January 4, 2023 • 43 mins
EPISODE 105: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: The Taliban Caucus lights the Republican Party and the House of Representatives on fire, while on his first day, the New Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries perfectly whips his members to do literally do nothing more than bring their popcorn and watch everybody from Gaetz to McCarthy burn, baby, burn. It was a beautiful thing, and it left the full range of fascists from Tucker Carlson to Rep. Byron Donalds having to cobble together the nonsensical sophistry that their self-defenestration was actually democracy in action. If Jeffries can manage to keep the Democrats from reverting to their natural desire to do ill-timed good on behalf of the institution rather than let the Republicans shoot themselves again today, he will have won the 118th Congress no matter which Liz Truss the GOP eventually settles on in place of the wounded McCarthy.
B-Block (15:15) SPECIAL COMMENT No. 2: There is the tragedy of Damar Hamlin of the Buffalo Bills, and then there is the disgusting reality that the National Football League is now trying to gaslight us. OF COURSE the league intended to resume Monday night's game even after the stricken player fell. And now the NFL has lied about it and sleazily blamed Joe Buck, Suzy Kolber and all of ESPN, to cover up its own insensitivity and callousness. This is, of course, the history of the NFL, which did the wrong thing after JFK was assassinated, and after Mayor George Moscone and Councilman Harvey Milk were assassinated hours before a Monday Night Football game in San Francisco, and after it was told flights could not be guaranteed to get its players and media to games the weekend after 9/11. But this lie makes the Hamlin nightmare even worse - as does the rank exploitation of it by the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, who spit on the memories of Chuck Hughes and J.V. Cain and Hank Gathers and so many athletes who died on the field, from cardiac distress. (30:54) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Trump and Michael Flynn are no match for Congressman-Elect George Santos.
C-Block (36:09) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: In 1973, Charles Crawford was interviewing me for his TV news story from one of the earliest baseball card shows. In 1983, he was sitting next to me on the anchor desk at CNN. He introduced himself and I said "we've met before." His reaction when I told him how and when is worth your time.
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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 I Heart Radio.
It is early still, but thus far it is the
(00:26):
tweets of a year from Ryan Nanny quote, GOP, give
Liz Trusts a shot. I mean that's it, isn't it.
Whatever Kevin McCarthy thinks he is doing, whatever, the twenty
American Taliban holdouts think they are doing. Whomever they all
think they are talking to. The Republicans, who forced the
(00:47):
balloting for speaker to a second day for the first
time in a century, have made themselves look like fools
of biblical proportions. They have in fact supplanted Liz Trusts
as the most obvious political punchline in the world. And
more importantly, twenty of them went to bed last night
(01:09):
dreaming of how to make it even worse today on
day one of his presumed speakership, someday Kevin McCarthy or
somebody was outmaneuvered, out, generaled, out, dignified by the new
leader of the Democrats in the House, Akeem Jeffreys. The
(01:30):
liberal inclination to avoid the fight, to put out the
dumpster fire, to self importantly get on with it for
the good of a nation, and then go get a
drink was suppressed and mastered by Leader Jefferies. Moderate Republicans
and even some Democrats expected that at least a few
Democrats would eventually leave the House during the day, and
(01:52):
by the second vote or at least the third vote,
their absences would reduce the margin McCarthy would need to
finally get over his hurdle, and Hakim Jeffreys said, stay
here and let them burn. As Don Buyer of the
Virginia Eighth put it, I'll be here voting on every
ballot for as long as it takes, and I haven't
heard any Dems talk about leaving. We are proud of
(02:15):
our unity and determined to fight. Others went more whimsical.
Janshakovsky of Illinois brought what appeared to be an oil
barrel sized container full of three different flavors of popcorn
to share with our Democratic colleagues. Her Illinois colleague, Robin Kelly,
brought a smaller and thus easier to transport tin of popcorn.
(02:38):
Grace Magne of New York and Ted Loeu of California
had personal serving sized bags of popcorn. Major league trolling
by Democrats who in other years would instead have been
handwringing and tut tutting and mulling, compromise on my health
of the grateful nation and the partial score keeen Jeffreys,
(02:58):
one Speaker of the House. If any nothing, the Geo
peace self defenestration yesterday underscores the reality that Trump with
a Republican Senate at a Republican Congress proved in two
thousand seventeen and two thousand eighteen, just as George W.
Bush proved, just as George H. W. Bush proved, just
(03:21):
as Ronald Reagan proved, the modern GOP can destroy almost everything,
but it has no idea how to put together almost anything.
It is a party more adept at political machination and
manipulation than are the Democrats. But when something actually, finally,
(03:41):
actually actually actually has to be done, there is no skill,
no forethought, no plan. At the stroke of eight o'clock
last night, right wingers running the gamut from the Trump
sickophants who garrotted McCarthy to Tucker Carlson to Byron Donald's
the knitwit who changed his vote from for McCarthy to
(04:02):
against McCarthy in the third ballot, they all hid behind
the only thing they actually did yesterday come up with
a plausible bit of sophistry that sounds good to their
own idiot side, which they are now pretending was the
idea all along. A little disagreement among great leaders is
fine and noble, because Republicans are the true democrats, and
(04:26):
Democrats are the real fascists. And this is how much
democratic Republicans love democracy. We didn't just have one democratic vote.
We had three democratic votes. And that was our democratic plan.
And you know what our next democratic plan is, Republicans, right,
if we break the all time record of a hundred
and thirty three ballots for a speaker, that'll mean we're
a hundred and thirty three times as democratic as the Democrats.
(04:48):
Democracy Democracy USA USA. They don't have a plan. I
mean Bobert and Gates and Bob Good and Chip Roy
and Scott Perry and the others had a scheme. The
nineteen of them, the nineteen what would you call them,
(05:09):
the Anti McCarthy is m Caucus, the chaos Caucus, the
insurrection Caucus, No, no, no, I last one they already
used two years ago Friday. They would create chaos and
havoc and drama and earn themselves what they really wanted
from serving in the House. What they really understood about
serving in the House, serving in the government, serving the
(05:31):
people of this country. A bunch of sound bites, a
bunch of sound bites they personally can use in fundraising
and election campaigns. That is what government means to them.
I mean, Congressman elect Don Bacon called them the Taliban
twenty and the Taliban Caucus, and Matt Gates took that
as a compliment, literally took it as a compliment, because
(05:56):
who will or will not return Matt Gates to the
House in two years if he's not in prison, the
Florida equivalent of the Taliban. Anything beyond cool sound bites
will be accidental. I mean, I suppose there is some
magical thinking that if they could talk this idiot Donald's
out of the McCarthy camp and go from nineteen votes
(06:17):
against him to twenty, they might be able to start
a run on the bank thing on ballot number I
don't know, twenty seven or something. That presumably is when
McCarthy's biggest backers or his most terrified backers like Marjorie
Trailer Park Green, start looking for an alternative who does
not even have to be part of the Taliban, And that,
(06:37):
of course, is how every presidential favorite whoever walked into
a Democratic or Republican convention and wound up not getting it,
wound up not getting it. It was ninety nine years
ago this summer that the Democrats headed to Madison Square
Garden with two outstanding presidential candidates, Woodrow Wilson's son in law,
William McAdoo and New York Governor Al Smith, and they
(07:00):
left it one hundred and three presidential nomination ballot its
later with the ultimate compromise candidate of all ultimate compromise candidates,
John Davis, unknown, former ambassador to England, and John Davis
in the election wound up getting twenty nine of the
popular vote and losing nearly two to one to Calvin Coolidge,
(07:23):
who didn't even campaign. And at the end of his life,
John Davis was one of the lawyers who defended the
segregationists in the suite of Supreme Court cases now collectively
known as Brown v. Board of Education. Nice work, John.
It is terrifying to say this, but Kevin McCarthy might
just be the most qualified candidate for Speaker that the
(07:48):
Republicans have. I mean, on a scale of one to
a hundred. He's a five or a six or six
point two and a good day. But that really might
be the best they have. And obviously truth about that is,
if you cause terrified Republican lemmings to abandon Kevin McCarthy,
(08:12):
they will inevitably wind up with somebody less capable of
making the house function. They will find their own John Davis. Hell.
Knowing these morons, they might even find the John Davis,
and John Davis has been dead since ninety and an
updated partial score a caim Jeffreys to Speaker of the
(08:33):
House if any Nothing Like all insurrectionists, the Taliban twenty
are the proverbial dogs chasing the car. Their skill, their
joy is that chase. What to do if they catch
the car is an entirely different thing. The jiminy Glick
of Fox News. Carlson, who has as much claim to
(08:55):
being the intellectual leader of the Republican Taliban as any
of the other morons, demanded two things last night, that
McCarthy re ease all the January six video and files online,
implying that McCarthy is part of some cover up of
the supposed truth about January six, which to them is
as any good Republican knows that the real victim that
(09:18):
day was Donald Trump. Carlson also demanded that McCarthy created
a new committee under Kentucky fascist Thomas Massey to investigate
CIA and FBI interference in domestic politics. Translation Twitter Gazi
with star hearing witnesses Matt Taiebie and Elon Musk. Whenever
(09:45):
the big giant part of reality, the Gates and Good
and Tucker, Carlson and the others have not seen, do
not see, and will never see, is the same big
giant part of reality that Trump has never seen, and
that frankly, a lot of us, myself in did a
lot of us often forget to focus on most of America.
(10:10):
Most of America's voters spend less time analyzing the events
of American politics than I have just reading this commentary
right now, and that you have just listening to this
commentary right now. America is the way it is today
because we have become the society that only reads the headlines,
(10:35):
and in this case the headlines are Republicans head back
to house for second day of laugh out loud disarray,
Democrats restock their supply of popcorn, and one more look
at the scoreboard. A Keem Jeffreys three, Speaker of the House.
If any nothing still ahead, Oh my god, the Republican
(11:10):
Taliban the twenty Liz Trusses somehow actually managed to overshadow
even poor George Santos walking sadly through the halls of Congress,
his goofball backpack, making him look like a lost transfer student.
Worst persons ahead, and next the tragedy of Damar Hamlin
of the Buffalo Bills. You know about, But in the
(11:32):
grief and shock, the history of similar nightmares in the
National Football League and in other sports seems to have
been entirely and perhaps deliberately forgotten, And that history is
being exploited by the anti Baxers, and I don't forget.
And more important still in the grief and shock, the
(11:52):
National Football League's willingness to throw its own broadcasters like
Joe Buck and its networks like ESPN under the bus
to gaslight you comes to the fore yet again. The
NFL one flying that they never tried to play the
Sunday after nine eleven. Now they are lying that they
never intended to resume Monday night's game after Hamlin was stricken.
(12:13):
The NFL is lying, and I will call them out
on it. And that is next. This is countdown. This
is countdown with Keith Olberman. Apart from the human tragedy
(12:42):
of Damar Hamlin of the Buffalo Bills at his cardiac arrest,
at his intubation, the inevitable, infuriating side stories are multiplying,
and first among them, the National Football League is gaslighting you.
After Hamlin collapsed Monday night and was given CPR on
the field and taken off by a mulence and play
(13:06):
was stopped and the Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati players
went to their locker rooms, the game was quote temporarily suspended.
It was not postponed, It was not canceled, and that
was made clear by the play by play man for
ESPN Joe Buck and the studio hosts Susie Calbert on
the ESPN broadcast, and ESPN even made a graphic temporarily suspended.
(13:31):
And then the NFL said it would give the teams
a five minute warning to get the players ready to
resume the first quarter, and ESPN put that on its graphic,
and in those five minutes, the world came down on
the NFL for its callousness and its hesitation to call
the game off, while a young and popular Bills player
(13:53):
was fighting for his life, and his teammates and his rivals,
and the broadcasters and the viewers tried to fight through
the trauma of what they had all been witnessed to,
either in person or via TV. Within hours of this,
the National Football League was claiming none of that had happened.
The league's executive vice president of football Operations, a former
(14:15):
player named Troy Vincent, insisted on a conference call, quote, Frankly,
it never crossed our mind to talk about warming up
to resume play. That's ridiculous, that's insensitive, and that's not
a place that we should ever be in. How do
you resume playing when such a traumatic event occurs in
front of you in real time? And that's the way
(14:36):
we were thinking about it. The commissioner and I bull
crap I worked at ESPN for a total of ten years.
I worked on NBC's football coverage for three years. I
co hosted the Super Bowl pregame show for NBC. I
hosted the Internet Super Bowl halftime show for Fox. I
(14:57):
worked for two years at Fox with Joe Buck. I
worked for seven years at ESPN with Suzie Calbert. I
worked with all the ESPN game producers and all the
studio producers, and all the executives, and I can tell
you without fear of contradiction, I have had many problems
with all of the people I have just mentioned, from
Joe to Susie to the executives. But if Joe Buck
(15:18):
and Susie Calbert reported that the players were going to
be given some time to compose themselves and then a
five minute warm up because the game was to resume,
Joe and Susie had been told that by the bosses
at the highest level of their organization, and those bosses
had been told that directly by the National Football League Yesterday.
(15:41):
Joe Buck said he was quoting ESPN's own rules expert,
John Perry, who had been in direct contact with the
NFL office in New York, and ESPN issued a carefully
phrased but strong self defense quoting it. There was constant
communication in real time between ESPN and league and game officials.
As a result of that, we reported what we were
(16:03):
told in the moment and immediately updated fans as new
information was learned. This was an unprecedented, rapidly evolving circumstance.
All night long, we refrained from speculation. They did not
say this. I will say it again. The National Football
League is lying. Of course it is. It is expert
(16:27):
at lying. And of course the NFL is trying to
revise the history of Damar Hamlin and what it wanted
to do that night because it made the wrong call
and because of the additional reporting that the players and
the coaches made it clear that they were not going
to resume the game, no matter what the NFL said,
and no matter what news did or did not come
(16:48):
from Damar Hamlin's bedside, And those are the only reasons
the game was finally postponed Monday night. The NFL would
have played. The National Football League has made callous mistakes before,
like how it wanted proceed after tomorrow Hamlin's cardiac arrest.
It will make them again. And this is also not
(17:10):
the first time it has flat outlied to the public
about what it did or did not do, or when
it was or was not callous. Right after nine eleven,
then NFL Commissioner Paul Taglabou made a huge chest thumping
deal over canceling the game's scheduled for Sunday, September six
and Monday September There were pious comments about the grieving
(17:33):
nation and the wounds, and inappropriate this and respectful that when,
in fact, on a conference call with the f a
A and security officials and the heads of the major
airlines on either the Thursday or Friday after the attacks,
the league said it intended to play those games as
scheduled on the sixteenth and seventeen, and the authorities replied
(17:56):
that that was nice, but there could be no guarantee
that NFL teams or officials, or broadcast crews or fans
would be able to fly from city to city just
to play or watch football games, and that there would
be no priority given to those flights, even if air
travel suspended after the attacks was largely up and running
(18:17):
by Saturday. The NFL complained, it got the same answer,
and so Paul tag b A Boo went public with
a loud, unseemly self congratulatory cancelation announcement, and unthinking reporters applauded,
without once considering the reality of the logistics that had
given the NFL no choice but to cancel, and then
(18:40):
boast as if it had been its own idea much earlier.
On the morning of Monday, November mayor George Moscone and
Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated by an ex city councilman
in San Francisco's City Hall. San Francisco were to host
the Pittsburgh Steelers literally just hours later in the Monday
(19:03):
night football game at Candle's Dick Park. Mayor Mosconi had
been an arch advocate for the forty Niners and for
the importance of sports in his community, and despite calls
to cancel or or just postpone the game for a day,
the NFL never seriously considered doing that. It was the
height of insensitivity and disrespect. Of course, it was that
(19:25):
is NFL policy. On November sixty three, the National Football
League played anyway. Two days after the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy, the American Football League canceled its entire schedule.
I have mentioned it here before that the then commissioner
of the NFL, Pete Rosel, openly regretted that decision for
(19:46):
the rest of his life, and he also understood firsthand
just how unpopular it was. I've never found a second
source for this report, but I can't imagine my source
made it up or got it wrong. He was Bill
McPhail and he was the president of CBS Sports, which
in three carried NFL games exclusively. It did not televise
(20:07):
any games that horrible Sunday. Bill mcphil was also Pete
Rosell's close friend, and the two of them pretty much
designed the way they televise NFL games then and now,
which built pro football in this country. Bill McPhail would
become the vice president of the new cable news network CNN.
In night he was the vice president in charge of sports.
He designed CNN's original robust sports department and started the
(20:31):
TV careers of people like Dan Patrick and Gary Miller
and me. And one day Bill told me that with
all the CBS NFL telecasts canceled on Sunday, November, he
had nothing to do, so he joined his friend Pete Rosel,
the NFL commissioner, at Yankee Stadium to watch the Giants
play the St. Louis Cardinals. It would be within weeks
(20:54):
that Rosel would say he was mistaken to not cancel
that schedule, and twenty years he was still telling it
to people like me and calling it the greatest mistake
of his life. But Pete Rosel us right about one thing.
Despite the assassination, Despite the grief, despite the fact that
Lee Harvey Oswald was shot on live national television forty
(21:14):
minutes before the NFL kicked off its games that day.
Attendance for the games was normal, down maybe a thousand
per game. There were sixty eight thousand fans at Yankee
Stadium for the Cardinals Giants game. But Bill McPhail told
me that during halftime one of them, a man appeared
at their seats asked, are you Pete Roselle? Are you
(21:37):
the reason we're here today? And when Roselle confirmed it,
the man punched Roselle in the face, said nothing and
walked away. Bill told me he moved to follow the
man to apprehend him, but Roselle stopped him. Don't I
know how he feels. The NFL made a mistake in
nineteen sixty three, it made a mistake in nineteen seventy eight,
(21:57):
It made a mistake in two thousand one. It made
a mistake Monday night. And if somebody had just said yes,
we originally thought we might be able to resume the game.
We did not know how serious his condition was. We
were terribly mistaken. We can only say that, like everybody
else who saw what happened. We were shocked and terrified.
(22:18):
And when you are traumatized, not only do you often
make mistakes, but the one mistake you are most likely
to make is to try to pretend everything is normal
and carry on as if everything is normal. We did that.
We are sorry. If the NFL had just said that,
I could not imagine anybody complaining about it. But do
(22:39):
not gaslight people. Do not lie to people. Do not
imply your broadcast partners whose content you watch like sensors,
misled the nation. You were already guilty of being callous.
Do not add dishonesty to your crimes. There is something
(23:00):
else about the Damar Hamlin tragedy that bears repeating, and
this has nothing to do with the nash Football leagues. Bluntly,
there is still a crazy component in our society that blames,
and until further notice, will blame the death or illness
of anyone at any time on COVID vaccinations. These creatures
(23:21):
appeared on Twitter, Kevin Sorbo, Lenny Dikestra, Charlie Kirk, Rogan,
oh Handley, Grant Stinkfield. There was another one who actually
declared that Hamlin was dead because of COVID vaccines. They
also all appeared in the right wing echo chamber because
there is no tragedy too traumatic for them to try
(23:41):
to exploit to serve their paranoid, uninformed, dangerous, indefensible conspiracy theories.
And they jumped on the Damar Hamlin story as if
it proved those conspiracies, because they have no souls, no consciences,
and ironically no hearts. And their basic, stupid, simplistic argument
(24:03):
is that no National Football League player had ever collapsed
that way before COVID vaccines. Therefore, COVID vaccines caused it.
Therefore COVID vaccines are evil. Therefore vote Republican. It is
a sick and twisted mentality, and how we will purge
it from this nation I do not know. Maybe more importantly,
(24:26):
that spits on the graves of the players in the
National Football League and in other sports who have died
of heart failure, heart attacks, other heart disease on fields
and on courts and in arenas since sports began. I
thought immediately of Hank Gathers, the loyal and Merrymount basketball
(24:50):
star who died in the middle of a playoff game,
died on the court in front of his home fans,
and I remember the unspeakable sadness and the gloom I
felt while reporting from his campus that night. And I
think of J. V. Caine, the seventh pick in the
nineteen seventy four football draft and a star tight end
(25:12):
of the St. Louis Cardinals, making his way back from
a serious tendon injury. He collapsed during a no contact
practice on July nineteen seventy nine, died within two hours,
and was later found to have had a rare congenital
heart problem that no one could have discovered until the autopsy.
And most of all, I am thinking of, and especially
(25:36):
I am enraged on behalf of the memory of a
player named Chuck Hughes. With less than two minutes to
go in the Chicago Bears Detroit Lions game at Tiger
Stadium in Detroit on October one, Chuck Hughes caught a
thirty two yard pass from the Detroit quarterback Greg Landry.
He was tackled virtually simultaneously from different directions by two
(26:00):
Chicago defenders, Bob Jeter and Gary Lyle. Three plays later,
as he made his way back to the Lions huddle,
Chuck Hughes dropped to the turf clutching his chest, he
was dead within minutes. His autopsy showed profound, undiagnosed arterio
sclerosis hardening of the arteries. Professionals said the violent double
(26:21):
tackle could have triggered the coronary thrombosis and then the
heart attack that killed him on the field, but it
was basically irrelevant. One of his coronary arteries had been
sev blocked. Football World mourned that year. And if there
were scumbags like Kevin Sorbo and Lenny Deistra and Charlie
(26:42):
Kirk and Rogano Handley and Grant Stinkfield around hoping to
tread on the grave of Chuck Hughes to try to
sell whatever conspiracy theories they were pushing in nine, they
had the presence of mind to keep their goddamned mouths shut,
where we had the presence of mind to never to
listen to them in denying it's via original intent to
(27:06):
restart that game. The National Football League has provided enough
insensitivity and dishonesty and shame to make this particular nightmare
somehow worse. We do not need amateurs like these anti backs,
opportunistic worms to pile onto that still ahead, so a
(27:41):
local TV news reporter in New York put me on
the air in one of his reports in ninety three
and a decade later, he was sitting next to me
on the anchor desk at CNN and he introduced himself
and I said, we've met before, and he said, oh,
the story of baseball cards and television, and how quickly
ten years can pass. Coming up first, the daily roundup
(28:04):
of the scrants, morons and Dunning Krueger effect specimens who
constitute today's worse persons in the world. Le Bronze Michael Flynn.
I don't know if he fought one too many battles
without his helmet on, or if he's getting paid to
say this stuff, But for eight years he's been saying
this stuff. Quote. Russia has achieved all of their objectives
(28:25):
in Ukraine, and they're now exposing bio labs that have
been in there sponsored by the US. The guy that
just showed up to speak to our Congress in a
sweatsuit should have been thrown out unquote. I don't know.
I think it reads better in the original Russian. When
are we going to do something about this guy? Flynn?
(28:45):
I don't know if he's disloyal or mentally discombobulated, but
he should be under Lock and Key, the runner up. Trump,
speaking of under lock and Key, this is why you
do not make deals with a psychopath. You may recall
that Kevin McCarthy dissolved whatever remaining glue ad heired Congressional
Republicans not only to America but to each other the
(29:06):
day after the coup, when he later went to Mari
Lago to kiss Trump's ring. A smarter, more patriotic man
would have used the post January six momentum that was
the feeling of horror and shame two years ago this
month and put it into a fire hose and then
pointed the fire hose at Trump. Instead, McCarthy made a
deal and reached by NBC last night about whether or
(29:29):
not he was sticking by that deal, which was his
endorsement of McCarthy to become Speaker of the House. Donald
Trump said, quote, we'll see what happens. We'll see how
it all works out. The reporter says, he asked the
question again, and Trump repeated, we will see what happens
and hung up. Nicely played Kevin, but our winner, George Santos,
(29:52):
He issued a press release yesterday saying he had been
sworn in as Congressman from New York, but in fact
he's still only Congressman elect because no speaker means no
swearing in. The liar from Long Island cut a very
sad figure. Indeed, in the house yesterday, nobody talking to him,
nobody feeding him popcorn. He was left alone to yawn
(30:12):
without covering his mouth. And worst of all, when he
went to his new office, he found it was surrounded
by reporters. There are reporters covering Congress and they can
just stand there and wait for me. I didn't see
that in the prospectus. So Santos promptly turned around and
walked away from the reporters, who trailed him, peppered him
(30:33):
with questions and he said nothing for like a minute.
The audio maybe better without the video. He's wearing a
backpack like he might have worn at Horstman Prep School
if he'd actually gone there and not just lied about it.
So he looks like Charlie Brown on a really, really
bad day. And the baseline noise here, the shuffling feet,
(30:56):
that to me is the chef's kiss. Oh George, do
you feel like you're qualified to serve in this Congress
right now? How do you hope your constituents can trust
you even though that you've misrepresented your biography to them?
What's your response to call spar House the assustigation of
my nickeloda? Do you have any statements about your campaign
(31:23):
and how you hope to govern? Do you hope to
carry out your full terms? To the number one story
(31:55):
on the Countdown and my favorite topic, me and things
I've promised not to tell. I believe it was this
time of year, early winter, thirty nine years ago that
the CBS television station here in New York, Channel two
dismissed a news reporter named Charles Crawford. I was reminded
of him the other day because he bridges two stages
of my life that from this advanced age, I feel
(32:16):
like two separate lives. Until I was about fifteen and
went out on my first date, I spent all of
my time doing about four things and four things only,
going to school, going to baseball games, collecting sports memorabilia,
and trying to figure out how I was going to
be a sportscaster or sportswriter when I grew up. Incidentally,
(32:38):
I think I'm now up to doing about six things
and six things only anyway. In nineteen one, the fact
that there were adults who collected baseball cards and spent
literally hundreds of dollars on some of them was sprung
on an unsuspecting America. The first big card convention, a
(32:59):
gussied up flea market in a Detroit area hotel over
a three day weekend to which people traveled from other states,
was so completely unbelievable that CBS News sent a crew
and a reporter to cover it. The story closed out
in an addition of the CBS Evening News one night.
(33:20):
I think it's so shocked Anchorman Walter Cronkite that he
said dush or something before recovering to sign off that
say it is Monday, AUGUSTE. Cronk The couple of thousand
of us who constituted the entirety of the known baseball
card hobby all lent out a squeal of delight in
(33:43):
front of our black and white TVs, and the main
streaming of baseball cards began. The most amazing part of
it was it was almost all adults. There was a
kid my age in Indianapolis named Elliott Doc who had
a fabulous collection. There was another one near Philly named
Robert Liftson, and he and I have been friends fifty
(34:04):
years now, and he was over at the apartment in
December talking cards. There were some other older teenagers seventeen
eighteen nineteen, but other than that it was all adults,
adults who had either secretly never stopped collecting baseball cards
or had resumed collecting them, and who could enjoy everything
from a newly issued Reggie Jackson card to a newly
(34:25):
discovered example from the set issued by Kalamazoo Bats cigarettes
in eight In nineteen seventy two, the first such cards
show in the metropolitan New York area was held, and
at the age of thirteen, I went with my parents
and sister in tow and I had, for me anyway,
a transcendent experience, and they did not, unless you consider
(34:48):
a summer weekend in a hotel in Lake Ground, Kunkama,
New York, transcendent. At least there was a pool and
it didn't rain anyway. The next year, in partnership with
some others, one of the really good people in the hobby,
an adult named Mike Aaronstein, also still a friend of
mine fifty years later, the man who basically invented everything
from plastic sheets to keep your cards in to reprints
(35:10):
of old cards to cards of minor league players. He
staged the first show in New York City in a
Union hall all the way downtown, Bang on ast your place,
over the Memorial Day weekend. He was told he was
going to lose his shirt on this. In fact, by
early Friday evening, like two hours after the thing opened,
the crowd was so large and dense I could not
(35:33):
see from my chair behind the table I had bought
from which I was selling my duplicates, to the table
directly across the aisle from me, which was no more
than twenty ft away. It was such a success Mike
hurriedly booked the hall for a second show for Thanksgiving. Well,
by now three, if you put a bunch of these
(35:54):
crazy adults paying good money to buy old baseball cards
twenty five dollars for a nineteen fifty two tops, Mickey Mantle,
are these people escape bees for my psychiatric facility? Well,
if you did that, some reporter was going to show
up and cover the lunacy. This was especially true of
local television news, especially on a weekend where a story
(36:16):
that was not exactly like every other story that you
could shoot before noon, developed the film and get it
on the air at six pm. That was a gift
from the gods, which is how I came to see
a little commotion at the front door of that nineteen
seventy three Memorial Day weekend card show and see emerging
from the commotion a man carrying a small TV camera,
(36:38):
followed by another man carrying a big TV boom microphone,
followed by another man who was Charles Crawford, the reporter
from Channel two News. I knew it was him because
I knew everybody on TV in New York in nineteen
seventy three by sight, because I watched as much TV
news as I could, because bluntly I was studying it.
(36:59):
My dad was at my table with me, and while
I hope that Mr Crawford would come over and interview
me among the hundreds of collectors and dealers there, my
dad was a little less reliant on happenstance and accident
and was more hands on. Be right back, he said,
And the next thing I knew, he was button holding
Charles Crawford and gesturing back towards me. And the next
(37:19):
thing I knew. After that. Charles Crawford was standing in
front of my table, asking me a few questions, but
mostly asking me to show his cameraman how I was
able to use my quote filing system so sophisticated it
allows him to find any card a collector might want.
In seconds. That was it my television debut. No sound bite,
(37:40):
not even my name, just my hands pulling out a
drawer from a small filing cabinet and definitely locating in
Rico Petrocelli card or whatever it was. There was also
about three seconds of me looking straight towards the camera,
just as Charles Crawford told me to my eyes, a
mixture of abject fear and an inscrutable scheming quality, which
(38:03):
quite bluntly at its essence, amounted to my internal dialogue
about how I could get Charles Crawford to surrender his
camera crew and his job so I could go leave
the card show and work for Channel two News that night.
I have gone into excruciating detail about my career timeline,
and for purposes of the Charles Crawford story, I will
only hit the bullet points. This is the year nineteen
(38:24):
seventy three. By nineteen seventy five, I was on the
air at the professional commercial radio station owned by Cornell Students.
In nineteen seventy eight, I was an intern at the
news assignment desk and for the sportscaster at another New
York TV station, Channel five. In nineteen seventy nine, I
got my first full time job at u p i
S Radio Network. In nineteen eighty one, I got my
(38:45):
first TV gig as a substitute sports reporter for CNN
in New York. In two I got that job full
time and now back to three when they started letting
me anchor for the first time a daily four minute
sportscast every night at five forty five in the middle
of the newscast that was co anchored by CNN's Vice
(39:05):
president and New York Bureau chief, Mary Alice Williams. One day,
now at the age of nearly twenty five, a cynical
vetant of twenty eight months in television, I came down
from our offices on the twenty fifth floor to our
studio in the lobby of one World Trade Center to
do my sports cast. But apparently Mary Alice Williams was
off that day, because when I got to the anchor
(39:27):
desk at five forty two or so. The anchor at
the desk in her place was Charles Crawford, the same
Charles Crawford, the Charles Crawford who had put me on
TV a decade before from the Vree Cards show at
the District Union Hall on Astor Place, a co anchor
(39:49):
in Atlanta, teas my sports cast and way when he
went to the commercial break, Charles Crawford introduced himself to
me and I said we've met, and he said, oh,
how when? And I said, well, I'll tell you now
so you can recover during the sportscast. And as I
quickly recounted it and quoted his narration word for word,
this fourteen year old has a filing system so sophisticated
(40:10):
it allows him to find any car to collector might
want in seconds. I told him that, and his face
got whiter and whiter and whiter, and he told me
not to worry if he got up and left while
I was doing the sports cast, because he needed to
walk around for a bit and get some air to
his credit. When we came back from my report, he
introduced me as his old friend when he came back
(40:35):
and said don't misunderstand me. I'm not offended or anything.
I'm glad you made it, but just remember this will
happen to you some day too. I mean, I'm only
forty seven. And I laughed and I told him it
already had happened to me. That I had gone back
to my college radio station a year after I had graduated,
and a kid walked up to me and said he
was just starting to train as a sportscaster there and
(40:57):
he had been listening to me since he was eleven
years old. And I went whiter than Charles Offerd did
on that set, and I said, oh, hell does that
work only twenty one? I only started here five years ago.
And he explained he was still attending Ethicca High School
at the moment, he was only sixteen. And I told
(41:17):
Charles Crawford that my response was not like his. To
go for a walk. I said, I went out and
went for a drink, and Charles said, that's also my plan.
As soon as the newscast is over, I'll buy you one.
It couldn't have been nicer. And just as I was
leaving CNN the next spring, they were hiring him full time,
and he eventually became CNN's chief science correspondent. He was
(41:37):
still with them in the late nineties, and he passed
away in two thousand sixteen at the age of eighty one.
I remember him for the nineteen seventy three Cards Show,
of course, but also for that drink at the bar
that was literally a hundred yards from CNN New York
front door. He had all kinds of advice about dealing
with TV executives. These people are as dangerous as anything
(41:58):
in this world. And I was a pilot instructor in
the Air Force for eight years. I've done all the
(42:18):
damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. If
you're not following or subscribing to the podcast, please do so.
Here are the credits. Most of the music, including our
theme from Beethoven's Ninth, was arranged, produced, and performed by
Brian Ray and John Philip Channel. They are the Countdown
musical directors. All orchestration and keyboards by John Philip Chanelle
guitarist based on drums by Brian Ray, produced by t
(42:40):
k O Brothers. Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and
performed by No Horns Allowed. The sports music is the
Overman theme from ESPN two and it was written by
Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN, Inc. Musical comments by
Nancy Faust. The best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer
today was Tony Kornheiser. Everything else was pretty much my fault.
(43:01):
So let's countdown for this, the seven under and twenty
ninth day since Donald try first attempted coup against the
democratically elected government of the United States. Arrest him now
while we still can a new edition tomorrow. Until then,
I'm Keith Olderman. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck.
(43:23):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of I Heart Radio.
It is early still, but thus far it is the
(00:26):
tweets of a year from Ryan Nanny quote, GOP, give
Liz Trusts a shot. I mean that's it, isn't it.
Whatever Kevin McCarthy thinks he is doing, whatever, the twenty
American Taliban holdouts think they are doing. Whomever they all
think they are talking to. The Republicans, who forced the
(00:47):
balloting for speaker to a second day for the first
time in a century, have made themselves look like fools
of biblical proportions. They have in fact supplanted Liz Trusts
as the most obvious political punchline in the world. And
more importantly, twenty of them went to bed last night
(01:09):
dreaming of how to make it even worse today on
day one of his presumed speakership, someday Kevin McCarthy or
somebody was outmaneuvered, out, generaled, out, dignified by the new
leader of the Democrats in the House, Akeem Jeffreys. The
(01:30):
liberal inclination to avoid the fight, to put out the
dumpster fire, to self importantly get on with it for
the good of a nation, and then go get a
drink was suppressed and mastered by Leader Jefferies. Moderate Republicans
and even some Democrats expected that at least a few
Democrats would eventually leave the House during the day, and
(01:52):
by the second vote or at least the third vote,
their absences would reduce the margin McCarthy would need to
finally get over his hurdle, and Hakim Jeffreys said, stay
here and let them burn. As Don Buyer of the
Virginia Eighth put it, I'll be here voting on every
ballot for as long as it takes, and I haven't
heard any Dems talk about leaving. We are proud of
(02:15):
our unity and determined to fight. Others went more whimsical.
Janshakovsky of Illinois brought what appeared to be an oil
barrel sized container full of three different flavors of popcorn
to share with our Democratic colleagues. Her Illinois colleague, Robin Kelly,
brought a smaller and thus easier to transport tin of popcorn.
(02:38):
Grace Magne of New York and Ted Loeu of California
had personal serving sized bags of popcorn. Major league trolling
by Democrats who in other years would instead have been
handwringing and tut tutting and mulling, compromise on my health
of the grateful nation and the partial score keeen Jeffreys,
(02:58):
one Speaker of the House. If any nothing, the Geo
peace self defenestration yesterday underscores the reality that Trump with
a Republican Senate at a Republican Congress proved in two
thousand seventeen and two thousand eighteen, just as George W.
Bush proved, just as George H. W. Bush proved, just
(03:21):
as Ronald Reagan proved, the modern GOP can destroy almost everything,
but it has no idea how to put together almost anything.
It is a party more adept at political machination and
manipulation than are the Democrats. But when something actually, finally,
(03:41):
actually actually actually has to be done, there is no skill,
no forethought, no plan. At the stroke of eight o'clock
last night, right wingers running the gamut from the Trump
sickophants who garrotted McCarthy to Tucker Carlson to Byron Donald's
the knitwit who changed his vote from for McCarthy to
(04:02):
against McCarthy in the third ballot, they all hid behind
the only thing they actually did yesterday come up with
a plausible bit of sophistry that sounds good to their
own idiot side, which they are now pretending was the
idea all along. A little disagreement among great leaders is
fine and noble, because Republicans are the true democrats, and
(04:26):
Democrats are the real fascists. And this is how much
democratic Republicans love democracy. We didn't just have one democratic vote.
We had three democratic votes. And that was our democratic plan.
And you know what our next democratic plan is, Republicans, right,
if we break the all time record of a hundred
and thirty three ballots for a speaker, that'll mean we're
a hundred and thirty three times as democratic as the Democrats.
(04:48):
Democracy Democracy USA USA. They don't have a plan. I
mean Bobert and Gates and Bob Good and Chip Roy
and Scott Perry and the others had a scheme. The
nineteen of them, the nineteen what would you call them,
(05:09):
the Anti McCarthy is m Caucus, the chaos Caucus, the
insurrection Caucus, No, no, no, I last one they already
used two years ago Friday. They would create chaos and
havoc and drama and earn themselves what they really wanted
from serving in the House. What they really understood about
serving in the House, serving in the government, serving the
(05:31):
people of this country. A bunch of sound bites, a
bunch of sound bites they personally can use in fundraising
and election campaigns. That is what government means to them.
I mean, Congressman elect Don Bacon called them the Taliban
twenty and the Taliban Caucus, and Matt Gates took that
as a compliment, literally took it as a compliment, because
(05:56):
who will or will not return Matt Gates to the
House in two years if he's not in prison, the
Florida equivalent of the Taliban. Anything beyond cool sound bites
will be accidental. I mean, I suppose there is some
magical thinking that if they could talk this idiot Donald's
out of the McCarthy camp and go from nineteen votes
(06:17):
against him to twenty, they might be able to start
a run on the bank thing on ballot number I
don't know, twenty seven or something. That presumably is when
McCarthy's biggest backers or his most terrified backers like Marjorie
Trailer Park Green, start looking for an alternative who does
not even have to be part of the Taliban, And that,
(06:37):
of course, is how every presidential favorite whoever walked into
a Democratic or Republican convention and wound up not getting it,
wound up not getting it. It was ninety nine years
ago this summer that the Democrats headed to Madison Square
Garden with two outstanding presidential candidates, Woodrow Wilson's son in law,
William McAdoo and New York Governor Al Smith, and they
(07:00):
left it one hundred and three presidential nomination ballot its
later with the ultimate compromise candidate of all ultimate compromise candidates,
John Davis, unknown, former ambassador to England, and John Davis
in the election wound up getting twenty nine of the
popular vote and losing nearly two to one to Calvin Coolidge,
(07:23):
who didn't even campaign. And at the end of his life,
John Davis was one of the lawyers who defended the
segregationists in the suite of Supreme Court cases now collectively
known as Brown v. Board of Education. Nice work, John.
It is terrifying to say this, but Kevin McCarthy might
just be the most qualified candidate for Speaker that the
(07:48):
Republicans have. I mean, on a scale of one to
a hundred. He's a five or a six or six
point two and a good day. But that really might
be the best they have. And obviously truth about that is,
if you cause terrified Republican lemmings to abandon Kevin McCarthy,
(08:12):
they will inevitably wind up with somebody less capable of
making the house function. They will find their own John Davis. Hell.
Knowing these morons, they might even find the John Davis,
and John Davis has been dead since ninety and an
updated partial score a caim Jeffreys to Speaker of the
(08:33):
House if any Nothing Like all insurrectionists, the Taliban twenty
are the proverbial dogs chasing the car. Their skill, their
joy is that chase. What to do if they catch
the car is an entirely different thing. The jiminy Glick
of Fox News. Carlson, who has as much claim to
(08:55):
being the intellectual leader of the Republican Taliban as any
of the other morons, demanded two things last night, that
McCarthy re ease all the January six video and files online,
implying that McCarthy is part of some cover up of
the supposed truth about January six, which to them is
as any good Republican knows that the real victim that
(09:18):
day was Donald Trump. Carlson also demanded that McCarthy created
a new committee under Kentucky fascist Thomas Massey to investigate
CIA and FBI interference in domestic politics. Translation Twitter Gazi
with star hearing witnesses Matt Taiebie and Elon Musk. Whenever
(09:45):
the big giant part of reality, the Gates and Good
and Tucker, Carlson and the others have not seen, do
not see, and will never see, is the same big
giant part of reality that Trump has never seen, and
that frankly, a lot of us, myself in did a
lot of us often forget to focus on most of America.
(10:10):
Most of America's voters spend less time analyzing the events
of American politics than I have just reading this commentary
right now, and that you have just listening to this
commentary right now. America is the way it is today
because we have become the society that only reads the headlines,
(10:35):
and in this case the headlines are Republicans head back
to house for second day of laugh out loud disarray,
Democrats restock their supply of popcorn, and one more look
at the scoreboard. A Keem Jeffreys three, Speaker of the House.
If any nothing still ahead, Oh my god, the Republican
(11:10):
Taliban the twenty Liz Trusses somehow actually managed to overshadow
even poor George Santos walking sadly through the halls of Congress,
his goofball backpack, making him look like a lost transfer student.
Worst persons ahead, and next the tragedy of Damar Hamlin
of the Buffalo Bills. You know about, But in the
(11:32):
grief and shock, the history of similar nightmares in the
National Football League and in other sports seems to have
been entirely and perhaps deliberately forgotten, And that history is
being exploited by the anti Baxers, and I don't forget.
And more important still in the grief and shock, the
(11:52):
National Football League's willingness to throw its own broadcasters like
Joe Buck and its networks like ESPN under the bus
to gaslight you comes to the fore yet again. The
NFL one flying that they never tried to play the
Sunday after nine eleven. Now they are lying that they
never intended to resume Monday night's game after Hamlin was stricken.
(12:13):
The NFL is lying, and I will call them out
on it. And that is next. This is countdown. This
is countdown with Keith Olberman. Apart from the human tragedy
(12:42):
of Damar Hamlin of the Buffalo Bills at his cardiac arrest,
at his intubation, the inevitable, infuriating side stories are multiplying,
and first among them, the National Football League is gaslighting you.
After Hamlin collapsed Monday night and was given CPR on
the field and taken off by a mulence and play
(13:06):
was stopped and the Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati players
went to their locker rooms, the game was quote temporarily suspended.
It was not postponed, It was not canceled, and that
was made clear by the play by play man for
ESPN Joe Buck and the studio hosts Susie Calbert on
the ESPN broadcast, and ESPN even made a graphic temporarily suspended.
(13:31):
And then the NFL said it would give the teams
a five minute warning to get the players ready to
resume the first quarter, and ESPN put that on its graphic,
and in those five minutes, the world came down on
the NFL for its callousness and its hesitation to call
the game off, while a young and popular Bills player
(13:53):
was fighting for his life, and his teammates and his rivals,
and the broadcasters and the viewers tried to fight through
the trauma of what they had all been witnessed to,
either in person or via TV. Within hours of this,
the National Football League was claiming none of that had happened.
The league's executive vice president of football Operations, a former
(14:15):
player named Troy Vincent, insisted on a conference call, quote, Frankly,
it never crossed our mind to talk about warming up
to resume play. That's ridiculous, that's insensitive, and that's not
a place that we should ever be in. How do
you resume playing when such a traumatic event occurs in
front of you in real time? And that's the way
(14:36):
we were thinking about it. The commissioner and I bull
crap I worked at ESPN for a total of ten years.
I worked on NBC's football coverage for three years. I
co hosted the Super Bowl pregame show for NBC. I
hosted the Internet Super Bowl halftime show for Fox. I
(14:57):
worked for two years at Fox with Joe Buck. I
worked for seven years at ESPN with Suzie Calbert. I
worked with all the ESPN game producers and all the
studio producers, and all the executives, and I can tell
you without fear of contradiction, I have had many problems
with all of the people I have just mentioned, from
Joe to Susie to the executives. But if Joe Buck
(15:18):
and Susie Calbert reported that the players were going to
be given some time to compose themselves and then a
five minute warm up because the game was to resume,
Joe and Susie had been told that by the bosses
at the highest level of their organization, and those bosses
had been told that directly by the National Football League Yesterday.
(15:41):
Joe Buck said he was quoting ESPN's own rules expert,
John Perry, who had been in direct contact with the
NFL office in New York, and ESPN issued a carefully
phrased but strong self defense quoting it. There was constant
communication in real time between ESPN and league and game officials.
As a result of that, we reported what we were
(16:03):
told in the moment and immediately updated fans as new
information was learned. This was an unprecedented, rapidly evolving circumstance.
All night long, we refrained from speculation. They did not
say this. I will say it again. The National Football
League is lying. Of course it is. It is expert
(16:27):
at lying. And of course the NFL is trying to
revise the history of Damar Hamlin and what it wanted
to do that night because it made the wrong call
and because of the additional reporting that the players and
the coaches made it clear that they were not going
to resume the game, no matter what the NFL said,
and no matter what news did or did not come
(16:48):
from Damar Hamlin's bedside, And those are the only reasons
the game was finally postponed Monday night. The NFL would
have played. The National Football League has made callous mistakes before,
like how it wanted proceed after tomorrow Hamlin's cardiac arrest.
It will make them again. And this is also not
(17:10):
the first time it has flat outlied to the public
about what it did or did not do, or when
it was or was not callous. Right after nine eleven,
then NFL Commissioner Paul Taglabou made a huge chest thumping
deal over canceling the game's scheduled for Sunday, September six
and Monday September There were pious comments about the grieving
(17:33):
nation and the wounds, and inappropriate this and respectful that when,
in fact, on a conference call with the f a
A and security officials and the heads of the major
airlines on either the Thursday or Friday after the attacks,
the league said it intended to play those games as
scheduled on the sixteenth and seventeen, and the authorities replied
(17:56):
that that was nice, but there could be no guarantee
that NFL teams or officials, or broadcast crews or fans
would be able to fly from city to city just
to play or watch football games, and that there would
be no priority given to those flights, even if air
travel suspended after the attacks was largely up and running
(18:17):
by Saturday. The NFL complained, it got the same answer,
and so Paul tag b A Boo went public with
a loud, unseemly self congratulatory cancelation announcement, and unthinking reporters applauded,
without once considering the reality of the logistics that had
given the NFL no choice but to cancel, and then
(18:40):
boast as if it had been its own idea much earlier.
On the morning of Monday, November mayor George Moscone and
Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated by an ex city councilman
in San Francisco's City Hall. San Francisco were to host
the Pittsburgh Steelers literally just hours later in the Monday
(19:03):
night football game at Candle's Dick Park. Mayor Mosconi had
been an arch advocate for the forty Niners and for
the importance of sports in his community, and despite calls
to cancel or or just postpone the game for a day,
the NFL never seriously considered doing that. It was the
height of insensitivity and disrespect. Of course, it was that
(19:25):
is NFL policy. On November sixty three, the National Football
League played anyway. Two days after the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy, the American Football League canceled its entire schedule.
I have mentioned it here before that the then commissioner
of the NFL, Pete Rosel, openly regretted that decision for
(19:46):
the rest of his life, and he also understood firsthand
just how unpopular it was. I've never found a second
source for this report, but I can't imagine my source
made it up or got it wrong. He was Bill
McPhail and he was the president of CBS Sports, which
in three carried NFL games exclusively. It did not televise
(20:07):
any games that horrible Sunday. Bill mcphil was also Pete
Rosell's close friend, and the two of them pretty much
designed the way they televise NFL games then and now,
which built pro football in this country. Bill McPhail would
become the vice president of the new cable news network CNN.
In night he was the vice president in charge of sports.
He designed CNN's original robust sports department and started the
(20:31):
TV careers of people like Dan Patrick and Gary Miller
and me. And one day Bill told me that with
all the CBS NFL telecasts canceled on Sunday, November, he
had nothing to do, so he joined his friend Pete Rosel,
the NFL commissioner, at Yankee Stadium to watch the Giants
play the St. Louis Cardinals. It would be within weeks
(20:54):
that Rosel would say he was mistaken to not cancel
that schedule, and twenty years he was still telling it
to people like me and calling it the greatest mistake
of his life. But Pete Rosel us right about one thing.
Despite the assassination, Despite the grief, despite the fact that
Lee Harvey Oswald was shot on live national television forty
(21:14):
minutes before the NFL kicked off its games that day.
Attendance for the games was normal, down maybe a thousand
per game. There were sixty eight thousand fans at Yankee
Stadium for the Cardinals Giants game. But Bill McPhail told
me that during halftime one of them, a man appeared
at their seats asked, are you Pete Roselle? Are you
(21:37):
the reason we're here today? And when Roselle confirmed it,
the man punched Roselle in the face, said nothing and
walked away. Bill told me he moved to follow the
man to apprehend him, but Roselle stopped him. Don't I
know how he feels. The NFL made a mistake in
nineteen sixty three, it made a mistake in nineteen seventy eight,
(21:57):
It made a mistake in two thousand one. It made
a mistake Monday night. And if somebody had just said yes,
we originally thought we might be able to resume the game.
We did not know how serious his condition was. We
were terribly mistaken. We can only say that, like everybody
else who saw what happened. We were shocked and terrified.
(22:18):
And when you are traumatized, not only do you often
make mistakes, but the one mistake you are most likely
to make is to try to pretend everything is normal
and carry on as if everything is normal. We did that.
We are sorry. If the NFL had just said that,
I could not imagine anybody complaining about it. But do
(22:39):
not gaslight people. Do not lie to people. Do not
imply your broadcast partners whose content you watch like sensors,
misled the nation. You were already guilty of being callous.
Do not add dishonesty to your crimes. There is something
(23:00):
else about the Damar Hamlin tragedy that bears repeating, and
this has nothing to do with the nash Football leagues. Bluntly,
there is still a crazy component in our society that blames,
and until further notice, will blame the death or illness
of anyone at any time on COVID vaccinations. These creatures
(23:21):
appeared on Twitter, Kevin Sorbo, Lenny Dikestra, Charlie Kirk, Rogan,
oh Handley, Grant Stinkfield. There was another one who actually
declared that Hamlin was dead because of COVID vaccines. They
also all appeared in the right wing echo chamber because
there is no tragedy too traumatic for them to try
(23:41):
to exploit to serve their paranoid, uninformed, dangerous, indefensible conspiracy theories.
And they jumped on the Damar Hamlin story as if
it proved those conspiracies, because they have no souls, no consciences,
and ironically no hearts. And their basic, stupid, simplistic argument
(24:03):
is that no National Football League player had ever collapsed
that way before COVID vaccines. Therefore, COVID vaccines caused it.
Therefore COVID vaccines are evil. Therefore vote Republican. It is
a sick and twisted mentality, and how we will purge
it from this nation I do not know. Maybe more importantly,
(24:26):
that spits on the graves of the players in the
National Football League and in other sports who have died
of heart failure, heart attacks, other heart disease on fields
and on courts and in arenas since sports began. I
thought immediately of Hank Gathers, the loyal and Merrymount basketball
(24:50):
star who died in the middle of a playoff game,
died on the court in front of his home fans,
and I remember the unspeakable sadness and the gloom I
felt while reporting from his campus that night. And I
think of J. V. Caine, the seventh pick in the
nineteen seventy four football draft and a star tight end
(25:12):
of the St. Louis Cardinals, making his way back from
a serious tendon injury. He collapsed during a no contact
practice on July nineteen seventy nine, died within two hours,
and was later found to have had a rare congenital
heart problem that no one could have discovered until the autopsy.
And most of all, I am thinking of, and especially
(25:36):
I am enraged on behalf of the memory of a
player named Chuck Hughes. With less than two minutes to
go in the Chicago Bears Detroit Lions game at Tiger
Stadium in Detroit on October one, Chuck Hughes caught a
thirty two yard pass from the Detroit quarterback Greg Landry.
He was tackled virtually simultaneously from different directions by two
(26:00):
Chicago defenders, Bob Jeter and Gary Lyle. Three plays later,
as he made his way back to the Lions huddle,
Chuck Hughes dropped to the turf clutching his chest, he
was dead within minutes. His autopsy showed profound, undiagnosed arterio
sclerosis hardening of the arteries. Professionals said the violent double
(26:21):
tackle could have triggered the coronary thrombosis and then the
heart attack that killed him on the field, but it
was basically irrelevant. One of his coronary arteries had been
sev blocked. Football World mourned that year. And if there
were scumbags like Kevin Sorbo and Lenny Deistra and Charlie
(26:42):
Kirk and Rogano Handley and Grant Stinkfield around hoping to
tread on the grave of Chuck Hughes to try to
sell whatever conspiracy theories they were pushing in nine, they
had the presence of mind to keep their goddamned mouths shut,
where we had the presence of mind to never to
listen to them in denying it's via original intent to
(27:06):
restart that game. The National Football League has provided enough
insensitivity and dishonesty and shame to make this particular nightmare
somehow worse. We do not need amateurs like these anti backs,
opportunistic worms to pile onto that still ahead, so a
(27:41):
local TV news reporter in New York put me on
the air in one of his reports in ninety three
and a decade later, he was sitting next to me
on the anchor desk at CNN and he introduced himself
and I said, we've met before, and he said, oh,
the story of baseball cards and television, and how quickly
ten years can pass. Coming up first, the daily roundup
(28:04):
of the scrants, morons and Dunning Krueger effect specimens who
constitute today's worse persons in the world. Le Bronze Michael Flynn.
I don't know if he fought one too many battles
without his helmet on, or if he's getting paid to
say this stuff, But for eight years he's been saying
this stuff. Quote. Russia has achieved all of their objectives
(28:25):
in Ukraine, and they're now exposing bio labs that have
been in there sponsored by the US. The guy that
just showed up to speak to our Congress in a
sweatsuit should have been thrown out unquote. I don't know.
I think it reads better in the original Russian. When
are we going to do something about this guy? Flynn?
(28:45):
I don't know if he's disloyal or mentally discombobulated, but
he should be under Lock and Key, the runner up. Trump,
speaking of under lock and Key, this is why you
do not make deals with a psychopath. You may recall
that Kevin McCarthy dissolved whatever remaining glue ad heired Congressional
Republicans not only to America but to each other the
(29:06):
day after the coup, when he later went to Mari
Lago to kiss Trump's ring. A smarter, more patriotic man
would have used the post January six momentum that was
the feeling of horror and shame two years ago this
month and put it into a fire hose and then
pointed the fire hose at Trump. Instead, McCarthy made a
deal and reached by NBC last night about whether or
(29:29):
not he was sticking by that deal, which was his
endorsement of McCarthy to become Speaker of the House. Donald
Trump said, quote, we'll see what happens. We'll see how
it all works out. The reporter says, he asked the
question again, and Trump repeated, we will see what happens
and hung up. Nicely played Kevin, but our winner, George Santos,
(29:52):
He issued a press release yesterday saying he had been
sworn in as Congressman from New York, but in fact
he's still only Congressman elect because no speaker means no
swearing in. The liar from Long Island cut a very
sad figure. Indeed, in the house yesterday, nobody talking to him,
nobody feeding him popcorn. He was left alone to yawn
(30:12):
without covering his mouth. And worst of all, when he
went to his new office, he found it was surrounded
by reporters. There are reporters covering Congress and they can
just stand there and wait for me. I didn't see
that in the prospectus. So Santos promptly turned around and
walked away from the reporters, who trailed him, peppered him
(30:33):
with questions and he said nothing for like a minute.
The audio maybe better without the video. He's wearing a
backpack like he might have worn at Horstman Prep School
if he'd actually gone there and not just lied about it.
So he looks like Charlie Brown on a really, really
bad day. And the baseline noise here, the shuffling feet,
(30:56):
that to me is the chef's kiss. Oh George, do
you feel like you're qualified to serve in this Congress
right now? How do you hope your constituents can trust
you even though that you've misrepresented your biography to them?
What's your response to call spar House the assustigation of
my nickeloda? Do you have any statements about your campaign
(31:23):
and how you hope to govern? Do you hope to
carry out your full terms? To the number one story
(31:55):
on the Countdown and my favorite topic, me and things
I've promised not to tell. I believe it was this
time of year, early winter, thirty nine years ago that
the CBS television station here in New York, Channel two
dismissed a news reporter named Charles Crawford. I was reminded
of him the other day because he bridges two stages
of my life that from this advanced age, I feel
(32:16):
like two separate lives. Until I was about fifteen and
went out on my first date, I spent all of
my time doing about four things and four things only,
going to school, going to baseball games, collecting sports memorabilia,
and trying to figure out how I was going to
be a sportscaster or sportswriter when I grew up. Incidentally,
(32:38):
I think I'm now up to doing about six things
and six things only anyway. In nineteen one, the fact
that there were adults who collected baseball cards and spent
literally hundreds of dollars on some of them was sprung
on an unsuspecting America. The first big card convention, a
(32:59):
gussied up flea market in a Detroit area hotel over
a three day weekend to which people traveled from other states,
was so completely unbelievable that CBS News sent a crew
and a reporter to cover it. The story closed out
in an addition of the CBS Evening News one night.
(33:20):
I think it's so shocked Anchorman Walter Cronkite that he
said dush or something before recovering to sign off that
say it is Monday, AUGUSTE. Cronk The couple of thousand
of us who constituted the entirety of the known baseball
card hobby all lent out a squeal of delight in
(33:43):
front of our black and white TVs, and the main
streaming of baseball cards began. The most amazing part of
it was it was almost all adults. There was a
kid my age in Indianapolis named Elliott Doc who had
a fabulous collection. There was another one near Philly named
Robert Liftson, and he and I have been friends fifty
(34:04):
years now, and he was over at the apartment in
December talking cards. There were some other older teenagers seventeen
eighteen nineteen, but other than that it was all adults,
adults who had either secretly never stopped collecting baseball cards
or had resumed collecting them, and who could enjoy everything
from a newly issued Reggie Jackson card to a newly
(34:25):
discovered example from the set issued by Kalamazoo Bats cigarettes
in eight In nineteen seventy two, the first such cards
show in the metropolitan New York area was held, and
at the age of thirteen, I went with my parents
and sister in tow and I had, for me anyway,
a transcendent experience, and they did not, unless you consider
(34:48):
a summer weekend in a hotel in Lake Ground, Kunkama,
New York, transcendent. At least there was a pool and
it didn't rain anyway. The next year, in partnership with
some others, one of the really good people in the hobby,
an adult named Mike Aaronstein, also still a friend of
mine fifty years later, the man who basically invented everything
from plastic sheets to keep your cards in to reprints
(35:10):
of old cards to cards of minor league players. He
staged the first show in New York City in a
Union hall all the way downtown, Bang on ast your place,
over the Memorial Day weekend. He was told he was
going to lose his shirt on this. In fact, by
early Friday evening, like two hours after the thing opened,
the crowd was so large and dense I could not
(35:33):
see from my chair behind the table I had bought
from which I was selling my duplicates, to the table
directly across the aisle from me, which was no more
than twenty ft away. It was such a success Mike
hurriedly booked the hall for a second show for Thanksgiving. Well,
by now three, if you put a bunch of these
(35:54):
crazy adults paying good money to buy old baseball cards
twenty five dollars for a nineteen fifty two tops, Mickey Mantle,
are these people escape bees for my psychiatric facility? Well,
if you did that, some reporter was going to show
up and cover the lunacy. This was especially true of
local television news, especially on a weekend where a story
(36:16):
that was not exactly like every other story that you
could shoot before noon, developed the film and get it
on the air at six pm. That was a gift
from the gods, which is how I came to see
a little commotion at the front door of that nineteen
seventy three Memorial Day weekend card show and see emerging
from the commotion a man carrying a small TV camera,
(36:38):
followed by another man carrying a big TV boom microphone,
followed by another man who was Charles Crawford, the reporter
from Channel two News. I knew it was him because
I knew everybody on TV in New York in nineteen
seventy three by sight, because I watched as much TV
news as I could, because bluntly I was studying it.
(36:59):
My dad was at my table with me, and while
I hope that Mr Crawford would come over and interview
me among the hundreds of collectors and dealers there, my
dad was a little less reliant on happenstance and accident
and was more hands on. Be right back, he said,
And the next thing I knew, he was button holding
Charles Crawford and gesturing back towards me. And the next
(37:19):
thing I knew. After that. Charles Crawford was standing in
front of my table, asking me a few questions, but
mostly asking me to show his cameraman how I was
able to use my quote filing system so sophisticated it
allows him to find any card a collector might want.
In seconds. That was it my television debut. No sound bite,
(37:40):
not even my name, just my hands pulling out a
drawer from a small filing cabinet and definitely locating in
Rico Petrocelli card or whatever it was. There was also
about three seconds of me looking straight towards the camera,
just as Charles Crawford told me to my eyes, a
mixture of abject fear and an inscrutable scheming quality, which
(38:03):
quite bluntly at its essence, amounted to my internal dialogue
about how I could get Charles Crawford to surrender his
camera crew and his job so I could go leave
the card show and work for Channel two News that night.
I have gone into excruciating detail about my career timeline,
and for purposes of the Charles Crawford story, I will
only hit the bullet points. This is the year nineteen
(38:24):
seventy three. By nineteen seventy five, I was on the
air at the professional commercial radio station owned by Cornell Students.
In nineteen seventy eight, I was an intern at the
news assignment desk and for the sportscaster at another New
York TV station, Channel five. In nineteen seventy nine, I
got my first full time job at u p i
S Radio Network. In nineteen eighty one, I got my
(38:45):
first TV gig as a substitute sports reporter for CNN
in New York. In two I got that job full
time and now back to three when they started letting
me anchor for the first time a daily four minute
sportscast every night at five forty five in the middle
of the newscast that was co anchored by CNN's Vice
(39:05):
president and New York Bureau chief, Mary Alice Williams. One day,
now at the age of nearly twenty five, a cynical
vetant of twenty eight months in television, I came down
from our offices on the twenty fifth floor to our
studio in the lobby of one World Trade Center to
do my sports cast. But apparently Mary Alice Williams was
off that day, because when I got to the anchor
(39:27):
desk at five forty two or so. The anchor at
the desk in her place was Charles Crawford, the same
Charles Crawford, the Charles Crawford who had put me on
TV a decade before from the Vree Cards show at
the District Union Hall on Astor Place, a co anchor
(39:49):
in Atlanta, teas my sports cast and way when he
went to the commercial break, Charles Crawford introduced himself to
me and I said we've met, and he said, oh,
how when? And I said, well, I'll tell you now
so you can recover during the sportscast. And as I
quickly recounted it and quoted his narration word for word,
this fourteen year old has a filing system so sophisticated
(40:10):
it allows him to find any car to collector might
want in seconds. I told him that, and his face
got whiter and whiter and whiter, and he told me
not to worry if he got up and left while
I was doing the sports cast, because he needed to
walk around for a bit and get some air to
his credit. When we came back from my report, he
introduced me as his old friend when he came back
(40:35):
and said don't misunderstand me. I'm not offended or anything.
I'm glad you made it, but just remember this will
happen to you some day too. I mean, I'm only
forty seven. And I laughed and I told him it
already had happened to me. That I had gone back
to my college radio station a year after I had graduated,
and a kid walked up to me and said he
was just starting to train as a sportscaster there and
(40:57):
he had been listening to me since he was eleven
years old. And I went whiter than Charles Offerd did
on that set, and I said, oh, hell does that
work only twenty one? I only started here five years ago.
And he explained he was still attending Ethicca High School
at the moment, he was only sixteen. And I told
(41:17):
Charles Crawford that my response was not like his. To
go for a walk. I said, I went out and
went for a drink, and Charles said, that's also my plan.
As soon as the newscast is over, I'll buy you one.
It couldn't have been nicer. And just as I was
leaving CNN the next spring, they were hiring him full time,
and he eventually became CNN's chief science correspondent. He was
(41:37):
still with them in the late nineties, and he passed
away in two thousand sixteen at the age of eighty one.
I remember him for the nineteen seventy three Cards Show,
of course, but also for that drink at the bar
that was literally a hundred yards from CNN New York
front door. He had all kinds of advice about dealing
with TV executives. These people are as dangerous as anything
(41:58):
in this world. And I was a pilot instructor in
the Air Force for eight years. I've done all the
(42:18):
damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. If
you're not following or subscribing to the podcast, please do so.
Here are the credits. Most of the music, including our
theme from Beethoven's Ninth, was arranged, produced, and performed by
Brian Ray and John Philip Channel. They are the Countdown
musical directors. All orchestration and keyboards by John Philip Chanelle
guitarist based on drums by Brian Ray, produced by t
(42:40):
k O Brothers. Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and
performed by No Horns Allowed. The sports music is the
Overman theme from ESPN two and it was written by
Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN, Inc. Musical comments by
Nancy Faust. The best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer
today was Tony Kornheiser. Everything else was pretty much my fault.
(43:01):
So let's countdown for this, the seven under and twenty
ninth day since Donald try first attempted coup against the
democratically elected government of the United States. Arrest him now
while we still can a new edition tomorrow. Until then,
I'm Keith Olderman. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck.
(43:23):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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