October 13, 2023 • 47 mins
SEASON 2 EPISODE 54: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: The day after he attacked Israel and mocked its Prime Minister and praised Hezbollah, Trump was astonishingly quiet, and even his self-praising press release was composed in the past tense and lacked the usual arrogance. Something is wrong in Trumpland. And here's a shock: Trump's minions are going to need ANOTHER new Speaker of the House and right now there's nobody within 100 votes of the minimum number of votes needed for election!
Just 18 days after I asked why he hadn't been indicted as an agent of Egypt, Senator Menendez...is. Now I ask: why is he out on bail? Ron DeSantis comes out of unintentional retirement to pull a really transparent stunt on Israel, and Tommy Tuberville shoots himself in the foot on the same topic. And something does not add up on the Mary Lou Retton story. So sick she can't breathe? No insurance? Daughter starts a GoFundMe? And last year the tiny Republican had a house worth $2,000,000?
B-Block (19:17) IN SPORTS: New ESPN host reveals he's paid Aaron Rodgers millions for "interviews" and why this means all TV Sports "News" programs are now mortally and irreversibly wounded. A large part of the field beclowns itself over the issue of whether a minor taunt a Braves' player made about a Phillies' player in a clubhouse full of reporters was somehow 'off the record' and an instance from my own career when it really WAS. And Sunday it'll be 35 years since I matter-of-factly predicted the Kirk Gibson World Series home run that everybody else still seems to think was impossible. And the witness to my prediction makes a cameo!
C-Block (38:20) FRIDAYS WITH THURBER: Only Thurber could merge the laziness of a sticky summer at his Connecticut place with the absolute conviction that his "hired man" trafficks with The Devil: "The Black Magic of Barney Haller."
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. It's Quiet,
It's too Quiet. In the twenty four hours since Donald
(00:27):
Trump attacked Israel in the middle of its first week
under siege by Hamas and called Hesbalab very smart, Trump
has been virtually silent. There was one press release on
campaign stationery screenshotted to social media. The critical first paragraph
clearly not written by him, written in the past, tense,
(00:48):
stranger of its own accord quote there was no better
friend or ally of Israel man Trump. And there was
a second paragraph written in more traditional Trumpian semi literate rage,
fixated on the six billion dollars in Iranian assets partially
restored that country as part of the release of the
five Americans, but with one small problem. The press release
(01:10):
went out at six point fifty one pm Eastern last night,
roughly four hours after the Biden administration had reversed itself
and in essence frozen the six billion dollars anew but
more astonishing than that, faux pa Biden must do this,
I did it four hours ago. Oh was the overall silence.
(01:31):
There was a bunch of state polls sent out a
picture of an award that Deutsche Bank gave him for
best I don't know best loan recipient who knows nothing
in his own maniacal hand about Israel, about Hamas, about Iran,
about Hesbala, about what he said in Florida, insulting Israel
(01:51):
and mocking its prime minister and explaining how the country
wasn't tough enough for this fight. Something went really really
wrong in Trump Land yesterday, and I don't know what
it is, but I'm tingling and it ain't my sciatica. Oddly,
Trump got a reprieve in Congress yesterday. You knew it
(02:11):
was over when the New York Times posted the headline
Scalise scrounges for votes as GOP speaker fight drags on.
Nobody uses the word scrounges unless it's bad. And it
was bad. I mean, remember this timeline. House Republicans walked
(02:33):
out of their conference Wednesday afternoon, determined to elect Steve
Scalise Speaker of the House by three pm that day.
By three pm the next day, Marjorie Taylor Barney Rubbell
Green had prettied up her sentiment a little bit, was
still saying, though in as many words, that she would
not vote for Scalice because he has cancer, and another
(02:55):
meeting had been scheduled for seven thirty, and then by
eight last night, Scalise had withdrawn and Jim Jordan Trump's
Indoorsea was the new leading candidate. I guess with ninety
nine votes, just one hundred and eighteen shy of election,
and now the anti Jordan crowd bringing out guess what
(03:17):
the wrestling rape case. The NBC Congressional Guy asked Congresswoman
Maliatakas of Staten Island if there were five Never Jordan votes,
and for the first time in her term of office,
she answered, honestly, quote, there are five never Everybody's that's
the problem. The little crackpot in the bow tie who's
(03:40):
the caretaker in the job right now? McHenry. He won't
run for speaker, won't endorse anybody for speaker, won't even
offer it to broker a compromise about Speaker. It's up
to the will of the conference, he says. And Republican
after Republicans steps right up as profiles in Cowardice. I mean,
I really really feel badly for the House Republicans. No,
(04:02):
I'm lying, I don't feel for them at all. I
hope they bailed on Scalise because Jordan's people put out
that story Wednesday night about how he had spent an
average of nearly one hundred and fourteen dollars a night,
two filet, Mignon's spinach and no tip at Capitol Grill,
and I hope half of them did so by saying
only one hundred and fourteen a night. This guy's making
us look bad. And the Republicans are right back where
(04:25):
they were when I walked into this movie theater in
nineteen ninety eight. They tried to impeach and dirty up
a Democratic president, and all that the Speaker of the
House who went along with it got. All he was
able to accomplish was to cost himself his own job.
And the first guy they had lined up to replace him,
(04:46):
like Scalise, a guy everybody loved from Louisiana, had all
the support behind him until all of a sudden, he
didn't have any support at all. And now when they
ask him who he's supporting, he says he's not involved.
He's just a simple majority leader. And by Monday he
may be claiming he's never even heard of this job
you mentioned. What did you say it was against? Like
a horse. The Mary Tyler Moore show line about changing
(05:10):
sportscasters pops into my head again. You never fire your
old sportscaster, Lou Grant says to her, until you've hired
your new sportscaster. Where now, anyway, my coin is still
on Kevin McCarthy Part two, Electric Boogaloo. Of course, that
(05:30):
underscores that one of the more frightening aspects of doing
news commentary is that occasionally you see something obvious that
the authorities seem to have missed or at least haven't
acted on yet, and you call it out, and then
they do the exact thing, and you have this terrible
sinking feeling. Did they not notice it? Until I wind
(05:52):
about it? Is the world really that eft up? Senator
Bob Menendez re indicted on charges that he conspired to
act as an agent of the guy Government of Egypt
while he served as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
No spit September twenty sixth, after they indicted him for
(06:13):
taking bribes even fantastically original a game, bribes like actual
bars of gold. When that happened, I noted here that
I was indifferent to the money part, quoting self again.
See my problem is that the senator sure seems like
he was spying for Egypt while chairman of the Foreign
(06:35):
Relations Committee may have been tipping them off about what
questions the Senate would be asking about the Egyptian part
of the murder of Jamal Koshagi. And maybe when they
arraign him tomorrow he shouldn't be released on veil and
old repurposed script. Senator Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who I like
enough that I think he should get two votes his
own in Kirsten Cinemas, immediately replied to the indictment by
(06:58):
calling for the expulsion of Senator Menendez. We cannot have
an alleged foreign agent in the United States Senate. This
is not a close call, he says. Fetterman is right,
but he is saying this only because he's only been
a Senator since January, and thus he has not really
(07:18):
had the time to fill his closet full of ethical skeletons.
None of those senior to him in the Senate in
either party says this. They didn't say it after the
first indictment, and they haven't said it after the second.
For the same reason that very few baseball teams complain
when it's obvious that an opposing team is cheating with
the pitcher scuffing the baseball, or sending a pitcher to
(07:41):
the mount of a giant clap of pine tar on
his neck, or somebody banging out Morse code on garbage
cans in the back because either their team is doing
the exact same thing, or some team they like is
doing the exact same thing, or some senator they like.
I mean, if we're going to start nosing around in
(08:05):
every senator's office to see who's has taken gold bars
and who hasn't, and who's taken favors or Dinners or
Mercedes benzes from foreign governments, and we're gonna take all
of those people and accuse them of being spies. We're
(08:26):
gonna have a lot of indictments, aren't we. More seriously,
never mind expelling him. How in the world is Senator
Menendez out un bail And who, if anyone is Senator
Tommy Tubberville an agent of Saturday Tommy the Tuba put
(08:47):
out a boiler plate quote the Iran back. Terrorist attacks
on Israel are completely unacceptable. United States and Alabama stand
firmly with Israel. Generic but fine congrats to whoever wrote it.
But now interview with w b r RC television in
Birmingham in his home state, and Tommy says, quote, I'm
(09:10):
hoping that cooler heads prevail. They don't go into Palestine,
only Tuberville. He don't say Palestine, he say Palestine. I'm
hoping that cooler heads prevail, they don't go into Palestine.
Hopefully they get the hostages back and people start cooperating.
But this has been really bad. Israel has the right
(09:32):
to go because they came in and they did some
terrible things in their country. But the problem is when
you start picking sides in the Middle East, it could
get really messy, very quick, picking sides, Coach Moron, Apart
from the inanity of this remark, you take sides on Saturday,
(09:59):
or don't you read your own press statements? And we
have I have a classic performative stunt related to the
Hamas attack from the Florida Governor Ron de Santis. Remember
Ron DeSantis quote, Today I signed an executive order authorizing
rescue operations in the Israel to bring Floridians home and
(10:21):
transport supplies to our allies. We will not leave our
residents behind to the many Floridians who are stuck in
Israel trying to get home. Help is on the way.
Unquote oo, the Florida State Special Forces are on the road.
The FDF raid at Defuniac Springs. Actually, if you read
(10:47):
this DeSantis executive order, if you wade through the hip
hi bull spit past the eighteen different uses of the
word whereas all of them capitalized, you get to what
he really has done. DeSantis has ordered the State Director
of Emerging See Management to quote seek direct assistance and
(11:08):
enter into agreements with any and all agencies of the
federal government as may be needed to meet this emergency.
In other words, DeSantis issued a memo, a memo that
directs one of his flunkies to issue another memo. But
(11:32):
it's an emergency memo. It's a memo with sirens on it.
It's a memo declaring a Florida State Israel state of
emergency in Florida. One other political note, and it is
(11:55):
far away from Gaza and Trump and the House, and
maybe not as far away from the House as one
might initially think. By now you've heard this, I believe
the Mary lou Retton story, winner of five gymnastics medals
at the nineteen eighty four Olympics on the eve now
of the fortieth anniversary celebration of having become the first
(12:16):
woman to win the individual all around for the US.
Hospitalized no insurance, unable to breathe on her own, her
daughter started to gofund me for her. Says she has
a rare form of pneumonia and something really really does
(12:37):
not add up here. As of May last year, Mary
lou Retton lived in and almost certainly owned a nine
thousand square foot multi million dollar mansion in South Texas,
custom built, six bed, six bath, rustic look but with
every modern convenience and a TV room in a big pool.
There had been a divorce, there had been a move
(12:59):
back to be with family in West Virginia, then another
back move to Houston, and now crowd funding that raised
a reported three hundred and seventy five thousand dollars in
two days, including fifty thousand dollars from a Houston mattress dealer,
and her partner on Dancing with the Stars says he
talked to her Tuesday. Even though she can't breathe on
(13:22):
her own and is presumably on a ventilator. And she
led the Pledge of allegiance at the two thousand and
four Republican Convention and when Congress was working to pass
a bill in the wake of the Larry Nasser nightmare,
the bill to protect young athletes by requiring Olympic governing
bodies to report all cases of sexual assault to the police.
The Olympic governing body USA Gymnastics lobbied against that bill,
(13:45):
and guess who they brought to the Senate hearing to
insist that the rules were just fine the way they
were and that bill should not be passed. Oh, Mary
lou Retten testified against the anti Larry Nasser bill. Is
her family crowdfunding for a woman who owns or souls
(14:05):
a two million dollar home in May of last year?
Maybe could your personal fortunes go so bad in eighteen
months that you could sell a two million dollar home
or still have it and be broke? Absolutely? Could medical
expenses pile up that fast? Certainly? Could a Republican who
(14:27):
lobbied against protecting teenage girls from rape be a part
of some scam to get you to pay for her
medical bills? You tell me? Also of interest here today,
let me pick your brain and your distant memory. Did
you ever watch the Sports Center? Did you like the
(14:53):
Sports Center? Good? Because it's dead. Now it's dead, or
soon it will be. Something was revealed yesterday from deep
in the heart of what passes for television sports journalism.
That is an inescapable sign that sooner or later SportsCenter
and Football Night in America and the Fox Baseball Pregame
(15:16):
Show and all those other sportscasts I used to host
that they are mortally wounded with no chance of recovery. Also,
Sunday is thirty five years since I predicted Kirk Gibson's
World Series home run ten minutes before it happened, and
(15:40):
there are witnesses to my prediction. That's next. This is countdown.
This is countdown with Keith Alberman, who can predict almost anything.
Thank you, Alexis Denny, and I'll explain who she is
and what she's doing here in one moment.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
This is Sports Center. Wait, check that, not anymore. This
is countdown with Keith Ulberman.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
In sports, it is hard to be startled by anything
during the death rattle of anything in sports television that
is not an actual game broadcast. But this, this is startling.
Pat McAfee, the former Indianapolis Colts punter who sold his
independent sports streaming show to ESPN for a reported eighty
(16:46):
five million dollars over five years, now reveals to The
New York Post that those frequent, controversial, sometimes hallucinogenic interviews
he does with the probable future ex quarterback of the
New York Jets, Aaron Rodgers, he has paid Rogers millions
of dollars to do them. Now, sit down, relax. I'm
(17:08):
not going on an ethical rant about Rogers or the
fact that he's afraid of a vaccine needle, or one
about ESPN or how McAfee is doing this or that.
But if ESPN has any interest in maintaining its stable
of studio shows, NFL, Countdown, SportsCenter, NBA today, I mean
(17:28):
if they have a darts show ESPN Darts Live or whatever,
if it wants to keep any of them, it has
to sever its ties with Pat McAfee immediately. It may
actually be too late to do that, but it should try.
This is not about journalism or sports or Pat McAfee,
(17:49):
or as I said, even about Aaron Rodgers. This is
about money. Because if one player is going to get
paid to be on ESPN for interviews. They're all going
to want to get paid to be on ESPN interviews,
or on Fox or CBS or anybody BBC, or Wally
(18:12):
and the Trucking Bozo on Fan Radio Nebraska, or on
the college postgame show in a college near you. We're
not talking morals or ethics. We're talking a question that
will destroy an entire medium. And the question is this,
why are you expecting me to come on for free
(18:33):
if you're paying Aaron Rodgers millions of dollars. I mean,
at this rate, even postgame interviews with the Chicago White
Sox are worth like thirteen dollars per player per appearance.
And guess which industry does not have thirteen dollars to
pay each player for each interview. The studio shows, from
(18:56):
SportsCenter to the special high school postgame edition of Wally
and the Trucking Bozo. They are shrinking into negligibility as
it is, as the old Procter and Bergmann joke jingle
went Hot Rock Radio. If the records weren't free, we'd
be all news. If player interviews cost money, there aren't
(19:20):
going to be any more player interviews. So ESPN, this
is simple. Go to Pat McAfee studio right now, get
everybody out safely, and light it on fire, burn it down.
If he himself will take a lot of money to
leave sports broadcasting forever, give it to him all that
(19:41):
he wants, or just start turning everything you have into
a version of what he does, and be prepared to
pay eighty five million dollars for five years of it,
but like ten times a year. Thank you, Nancy Faust,
(20:31):
and here's your thirteen dollars. I mean there are journalistic
questions here too. If you are paying an athlete for
his comments, how do you know he's not embellishing his
comments so you will embellish his paycheck. I mean, if
I'm coach Dion Sanders and I find out you're paying
Aaron Rodgers, say two million a year, why wouldn't I say, Hey,
(20:54):
you give me three million a year and I'll make
up a story for you that me and the ninety
two Braves through the World Series, or I'll tell you
that we didn't throw the World Series, whatever you like.
And then there's the real nightmare scenario on teams that
unfolded when our ancestors tried to mix money and journalism
(21:14):
and athletes. More than a century ago. In nineteen eleven,
The New York Times the New York Goddamn Times hired
New York Giants pitching ace Rube Marquard to quote write
unquote columns about its team as it played the A's
in that year's World Series. So The New York Herald
(21:36):
turned around and hired his teammate Christy Mathewson to quote
write unquote columns about the same games. They had ghostwriters,
of course, sports writers who wrote the words for them,
but it was their byline on each column. Markquard in
The Times, Matthewson and The Herald. When Frank Baker of
the A's beat Marquard with a late home run in
(21:57):
Game two, Matthewson's ghostwriter wrote, Markquard makes the wrong pitch,
and he had Matthewson's slam Marquard for ignoring the scouting
reports on Baker. Then in Game three, Baker beat Matthewson
with a homer late and under Markquard's byline, Markquard's ghostwriter asked,
will the great Matthewson tell us exactly what he pitched
(22:19):
to Baker. Matthewson and Markquard barely spoke to each other ever.
Again It would be nine years before the New York
Giants won a World Series. If anybody should know the
intra teamed Dangers of the Pat McAfee millions and millions experiment,
(22:40):
it is ESPN's own Sunday Night baseball analyst David Cohne.
In nineteen eighty eight, the New York Daily News paid
David Cohne for an exclusive column on the upcoming National
League Championship series against the La Dodgers in Los Angeles.
In it, Cohn's ghostwriter called the Dodgers Ace lucky and
(23:01):
the Dodgers' top reliever a high school pitcher, and the
Rodgers made sure every player and seemingly every fan in
Los Angeles had a copy of the column. I was
there at Dodger Stadium the night Cone pitched. He said,
the hatred from the stands and the dugout was so
palpable he could barely breathe. As I said, I was there,
(23:23):
I think he's understating it. Cohn gave up five runs
before being chased in the second inning. The Mets lost
the game and the series, and the paper paid him
five hundred dollars. So paying Aaron Rodgers millions, that's gotta
go well for ESPN and the industry. If by well
(23:43):
you mean a cataclysm that will destroy ESPN's credibility and
its relationships with every team and every player, and also
its profitability, and it will wipe out every show that
relies on player interviews, including Wally and the Trucking Pozo
Bon Chance Boys. It's not like sports journalism isn't fraught
(24:07):
enough as it is. The Atlanta Braves are actually angry
because after Game two of their NL playoff series against Philadelphia,
which turned on the Braves doubling off the Philly star
Bryce Harper, shortstop Orlando Arcia ran around the Braves clubhouse
shouting haha at a boy Harper while quoting a reporter.
Reporters circled the room. In Game three, Harper used the
(24:31):
story as motivation. He hit too or home runs against
the Braves, and as he circled the bases, he stared
daggers at Arcia on both home runs. Arcia and the
other Braves players have actually complained that Arcia's repeated needling
of Harper, shouted in their clubhouse was somehow confidential and
should not have been reported because even though it was
(24:53):
done in front of literally dozens of reporters. It was
not part of some actual interview a quote here. The
clubhouse is a sanctuary, and I think when things like
that get out, it doesn't make people want to talk
to the media at all, said Braves, catchered Travis Darnow
in one of the least supportable comments any player has
(25:14):
ever made in human history. Even a local Atlanta TV
sports anchor named Miles Garrett and local TV sports anchors
have largely been reduced to fans with microphones and pennants
that they waive. He claimed that rci's remark, which he
made a lot of times in front of a lot
(25:35):
of witnesses, was somehow off the record and reporting it
violated a trust. The good news here is happily this
will all be resolved when every player is paid for
every interview, after every game and on every show, and
then the players who are really in demand, they will
be given the right to approve their remarks before they
(25:56):
are quoted or played on TV. Hey, Pandora, can I
borrow your box? The irony here too is that players
can say things. They can, even like Arcia, shout things
in a clubhouse, and they can have the right to
expect that nobody reports them. I know it happened to
(26:19):
me before the fifth and final game of the nineteen
ninety nine AL Championship Series at Fenway Park in Boston.
I had to get into the Yankee clubhouse like two
innings before the game ended, so I could cover the
celebrating Yankee players and the award presentation live on Fox's
broadcast of the game, for which we were paying baseball millions.
(26:39):
I was on a platform, I was bleached in a
camera light, and the technicians were checking their stuff and
the lights and the angles and everything else. When the
clubhouse door slammed open and in scrutted the Yankee second baseman,
Chuck Nabloc. He was swearing profusely, profoundly, amazingly. Chuck had
been having trouble throwing ground balls. He was throwing them
(27:02):
away mostly, and as the eighth inning started, Yankees' manager
Joe Torre had removed him from the game, denying him
the chance to be in in the on field celebration
of the Pennant NA Block was so enraged that he
never saw me, or the platform I was standing on,
or the camera lights. He used all the expletives known
(27:22):
to man, and he directed them all at his own manager,
the Yankees' public relations guy, a childhood friend of mine,
rushed over to me to insist that I could not
report what I had just heard, and he was a
little shocked when I said, you're right, he said what
I said. I'm here as a lighting prop. No Block
(27:44):
has a perfect right to expect there'd be no reporters
in the clubhouse during the game. If he says it
again afterwards, I'll say I heard it just now first.
Otherwise I'm never gonna mention it. No way. Now. Of course,
the PR guy would be rushing over to me to
negotiate how much Fox would be willing to pay nab
Block to let us report his rage. Eleven years earlier,
(28:09):
I had an entirely different experience in the waning moments
of a postseason game. And oddly enough, this ties into
that nineteen eighty eight season of David Kohne and the
Dodgers and Alexis Denny, all of whom I have mentioned already.
On Sunday, the Dodgers will celebrate the thirty fifth anniversary
of what is certainly the most famous moment in their
(28:30):
history in Los Angeles. Anyway, Game one of the nineteen
eighty eight World Series against the Oakland A's, literally half
of the Dodgers' starting lineup that had won the National
League Pennant was hurt and the other half was not
that impressive to begin with. National League Most Valuable Player
Kirk Gibson had nearly destroyed his left hamstring in Game
(28:50):
two of that playoff series that David Cohne had written about,
and Gibson had ripped up his right knee in Game seven.
He was assumed to be out of the World Series,
but he was still on the Dodger roster, and the
joke was that was only because the Dodgers literally did
not have any other healthy players under contract and their
only other option was to activate sixty one year old
(29:10):
manager Tom Lesarda. Anyway, the Dodgers had actually led Game
one against the powerful Oakland A's to nothing after the
first inning, but by the ninth they were trailing four
to three, with literally three of the worst hitters in
the National League due up and then the pitcher. I
was there covering the game for KCBS Channel two in LA,
(29:32):
and my pal Alexis Denny, news and sports producer for
CBS Network News in Los Angeles made our way together
down to the tiny alcove from the press box, the
alcove between the clubhouses, from which we could see just
a sliver of the field, pretty much just the pitcher
and the batter, framed by a hot dog stand as
(29:54):
the Oakland relief ace. Dennis Eckersley warmed up to pitch
the bottom of the ninth, and he had given up
exactly nine hits in his previous eighteen games, in fourteen
of which he had recorded saves. Alexis asked me, simply
and appropriately, so what are we going to ask Eck
after this game is over? And, matter of factly, without
(30:17):
any emotion, certainly without any sense of predicting anything, I said,
We're going to ask Eck about this game losing home
run he's about to give up to Kirk Gibson. Alexis
looked at me, funny, I mean, funnier than usual. What
Gibson's not playing? He's hurt? I looked at her with
(30:39):
mild annoyance. Oh, come on, you know it has to happen.
I can only describe my feeling at that time as
being exactly what had been a decade before at another
playoff game in Boston with the Red Sox leading the
Yankees to nothing in the top of the seventh, with
two Yankees on and New York shortstop Bucky Dent coming up,
and my best friend, the Red Sox fan, exhaling when
(31:01):
the last batter had popped out and saying, thank goodness,
Dent is no home run threat. And I began to
speak in tongues, and what I was saying was about
how his hubristic remark about Dent would now necessarily cause
to happen next. What would happen next? A three run
home run by Bucky Dent, and it would be all
(31:23):
his fault, and then Dent hit the homer. Neither the
Dent nor the Gibson home run predictions were really predictions.
I felt no sense of investment in it. I didn't
race to put down a bet. I suppose that at
some other games I had made equally impossible announcements of
(31:47):
events that did not happen, but I have never been
given to that, so if I did do it, it was
only a couple of times. My batting average is like
four or five hundred on these, And anyway, these weren't
calculations or analyzes. On my part, I just felt like
I was running about five minutes ahead of the rest
of the world. And these things danse home run in
(32:07):
nineteen seventy eight, Gibson's home run in nineteen eighty eight,
these things had already happened. AnyWho, Mike Davis of the
Dodgers walked stole second base with two outs. Gibson, to
the shock of everybody except me, managed somehow to climb
(32:27):
up the three steps of the Dodger dugout and waddle
out to home plate, and then, on a three to
two pitch, hit the game winning home run. Like I said,
as Dodger Stadium shook and we prepared to go into
the clubhouses, Alexis Denny gave me a look that I
still can't really describe. But thirty five years later, I
(32:49):
know that since that night she has not been fully
convinced that I am of this earth. Alexis was nice
enough to make up an affidavit about all this. It
hangs on my wall, and yes, this really did happen.
I will also note that the Dodgers won the World Series,
(33:11):
the only time since nineteen sixty five they have done
so in a full Major League season, and once again,
having been eliminated by Arizona on Wednesday night, they are,
for like the twenty seventh time in these thirty five years,
the Dodgers are celebrating the anniversary of Kirk Gibson's home
run that I told you was gonna happen by not
(33:33):
playing a postseason game because their season is already over.
To the number one story on the Countdown and it's
(33:55):
Fridays with Thurber, and only occasionally did the great American
humorist bend towards the supernatural. Lots of Thurber's characters, like
his fictionalized version of his own mother, claimed to get
messages from beyond the grave and stuff like that, but
rarely did Thurber ever go a cult in the first person.
(34:16):
This is not true in one of my all time
favorites of his stories, The Black Magic of Barney Haller,
in which a slight accent turns into something that is
just right up against the line of being actually a
little scary but still hilarious. The Black Magic of Barney
Haller by James Thurber. It was one of those hot
(34:41):
days on which the earth is uninhabitable, even as early
as ten o'clock in the morning, even on the hill
where I live under the dark maples. The long porch
was hot, and the wicker chair I sat in complained
hot lee. My coffee was beginning to wear off, and
with it the momentary illusion it gives that things are
right and life is good. There were sultry mutterings of thunder.
(35:05):
I had a quick feeling that if I looked up
from my book, I would see Barney Holler. I looked up,
and there he was, coming along the road, lightning playing about
his shoulders, thunder following him like a dog. Barney is,
or was, my hired man. He is strong and amiable,
(35:29):
sweaty and dependable, slowly and heavily confident. But he is
also eerie. He traffics with the devil. His ears twitch
when he talks, but it isn't so much that as
the things he says. Once in late June, when all
of a moment, sabers began to flash brightly in the
(35:51):
heavens and bowling balls rumbled, I took refuge in the barn.
I always have a feeling that I am going to
be struck by lightning and either riven like an old
apple tree, or left with a foot that aches in
rainy weather, and a habit of fainting. These things happen.
Barney came in, not to escape the storm to which
he is or pretends to be indifferent, but to put
(36:15):
the sigh the way. Suddenly, he said the first of
those things that made me, when I was with him,
faintly creepy. He pointed at the house. Once I said,
this boat come down to rock, He said, it is
phenomena like that of which I stand in constant dread,
boats coming down rocks, people being teleported, statues dripping blood,
(36:37):
old regrets, and dreams in the form of Luna moths
fluttering against the windows at midnight. Of course, I finally
figured out what Barney meant, or what I comforted myself
with believing he meant something about a bolt coming down
the lightning rod on the house, a commonplace and utterly
natural thing. I should have dismissed it, but it had
(37:01):
its effect on me. Here was a stolid man, smelling
of hay and leather, who talked like somebody out of
Charles Fort's books, or like a traveler back from oz
and all the time the lightning was zigging and zagging
around him. On this hot morning, When I saw Barney
(37:21):
coming along with his faithful storm trudging behind him, I
went back, frowningly to my copy of Swan's Way. I
hope that Barney, seeing me absorbed in a book, would
pass by without saying anything. I read. I myself seemed
actually to have become the subject of my book, A
church a quartet, the rivalry between Francis the First and
(37:43):
Charles the Fifth. I could feel Barney standing looking at me,
but I didn't look at him this morning. By and by,
said Barney, I go hunt grotcher's and d voods. That's fine,
I said, and turned a page and pretended to be
engrossed in what I was reading. Barney walked on. He
(38:06):
had wanted to talk some more, but he walked on
after a paragraph where two his words began to come
between me and the words in the book. Bime By,
I go hunt grotches in d woods. If you are
susceptible such things, it is not difficult to visualize grotches.
(38:26):
They fluttered into my mind, ugly little creatures about the
size of whipperwills, only covered with blood and honey, and
the scrapings of church bells. Grotches Who and what I wondered,
really was this thing in the form of a hired
man that kept anointing me ominously in passing with Abra cadabra.
(38:52):
Barney didn't go toward the woods at once. He weeded
the corn, He picked apple boughs off off the lawn.
He knocked a yellow jacket's nest down out of a
plum tree. It was raining now, but he didn't seem
to notice it. He kept looking at me out of
the corner of his eye, and I kept looking at
him out of the corner of my eyebod. Dime is
it bleeze? He called to me. Finally, I put down
(39:14):
my book and sauntered out to him. When you go
for those grotches, I said, firmly, I'll go with you.
I was sure he wouldn't want me to go. I
was right. He protested that he could get the grotches himself.
I'll go with you, I said, stubbornly. We stood looking
at each other, and then, abruptly, just to give him
(39:35):
something to ponder over, I quoted, I'm going out to
clean the pasture spring. I'll only stop to take the
leaves away and wait to watch the water clear. I
may i shan't be gone long you come too. It wasn't,
I realized, very good abracadabra, But it served. Barney looked
(39:58):
at me in a puzzled way. Yes, he said, vaguely,
it's fine. Minutes of twelve, I said, remembering he had asked.
Then we go, he said, And we trudged through the
rain over to the orchard fence and climbed that, and
opened a gate and went out into the meadow that
slopes up to the woods. I had a prefiguring of
(40:19):
Barney at some proper spot deep in the woods, prancing
around like a goat, casting off his false nature, shedding
his hired man's garments, dropping his teutonic accent, repeating diabolical phrases,
conjuring up grotches. It was a great slash of lightning
(40:39):
and along bumping of thunder. As we reached the edge
of the woods, I turned and fled, glancing over my shoulder,
I saw Barney standing and staring after me. It turned out,
on the face of it to be as simple as
the boat that came down the rock. Grotches were crotches,
(41:00):
crotched saplings, which he cut down to use as supports
under the peach boughs, because in bearing time they become
so heavy with fruit that there was danger of the
branches snapping off. I saw Barney later putting the crotches
in place. We didn't have much to say to each other.
I can see now that he was beginning to suspect
me too. About six o'clock next evening, I was alone
(41:26):
in the house and sleeping upstairs. Barney rapped on the
door of the front porch. I knew it was Barney
because he called to me. I woke up slowly. It
was dark for six o'clock. I heard rumblings and soft flickerings.
Barney was standing at the front door with his storm
at heel. I had the conviction that it wasn't storming
(41:49):
anywhere except around my house. There couldn't, without the intervention
of the devil or one of his agents, be so
many lightning storms in one neighborhood. I had been dreaming
of Proost and the church at Cambre and madel dipped
in Tea, and the rivalry between Francis the First and
Charles the fifth. My head whirled and I didn't get up.
(42:11):
Barney kept on wrapping. He called out again. There was
a flash followed by a sharp splitting sound. Now I
leaped up this time, I thought he is here to
get me. I had a notion that he was standing
at the door, barefooted, with a wreath of grape leaves
around his head and a wild animal's skin slung over
(42:33):
his shoulder. I didn't want to go down, but I did.
He was as usual, solid, amiable, dressed like a hired man.
I went out onto the porch and looked at the
improbable storm now on in all of its fury. This
is getting pretty bad, I said meaningly. Barney looked at
the rain placidly well. I said, irritably, what's up? Barney
(42:56):
turned his little squinty blue eyes on me. We go
to the gaddock now and become warbs, he said, the
hell we do? I thought to myself quickly. I was uneasy.
I was you might even say terrified, but I determined
not to show it. If he began to chant incantations
(43:18):
or to make obscene signs, or if he attempted to
sling me over his shoulder, I resolved to plunge right
out into that storm, lightning it all, and run to
the nearest house. I didn't know what they would think
at the nearest house when I burst in upon them,
or what I would tell them. But I didn't intend
to accompany this amiable looking fiend to any garrick and
(43:38):
become a warb. I tried to persuade myself that there
was some simple explanation that warbs would turn out to
be as innocuous as boats on rocks and grotches in Davoudes.
But the conviction gripped me in the growling of the
thunder that here, at last was the moment when Barney
(43:58):
Holler or whoever he was, had chosen to get me
toward the steps that led to the lawn, and turned
and faced him grimly. Listen, I barked. Suddenly. Did you
know that even when it isn't brillig I can produce
slythe toes? Did you happen to know that the Momrath
(44:19):
never lived that could outgrab me? Yeah? And furthermore, I
can become anything I want to. Even if I were
a warb, I wouldn't have to keep on being one
if I didn't want to. I can become a playing card.
It will too once I was the jack of clubs.
Only I forgot to say my glasses off, and some
guy recognized me. I. Barney was backing slowly away toward
(44:40):
the petunia box at one end of the porch. His
little blue eyes were wide. He saw that I had him.
I think I go now, he said, and he walked
out into the rain. The rain followed him down the road.
I have a new hired man now. Barney never came
back to work for me after that day. Of course,
(45:02):
I figured out finally what he meant the garrick and
the warps. He had simply got horribly mixed up in
trying to tell me that he was going up to
the garret and clear out the wasps, of which I
have thousands. The new hired man is afraid of them.
Barney could have scooped them up in his hands and
(45:22):
thrown them out a window without getting stung. I am
sure he trafficked with the devil, but I am sorry
I let him go. I've done all the damage I
(45:46):
can do here. Thank you for listening. Countdown has come
to you from the Vin Scully Studios talking about Kirk
Gibson at the Olderman Broadcasting Empire in New York. The
music you've heard was, for the most part arranged produced
and performed by Countdown musical directors Brian Ray and John
Phillip Schenel. Brian Ray handled the guitars, bass and drums.
(46:07):
John Phillip Scheneil did the orchestration and keyboards. Then it
was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including the other
Beethoven tunes, were arranged and performed by No Horns Allowed.
Sports music is courtesy of ESPN, Inc. And it was
written by Mitch Warren Davis And we call it the
Olderman theme from ESPN two. Your Price May Vary. Our
(46:29):
satirical and pithy musical comments are by Nancy Fauss, the
best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today was, as
I mentioned, my friend Alexis Denny live from Paris. Everything
else is pretty much my fault. That's countdown for this
the one thousand and eleventh day since Donald Trump's first
attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
(46:51):
Convict him now while we still can. The banks scheduled
countdown is Tuesday bulletins. As the news warrants, I have
no further predictions at this time till then. I'm Keith Ulderman.
Good morning, Good afternoon, good Night, and good Luck. Countdown
(47:21):
with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. It's Quiet,
It's too Quiet. In the twenty four hours since Donald
(00:27):
Trump attacked Israel in the middle of its first week
under siege by Hamas and called Hesbalab very smart, Trump
has been virtually silent. There was one press release on
campaign stationery screenshotted to social media. The critical first paragraph
clearly not written by him, written in the past, tense,
(00:48):
stranger of its own accord quote there was no better
friend or ally of Israel man Trump. And there was
a second paragraph written in more traditional Trumpian semi literate rage,
fixated on the six billion dollars in Iranian assets partially
restored that country as part of the release of the
five Americans, but with one small problem. The press release
(01:10):
went out at six point fifty one pm Eastern last night,
roughly four hours after the Biden administration had reversed itself
and in essence frozen the six billion dollars anew but
more astonishing than that, faux pa Biden must do this,
I did it four hours ago. Oh was the overall silence.
(01:31):
There was a bunch of state polls sent out a
picture of an award that Deutsche Bank gave him for
best I don't know best loan recipient who knows nothing
in his own maniacal hand about Israel, about Hamas, about Iran,
about Hesbala, about what he said in Florida, insulting Israel
(01:51):
and mocking its prime minister and explaining how the country
wasn't tough enough for this fight. Something went really really
wrong in Trump Land yesterday, and I don't know what
it is, but I'm tingling and it ain't my sciatica. Oddly,
Trump got a reprieve in Congress yesterday. You knew it
(02:11):
was over when the New York Times posted the headline
Scalise scrounges for votes as GOP speaker fight drags on.
Nobody uses the word scrounges unless it's bad. And it
was bad. I mean, remember this timeline. House Republicans walked
(02:33):
out of their conference Wednesday afternoon, determined to elect Steve
Scalise Speaker of the House by three pm that day.
By three pm the next day, Marjorie Taylor Barney Rubbell
Green had prettied up her sentiment a little bit, was
still saying, though in as many words, that she would
not vote for Scalice because he has cancer, and another
(02:55):
meeting had been scheduled for seven thirty, and then by
eight last night, Scalise had withdrawn and Jim Jordan Trump's
Indoorsea was the new leading candidate. I guess with ninety
nine votes, just one hundred and eighteen shy of election,
and now the anti Jordan crowd bringing out guess what
(03:17):
the wrestling rape case. The NBC Congressional Guy asked Congresswoman
Maliatakas of Staten Island if there were five Never Jordan votes,
and for the first time in her term of office,
she answered, honestly, quote, there are five never Everybody's that's
the problem. The little crackpot in the bow tie who's
(03:40):
the caretaker in the job right now? McHenry. He won't
run for speaker, won't endorse anybody for speaker, won't even
offer it to broker a compromise about Speaker. It's up
to the will of the conference, he says. And Republican
after Republicans steps right up as profiles in Cowardice. I mean,
I really really feel badly for the House Republicans. No,
(04:02):
I'm lying, I don't feel for them at all. I
hope they bailed on Scalise because Jordan's people put out
that story Wednesday night about how he had spent an
average of nearly one hundred and fourteen dollars a night,
two filet, Mignon's spinach and no tip at Capitol Grill,
and I hope half of them did so by saying
only one hundred and fourteen a night. This guy's making
us look bad. And the Republicans are right back where
(04:25):
they were when I walked into this movie theater in
nineteen ninety eight. They tried to impeach and dirty up
a Democratic president, and all that the Speaker of the
House who went along with it got. All he was
able to accomplish was to cost himself his own job.
And the first guy they had lined up to replace him,
(04:46):
like Scalise, a guy everybody loved from Louisiana, had all
the support behind him until all of a sudden, he
didn't have any support at all. And now when they
ask him who he's supporting, he says he's not involved.
He's just a simple majority leader. And by Monday he
may be claiming he's never even heard of this job
you mentioned. What did you say it was against? Like
a horse. The Mary Tyler Moore show line about changing
(05:10):
sportscasters pops into my head again. You never fire your
old sportscaster, Lou Grant says to her, until you've hired
your new sportscaster. Where now, anyway, my coin is still
on Kevin McCarthy Part two, Electric Boogaloo. Of course, that
(05:30):
underscores that one of the more frightening aspects of doing
news commentary is that occasionally you see something obvious that
the authorities seem to have missed or at least haven't
acted on yet, and you call it out, and then
they do the exact thing, and you have this terrible
sinking feeling. Did they not notice it? Until I wind
(05:52):
about it? Is the world really that eft up? Senator
Bob Menendez re indicted on charges that he conspired to
act as an agent of the guy Government of Egypt
while he served as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
No spit September twenty sixth, after they indicted him for
(06:13):
taking bribes even fantastically original a game, bribes like actual
bars of gold. When that happened, I noted here that
I was indifferent to the money part, quoting self again.
See my problem is that the senator sure seems like
he was spying for Egypt while chairman of the Foreign
(06:35):
Relations Committee may have been tipping them off about what
questions the Senate would be asking about the Egyptian part
of the murder of Jamal Koshagi. And maybe when they
arraign him tomorrow he shouldn't be released on veil and
old repurposed script. Senator Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who I like
enough that I think he should get two votes his
own in Kirsten Cinemas, immediately replied to the indictment by
(06:58):
calling for the expulsion of Senator Menendez. We cannot have
an alleged foreign agent in the United States Senate. This
is not a close call, he says. Fetterman is right,
but he is saying this only because he's only been
a Senator since January, and thus he has not really
(07:18):
had the time to fill his closet full of ethical skeletons.
None of those senior to him in the Senate in
either party says this. They didn't say it after the
first indictment, and they haven't said it after the second.
For the same reason that very few baseball teams complain
when it's obvious that an opposing team is cheating with
the pitcher scuffing the baseball, or sending a pitcher to
(07:41):
the mount of a giant clap of pine tar on
his neck, or somebody banging out Morse code on garbage
cans in the back because either their team is doing
the exact same thing, or some team they like is
doing the exact same thing, or some senator they like.
I mean, if we're going to start nosing around in
(08:05):
every senator's office to see who's has taken gold bars
and who hasn't, and who's taken favors or Dinners or
Mercedes benzes from foreign governments, and we're gonna take all
of those people and accuse them of being spies. We're
(08:26):
gonna have a lot of indictments, aren't we. More seriously,
never mind expelling him. How in the world is Senator
Menendez out un bail And who, if anyone is Senator
Tommy Tubberville an agent of Saturday Tommy the Tuba put
(08:47):
out a boiler plate quote the Iran back. Terrorist attacks
on Israel are completely unacceptable. United States and Alabama stand
firmly with Israel. Generic but fine congrats to whoever wrote it.
But now interview with w b r RC television in
Birmingham in his home state, and Tommy says, quote, I'm
(09:10):
hoping that cooler heads prevail. They don't go into Palestine,
only Tuberville. He don't say Palestine, he say Palestine. I'm
hoping that cooler heads prevail, they don't go into Palestine.
Hopefully they get the hostages back and people start cooperating.
But this has been really bad. Israel has the right
(09:32):
to go because they came in and they did some
terrible things in their country. But the problem is when
you start picking sides in the Middle East, it could
get really messy, very quick, picking sides, Coach Moron, Apart
from the inanity of this remark, you take sides on Saturday,
(09:59):
or don't you read your own press statements? And we
have I have a classic performative stunt related to the
Hamas attack from the Florida Governor Ron de Santis. Remember
Ron DeSantis quote, Today I signed an executive order authorizing
rescue operations in the Israel to bring Floridians home and
(10:21):
transport supplies to our allies. We will not leave our
residents behind to the many Floridians who are stuck in
Israel trying to get home. Help is on the way.
Unquote oo, the Florida State Special Forces are on the road.
The FDF raid at Defuniac Springs. Actually, if you read
(10:47):
this DeSantis executive order, if you wade through the hip
hi bull spit past the eighteen different uses of the
word whereas all of them capitalized, you get to what
he really has done. DeSantis has ordered the State Director
of Emerging See Management to quote seek direct assistance and
(11:08):
enter into agreements with any and all agencies of the
federal government as may be needed to meet this emergency.
In other words, DeSantis issued a memo, a memo that
directs one of his flunkies to issue another memo. But
(11:32):
it's an emergency memo. It's a memo with sirens on it.
It's a memo declaring a Florida State Israel state of
emergency in Florida. One other political note, and it is
(11:55):
far away from Gaza and Trump and the House, and
maybe not as far away from the House as one
might initially think. By now you've heard this, I believe
the Mary lou Retton story, winner of five gymnastics medals
at the nineteen eighty four Olympics on the eve now
of the fortieth anniversary celebration of having become the first
(12:16):
woman to win the individual all around for the US.
Hospitalized no insurance, unable to breathe on her own, her
daughter started to gofund me for her. Says she has
a rare form of pneumonia and something really really does
(12:37):
not add up here. As of May last year, Mary
lou Retton lived in and almost certainly owned a nine
thousand square foot multi million dollar mansion in South Texas,
custom built, six bed, six bath, rustic look but with
every modern convenience and a TV room in a big pool.
There had been a divorce, there had been a move
(12:59):
back to be with family in West Virginia, then another
back move to Houston, and now crowd funding that raised
a reported three hundred and seventy five thousand dollars in
two days, including fifty thousand dollars from a Houston mattress dealer,
and her partner on Dancing with the Stars says he
talked to her Tuesday. Even though she can't breathe on
(13:22):
her own and is presumably on a ventilator. And she
led the Pledge of allegiance at the two thousand and
four Republican Convention and when Congress was working to pass
a bill in the wake of the Larry Nasser nightmare,
the bill to protect young athletes by requiring Olympic governing
bodies to report all cases of sexual assault to the police.
The Olympic governing body USA Gymnastics lobbied against that bill,
(13:45):
and guess who they brought to the Senate hearing to
insist that the rules were just fine the way they
were and that bill should not be passed. Oh, Mary
lou Retten testified against the anti Larry Nasser bill. Is
her family crowdfunding for a woman who owns or souls
(14:05):
a two million dollar home in May of last year?
Maybe could your personal fortunes go so bad in eighteen
months that you could sell a two million dollar home
or still have it and be broke? Absolutely? Could medical
expenses pile up that fast? Certainly? Could a Republican who
(14:27):
lobbied against protecting teenage girls from rape be a part
of some scam to get you to pay for her
medical bills? You tell me? Also of interest here today,
let me pick your brain and your distant memory. Did
you ever watch the Sports Center? Did you like the
(14:53):
Sports Center? Good? Because it's dead. Now it's dead, or
soon it will be. Something was revealed yesterday from deep
in the heart of what passes for television sports journalism.
That is an inescapable sign that sooner or later SportsCenter
and Football Night in America and the Fox Baseball Pregame
(15:16):
Show and all those other sportscasts I used to host
that they are mortally wounded with no chance of recovery. Also,
Sunday is thirty five years since I predicted Kirk Gibson's
World Series home run ten minutes before it happened, and
(15:40):
there are witnesses to my prediction. That's next. This is countdown.
This is countdown with Keith Alberman, who can predict almost anything.
Thank you, Alexis Denny, and I'll explain who she is
and what she's doing here in one moment.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
This is Sports Center. Wait, check that, not anymore. This
is countdown with Keith Ulberman.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
In sports, it is hard to be startled by anything
during the death rattle of anything in sports television that
is not an actual game broadcast. But this, this is startling.
Pat McAfee, the former Indianapolis Colts punter who sold his
independent sports streaming show to ESPN for a reported eighty
(16:46):
five million dollars over five years, now reveals to The
New York Post that those frequent, controversial, sometimes hallucinogenic interviews
he does with the probable future ex quarterback of the
New York Jets, Aaron Rodgers, he has paid Rogers millions
of dollars to do them. Now, sit down, relax. I'm
(17:08):
not going on an ethical rant about Rogers or the
fact that he's afraid of a vaccine needle, or one
about ESPN or how McAfee is doing this or that.
But if ESPN has any interest in maintaining its stable
of studio shows, NFL, Countdown, SportsCenter, NBA today, I mean
(17:28):
if they have a darts show ESPN Darts Live or whatever,
if it wants to keep any of them, it has
to sever its ties with Pat McAfee immediately. It may
actually be too late to do that, but it should try.
This is not about journalism or sports or Pat McAfee,
(17:49):
or as I said, even about Aaron Rodgers. This is
about money. Because if one player is going to get
paid to be on ESPN for interviews. They're all going
to want to get paid to be on ESPN interviews,
or on Fox or CBS or anybody BBC, or Wally
(18:12):
and the Trucking Bozo on Fan Radio Nebraska, or on
the college postgame show in a college near you. We're
not talking morals or ethics. We're talking a question that
will destroy an entire medium. And the question is this,
why are you expecting me to come on for free
(18:33):
if you're paying Aaron Rodgers millions of dollars. I mean,
at this rate, even postgame interviews with the Chicago White
Sox are worth like thirteen dollars per player per appearance.
And guess which industry does not have thirteen dollars to
pay each player for each interview. The studio shows, from
(18:56):
SportsCenter to the special high school postgame edition of Wally
and the Trucking Bozo. They are shrinking into negligibility as
it is, as the old Procter and Bergmann joke jingle
went Hot Rock Radio. If the records weren't free, we'd
be all news. If player interviews cost money, there aren't
(19:20):
going to be any more player interviews. So ESPN, this
is simple. Go to Pat McAfee studio right now, get
everybody out safely, and light it on fire, burn it down.
If he himself will take a lot of money to
leave sports broadcasting forever, give it to him all that
(19:41):
he wants, or just start turning everything you have into
a version of what he does, and be prepared to
pay eighty five million dollars for five years of it,
but like ten times a year. Thank you, Nancy Faust,
(20:31):
and here's your thirteen dollars. I mean there are journalistic
questions here too. If you are paying an athlete for
his comments, how do you know he's not embellishing his
comments so you will embellish his paycheck. I mean, if
I'm coach Dion Sanders and I find out you're paying
Aaron Rodgers, say two million a year, why wouldn't I say, Hey,
(20:54):
you give me three million a year and I'll make
up a story for you that me and the ninety
two Braves through the World Series, or I'll tell you
that we didn't throw the World Series, whatever you like.
And then there's the real nightmare scenario on teams that
unfolded when our ancestors tried to mix money and journalism
(21:14):
and athletes. More than a century ago. In nineteen eleven,
The New York Times the New York Goddamn Times hired
New York Giants pitching ace Rube Marquard to quote write
unquote columns about its team as it played the A's
in that year's World Series. So The New York Herald
(21:36):
turned around and hired his teammate Christy Mathewson to quote
write unquote columns about the same games. They had ghostwriters,
of course, sports writers who wrote the words for them,
but it was their byline on each column. Markquard in
The Times, Matthewson and The Herald. When Frank Baker of
the A's beat Marquard with a late home run in
(21:57):
Game two, Matthewson's ghostwriter wrote, Markquard makes the wrong pitch,
and he had Matthewson's slam Marquard for ignoring the scouting
reports on Baker. Then in Game three, Baker beat Matthewson
with a homer late and under Markquard's byline, Markquard's ghostwriter asked,
will the great Matthewson tell us exactly what he pitched
(22:19):
to Baker. Matthewson and Markquard barely spoke to each other ever.
Again It would be nine years before the New York
Giants won a World Series. If anybody should know the
intra teamed Dangers of the Pat McAfee millions and millions experiment,
(22:40):
it is ESPN's own Sunday Night baseball analyst David Cohne.
In nineteen eighty eight, the New York Daily News paid
David Cohne for an exclusive column on the upcoming National
League Championship series against the La Dodgers in Los Angeles.
In it, Cohn's ghostwriter called the Dodgers Ace lucky and
(23:01):
the Dodgers' top reliever a high school pitcher, and the
Rodgers made sure every player and seemingly every fan in
Los Angeles had a copy of the column. I was
there at Dodger Stadium the night Cone pitched. He said,
the hatred from the stands and the dugout was so
palpable he could barely breathe. As I said, I was there,
(23:23):
I think he's understating it. Cohn gave up five runs
before being chased in the second inning. The Mets lost
the game and the series, and the paper paid him
five hundred dollars. So paying Aaron Rodgers millions, that's gotta
go well for ESPN and the industry. If by well
(23:43):
you mean a cataclysm that will destroy ESPN's credibility and
its relationships with every team and every player, and also
its profitability, and it will wipe out every show that
relies on player interviews, including Wally and the Trucking Pozo
Bon Chance Boys. It's not like sports journalism isn't fraught
(24:07):
enough as it is. The Atlanta Braves are actually angry
because after Game two of their NL playoff series against Philadelphia,
which turned on the Braves doubling off the Philly star
Bryce Harper, shortstop Orlando Arcia ran around the Braves clubhouse
shouting haha at a boy Harper while quoting a reporter.
Reporters circled the room. In Game three, Harper used the
(24:31):
story as motivation. He hit too or home runs against
the Braves, and as he circled the bases, he stared
daggers at Arcia on both home runs. Arcia and the
other Braves players have actually complained that Arcia's repeated needling
of Harper, shouted in their clubhouse was somehow confidential and
should not have been reported because even though it was
(24:53):
done in front of literally dozens of reporters. It was
not part of some actual interview a quote here. The
clubhouse is a sanctuary, and I think when things like
that get out, it doesn't make people want to talk
to the media at all, said Braves, catchered Travis Darnow
in one of the least supportable comments any player has
(25:14):
ever made in human history. Even a local Atlanta TV
sports anchor named Miles Garrett and local TV sports anchors
have largely been reduced to fans with microphones and pennants
that they waive. He claimed that rci's remark, which he
made a lot of times in front of a lot
(25:35):
of witnesses, was somehow off the record and reporting it
violated a trust. The good news here is happily this
will all be resolved when every player is paid for
every interview, after every game and on every show, and
then the players who are really in demand, they will
be given the right to approve their remarks before they
(25:56):
are quoted or played on TV. Hey, Pandora, can I
borrow your box? The irony here too is that players
can say things. They can, even like Arcia, shout things
in a clubhouse, and they can have the right to
expect that nobody reports them. I know it happened to
(26:19):
me before the fifth and final game of the nineteen
ninety nine AL Championship Series at Fenway Park in Boston.
I had to get into the Yankee clubhouse like two
innings before the game ended, so I could cover the
celebrating Yankee players and the award presentation live on Fox's
broadcast of the game, for which we were paying baseball millions.
(26:39):
I was on a platform, I was bleached in a
camera light, and the technicians were checking their stuff and
the lights and the angles and everything else. When the
clubhouse door slammed open and in scrutted the Yankee second baseman,
Chuck Nabloc. He was swearing profusely, profoundly, amazingly. Chuck had
been having trouble throwing ground balls. He was throwing them
(27:02):
away mostly, and as the eighth inning started, Yankees' manager
Joe Torre had removed him from the game, denying him
the chance to be in in the on field celebration
of the Pennant NA Block was so enraged that he
never saw me, or the platform I was standing on,
or the camera lights. He used all the expletives known
(27:22):
to man, and he directed them all at his own manager,
the Yankees' public relations guy, a childhood friend of mine,
rushed over to me to insist that I could not
report what I had just heard, and he was a
little shocked when I said, you're right, he said what
I said. I'm here as a lighting prop. No Block
(27:44):
has a perfect right to expect there'd be no reporters
in the clubhouse during the game. If he says it
again afterwards, I'll say I heard it just now first.
Otherwise I'm never gonna mention it. No way. Now. Of course,
the PR guy would be rushing over to me to
negotiate how much Fox would be willing to pay nab
Block to let us report his rage. Eleven years earlier,
(28:09):
I had an entirely different experience in the waning moments
of a postseason game. And oddly enough, this ties into
that nineteen eighty eight season of David Kohne and the
Dodgers and Alexis Denny, all of whom I have mentioned already.
On Sunday, the Dodgers will celebrate the thirty fifth anniversary
of what is certainly the most famous moment in their
(28:30):
history in Los Angeles. Anyway, Game one of the nineteen
eighty eight World Series against the Oakland A's, literally half
of the Dodgers' starting lineup that had won the National
League Pennant was hurt and the other half was not
that impressive to begin with. National League Most Valuable Player
Kirk Gibson had nearly destroyed his left hamstring in Game
(28:50):
two of that playoff series that David Cohne had written about,
and Gibson had ripped up his right knee in Game seven.
He was assumed to be out of the World Series,
but he was still on the Dodger roster, and the
joke was that was only because the Dodgers literally did
not have any other healthy players under contract and their
only other option was to activate sixty one year old
(29:10):
manager Tom Lesarda. Anyway, the Dodgers had actually led Game
one against the powerful Oakland A's to nothing after the
first inning, but by the ninth they were trailing four
to three, with literally three of the worst hitters in
the National League due up and then the pitcher. I
was there covering the game for KCBS Channel two in LA,
(29:32):
and my pal Alexis Denny, news and sports producer for
CBS Network News in Los Angeles made our way together
down to the tiny alcove from the press box, the
alcove between the clubhouses, from which we could see just
a sliver of the field, pretty much just the pitcher
and the batter, framed by a hot dog stand as
(29:54):
the Oakland relief ace. Dennis Eckersley warmed up to pitch
the bottom of the ninth, and he had given up
exactly nine hits in his previous eighteen games, in fourteen
of which he had recorded saves. Alexis asked me, simply
and appropriately, so what are we going to ask Eck
after this game is over? And, matter of factly, without
(30:17):
any emotion, certainly without any sense of predicting anything, I said,
We're going to ask Eck about this game losing home
run he's about to give up to Kirk Gibson. Alexis
looked at me, funny, I mean, funnier than usual. What
Gibson's not playing? He's hurt? I looked at her with
(30:39):
mild annoyance. Oh, come on, you know it has to happen.
I can only describe my feeling at that time as
being exactly what had been a decade before at another
playoff game in Boston with the Red Sox leading the
Yankees to nothing in the top of the seventh, with
two Yankees on and New York shortstop Bucky Dent coming up,
and my best friend, the Red Sox fan, exhaling when
(31:01):
the last batter had popped out and saying, thank goodness,
Dent is no home run threat. And I began to
speak in tongues, and what I was saying was about
how his hubristic remark about Dent would now necessarily cause
to happen next. What would happen next? A three run
home run by Bucky Dent, and it would be all
(31:23):
his fault, and then Dent hit the homer. Neither the
Dent nor the Gibson home run predictions were really predictions.
I felt no sense of investment in it. I didn't
race to put down a bet. I suppose that at
some other games I had made equally impossible announcements of
(31:47):
events that did not happen, but I have never been
given to that, so if I did do it, it was
only a couple of times. My batting average is like
four or five hundred on these, And anyway, these weren't
calculations or analyzes. On my part, I just felt like
I was running about five minutes ahead of the rest
of the world. And these things danse home run in
(32:07):
nineteen seventy eight, Gibson's home run in nineteen eighty eight,
these things had already happened. AnyWho, Mike Davis of the
Dodgers walked stole second base with two outs. Gibson, to
the shock of everybody except me, managed somehow to climb
(32:27):
up the three steps of the Dodger dugout and waddle
out to home plate, and then, on a three to
two pitch, hit the game winning home run. Like I said,
as Dodger Stadium shook and we prepared to go into
the clubhouses, Alexis Denny gave me a look that I
still can't really describe. But thirty five years later, I
(32:49):
know that since that night she has not been fully
convinced that I am of this earth. Alexis was nice
enough to make up an affidavit about all this. It
hangs on my wall, and yes, this really did happen.
I will also note that the Dodgers won the World Series,
(33:11):
the only time since nineteen sixty five they have done
so in a full Major League season, and once again,
having been eliminated by Arizona on Wednesday night, they are,
for like the twenty seventh time in these thirty five years,
the Dodgers are celebrating the anniversary of Kirk Gibson's home
run that I told you was gonna happen by not
(33:33):
playing a postseason game because their season is already over.
To the number one story on the Countdown and it's
(33:55):
Fridays with Thurber, and only occasionally did the great American
humorist bend towards the supernatural. Lots of Thurber's characters, like
his fictionalized version of his own mother, claimed to get
messages from beyond the grave and stuff like that, but
rarely did Thurber ever go a cult in the first person.
(34:16):
This is not true in one of my all time
favorites of his stories, The Black Magic of Barney Haller,
in which a slight accent turns into something that is
just right up against the line of being actually a
little scary but still hilarious. The Black Magic of Barney
Haller by James Thurber. It was one of those hot
(34:41):
days on which the earth is uninhabitable, even as early
as ten o'clock in the morning, even on the hill
where I live under the dark maples. The long porch
was hot, and the wicker chair I sat in complained
hot lee. My coffee was beginning to wear off, and
with it the momentary illusion it gives that things are
right and life is good. There were sultry mutterings of thunder.
(35:05):
I had a quick feeling that if I looked up
from my book, I would see Barney Holler. I looked up,
and there he was, coming along the road, lightning playing about
his shoulders, thunder following him like a dog. Barney is,
or was, my hired man. He is strong and amiable,
(35:29):
sweaty and dependable, slowly and heavily confident. But he is
also eerie. He traffics with the devil. His ears twitch
when he talks, but it isn't so much that as
the things he says. Once in late June, when all
of a moment, sabers began to flash brightly in the
(35:51):
heavens and bowling balls rumbled, I took refuge in the barn.
I always have a feeling that I am going to
be struck by lightning and either riven like an old
apple tree, or left with a foot that aches in
rainy weather, and a habit of fainting. These things happen.
Barney came in, not to escape the storm to which
he is or pretends to be indifferent, but to put
(36:15):
the sigh the way. Suddenly, he said the first of
those things that made me, when I was with him,
faintly creepy. He pointed at the house. Once I said,
this boat come down to rock, He said, it is
phenomena like that of which I stand in constant dread,
boats coming down rocks, people being teleported, statues dripping blood,
(36:37):
old regrets, and dreams in the form of Luna moths
fluttering against the windows at midnight. Of course, I finally
figured out what Barney meant, or what I comforted myself
with believing he meant something about a bolt coming down
the lightning rod on the house, a commonplace and utterly
natural thing. I should have dismissed it, but it had
(37:01):
its effect on me. Here was a stolid man, smelling
of hay and leather, who talked like somebody out of
Charles Fort's books, or like a traveler back from oz
and all the time the lightning was zigging and zagging
around him. On this hot morning, When I saw Barney
(37:21):
coming along with his faithful storm trudging behind him, I
went back, frowningly to my copy of Swan's Way. I
hope that Barney, seeing me absorbed in a book, would
pass by without saying anything. I read. I myself seemed
actually to have become the subject of my book, A
church a quartet, the rivalry between Francis the First and
(37:43):
Charles the Fifth. I could feel Barney standing looking at me,
but I didn't look at him this morning. By and by,
said Barney, I go hunt grotcher's and d voods. That's fine,
I said, and turned a page and pretended to be
engrossed in what I was reading. Barney walked on. He
(38:06):
had wanted to talk some more, but he walked on
after a paragraph where two his words began to come
between me and the words in the book. Bime By,
I go hunt grotches in d woods. If you are
susceptible such things, it is not difficult to visualize grotches.
(38:26):
They fluttered into my mind, ugly little creatures about the
size of whipperwills, only covered with blood and honey, and
the scrapings of church bells. Grotches Who and what I wondered,
really was this thing in the form of a hired
man that kept anointing me ominously in passing with Abra cadabra.
(38:52):
Barney didn't go toward the woods at once. He weeded
the corn, He picked apple boughs off off the lawn.
He knocked a yellow jacket's nest down out of a
plum tree. It was raining now, but he didn't seem
to notice it. He kept looking at me out of
the corner of his eye, and I kept looking at
him out of the corner of my eyebod. Dime is
it bleeze? He called to me. Finally, I put down
(39:14):
my book and sauntered out to him. When you go
for those grotches, I said, firmly, I'll go with you.
I was sure he wouldn't want me to go. I
was right. He protested that he could get the grotches himself.
I'll go with you, I said, stubbornly. We stood looking
at each other, and then, abruptly, just to give him
(39:35):
something to ponder over, I quoted, I'm going out to
clean the pasture spring. I'll only stop to take the
leaves away and wait to watch the water clear. I
may i shan't be gone long you come too. It wasn't,
I realized, very good abracadabra, But it served. Barney looked
(39:58):
at me in a puzzled way. Yes, he said, vaguely,
it's fine. Minutes of twelve, I said, remembering he had asked.
Then we go, he said, And we trudged through the
rain over to the orchard fence and climbed that, and
opened a gate and went out into the meadow that
slopes up to the woods. I had a prefiguring of
(40:19):
Barney at some proper spot deep in the woods, prancing
around like a goat, casting off his false nature, shedding
his hired man's garments, dropping his teutonic accent, repeating diabolical phrases,
conjuring up grotches. It was a great slash of lightning
(40:39):
and along bumping of thunder. As we reached the edge
of the woods, I turned and fled, glancing over my shoulder,
I saw Barney standing and staring after me. It turned out,
on the face of it to be as simple as
the boat that came down the rock. Grotches were crotches,
(41:00):
crotched saplings, which he cut down to use as supports
under the peach boughs, because in bearing time they become
so heavy with fruit that there was danger of the
branches snapping off. I saw Barney later putting the crotches
in place. We didn't have much to say to each other.
I can see now that he was beginning to suspect
me too. About six o'clock next evening, I was alone
(41:26):
in the house and sleeping upstairs. Barney rapped on the
door of the front porch. I knew it was Barney
because he called to me. I woke up slowly. It
was dark for six o'clock. I heard rumblings and soft flickerings.
Barney was standing at the front door with his storm
at heel. I had the conviction that it wasn't storming
(41:49):
anywhere except around my house. There couldn't, without the intervention
of the devil or one of his agents, be so
many lightning storms in one neighborhood. I had been dreaming
of Proost and the church at Cambre and madel dipped
in Tea, and the rivalry between Francis the First and
Charles the fifth. My head whirled and I didn't get up.
(42:11):
Barney kept on wrapping. He called out again. There was
a flash followed by a sharp splitting sound. Now I
leaped up this time, I thought he is here to
get me. I had a notion that he was standing
at the door, barefooted, with a wreath of grape leaves
around his head and a wild animal's skin slung over
(42:33):
his shoulder. I didn't want to go down, but I did.
He was as usual, solid, amiable, dressed like a hired man.
I went out onto the porch and looked at the
improbable storm now on in all of its fury. This
is getting pretty bad, I said meaningly. Barney looked at
the rain placidly well. I said, irritably, what's up? Barney
(42:56):
turned his little squinty blue eyes on me. We go
to the gaddock now and become warbs, he said, the
hell we do? I thought to myself quickly. I was uneasy.
I was you might even say terrified, but I determined
not to show it. If he began to chant incantations
(43:18):
or to make obscene signs, or if he attempted to
sling me over his shoulder, I resolved to plunge right
out into that storm, lightning it all, and run to
the nearest house. I didn't know what they would think
at the nearest house when I burst in upon them,
or what I would tell them. But I didn't intend
to accompany this amiable looking fiend to any garrick and
(43:38):
become a warb. I tried to persuade myself that there
was some simple explanation that warbs would turn out to
be as innocuous as boats on rocks and grotches in Davoudes.
But the conviction gripped me in the growling of the
thunder that here, at last was the moment when Barney
(43:58):
Holler or whoever he was, had chosen to get me
toward the steps that led to the lawn, and turned
and faced him grimly. Listen, I barked. Suddenly. Did you
know that even when it isn't brillig I can produce
slythe toes? Did you happen to know that the Momrath
(44:19):
never lived that could outgrab me? Yeah? And furthermore, I
can become anything I want to. Even if I were
a warb, I wouldn't have to keep on being one
if I didn't want to. I can become a playing card.
It will too once I was the jack of clubs.
Only I forgot to say my glasses off, and some
guy recognized me. I. Barney was backing slowly away toward
(44:40):
the petunia box at one end of the porch. His
little blue eyes were wide. He saw that I had him.
I think I go now, he said, and he walked
out into the rain. The rain followed him down the road.
I have a new hired man now. Barney never came
back to work for me after that day. Of course,
(45:02):
I figured out finally what he meant the garrick and
the warps. He had simply got horribly mixed up in
trying to tell me that he was going up to
the garret and clear out the wasps, of which I
have thousands. The new hired man is afraid of them.
Barney could have scooped them up in his hands and
(45:22):
thrown them out a window without getting stung. I am
sure he trafficked with the devil, but I am sorry
I let him go. I've done all the damage I
(45:46):
can do here. Thank you for listening. Countdown has come
to you from the Vin Scully Studios talking about Kirk
Gibson at the Olderman Broadcasting Empire in New York. The
music you've heard was, for the most part arranged produced
and performed by Countdown musical directors Brian Ray and John
Phillip Schenel. Brian Ray handled the guitars, bass and drums.
(46:07):
John Phillip Scheneil did the orchestration and keyboards. Then it
was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including the other
Beethoven tunes, were arranged and performed by No Horns Allowed.
Sports music is courtesy of ESPN, Inc. And it was
written by Mitch Warren Davis And we call it the
Olderman theme from ESPN two. Your Price May Vary. Our
(46:29):
satirical and pithy musical comments are by Nancy Fauss, the
best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today was, as
I mentioned, my friend Alexis Denny live from Paris. Everything
else is pretty much my fault. That's countdown for this
the one thousand and eleventh day since Donald Trump's first
attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
(46:51):
Convict him now while we still can. The banks scheduled
countdown is Tuesday bulletins. As the news warrants, I have
no further predictions at this time till then. I'm Keith Ulderman.
Good morning, Good afternoon, good Night, and good Luck. Countdown
(47:21):
with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts.
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