're not interested right so to go from a position of absolute power in the media world to then fall to a point where your friends and relatives and former coworkers are willing to say anything about you that

someone asks. That is the real fall. But then to have the power, you know, the curating power to have a number one times bestseller, presumably with your face on the cover, that is the return to glory, you know? I mean, that's the, that is the arc in purely publishing terms. You're still that big. Yeah. You're still that big.

I mean, just think about this. Sports writers could have written, this is the greatest thing we've ever seen in the history of sports. This guy blew it all and his body fell apart. And then now this is the greatest story we could have ever seen in sports. And they were right three times. Yeah. They were right every time. They weren't exactly exaggerating.

All right. That's the press box for this week. Thanks for listening to the show. Thanks to our producer, Kai McMahon, filling in for two weeks for us. David, back next week. Yeah. For more hot takes about the media. The hot take factory will be back in business.

Absolutely. Let's do it, buddy. See you. See you later, man.