October 12, 2023 • 48 mins
SERIES 2 EPISODE 53: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Well, could YOU choose between Rep. Beelzebub or Rep. Lucifer? Jordan and Scalise both eminently define different kind of evils of the Republican Party. But the knives are out and they're steak knives: Jordan's allies are trying to sink Scalise by revealing his campaign has spent half a million dollars at DC's Capital Grille since 2011 (unfortunately that amounts to a nightly purchase of just two Filet Mignons, a side of spinach for the table, and no tip).
While Trump's lawyers file their latest delay against Jack Smith by claiming there are "missing documents" from he January 6th Committee, and his Colorado lawyers explain Trump isn't subject to the 14th Amendment because the president doesn't have to "support" the Constitution, Trump goes off the deep end on Israel. He claims that Israel was attacked because of the 2020 election "rigging," keeps repeating "Barack Hussein Obama," and attacks Prime Minister Netanyahu claiming Israel was neither smart nor tough. The cheese whiz is slipping off the cracker - again.
B-Block (20:00) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The internet is not kind to Tommy Tuberville: never joke about POTUS falling down if there's video of YOU falling down. Clouds begin to gather around Gary Bettman after he caves to the homophobes and Russians. And there's a shooting war between Israel and Hamas so what's exactly the right thing for a Charlie Kirk Turning Point USA "ambassador" to do? Compare "zionism to communism."
C-Block (29:43) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I missed the anniversary, but to be fair - so did ESPN. 30 years ago on the 1st of this month we debuted ESPN2. Nobody noticed this month. EVERYBODY noticed then. We were voted the 7th worst thing in sports for 1993!
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. Well,
if you were the Republicans who had a choice of
making the guy who covered up the rape of college
(00:26):
wrestlers you're new Speaker of the House, or of making
the guy who gave a speech to David Duke's white
supremacist organization your new Speaker of the House, but not both,
how could you make up your mind? I mean, they're
both perfect in their own ways, right. The only relevance
of the choice Republicans completely failed to make yesterday Representative
(00:51):
Beelzebub or Representative Lucifer is that Trump endorsed Jim Jordan,
and even in conference, House Republicans rejected Trump's endorse one
hundred and thirteen to ninety nine, with two caveats. The
first caveat being it was a secret ballot, so those
who betrayed the will of their Lord and Savior and
(01:13):
voted for Scalise will be unknown to him until their
colleagues wrap them out, And one wonders, if it had
been a voice vote in public and on the record,
if anybody would have voted for Scalise. The second caveat
is unless the Republicans have changed the numbers one hundred
and thirteen plus ninety nine is two hundred and twelve
(01:37):
and at least two hundred and seventeen have to vote
for the nominee for speaker, and ken Buck said he
didn't vote for either of them and won't vote for
either of them on the floor. And Boburt and Max
Miller and Barney Rubble and Bob Good and a couple
of others say they'll vote for Jim Jordan, or at
least not for Scalise, and the chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee, and yes, that name is chosen, ironically says
(01:58):
he's not sure. And George Santos put out a press
release literally saying he will vote for whoever will not
excpt spell him from Congress, and Congresswoman's Sparks of Indiana says, quote,
I cannot tell you what I'm going to do on
the floor right now. And nobody has ever better summed
up the Republican agenda more concisely. Oh, and Nancy May
(02:19):
says she's voting Jordan anyway, and that quote, I've actually
talked to Democrats who trust him, and clearly that a
that she wore on her shirt Tuesday, that was for Ambion,
And now what does Jordan do here? He was all
ready to shut down the government until the Democrats agreed
to not let in any more immigrants ever again. And
(02:42):
instead he's got Troy Nell's out there saying now is
the time to bring in Trump a speaker. Things are
desperate enough for Jordan that Time magazine says his allies
were last night trying to portray Steve Scalise as just
another Washington insider, a swamp creature whose congressional campaign had
(03:04):
as wait for it, spent more than half a million
dollars at a DC restaurant called the Capitol Grill since
twenty eleven. And I hate to have to defend Steve Scalise,
but since twenty eleven, that's one hundred and thirteen dollars
a night, and one hundred and thirteen dollars a night
(03:27):
at Capitol Grill is literally the price of two file
at Mignons and a side of creamed spinach for the
table and no tip. And anyway, you're burying the headline
right here, Jim Jordan allies evidence of a Republican actually
paying for something himself. By the way, if Jim Jordan
(03:52):
were not having enough of a bad week. Fannie Willis
wrote him yesterday basically accusing him of obstruction of justice,
something I suggested the last time she wrote to Jordan,
which was on September seventh. Only this time she cited
the actual interference statute by number in the Georgia State
Penal Code, and she did it in her fourth sentence,
(04:14):
and hot damn, I think she might actually try to
indict him now. She does give him another option, however,
quote that you are ignorant of the United States and
Georgia constitutions and codes, and again tells him that his
demands for information about federal funding for her office and
details of any contact with the Attorney General's Office of
Special Counsel, and specifics of her indictment of Trump he
(04:38):
already has or has no right to have. She ends
by reminding him that six weeks ago, the last time
she used the US Postal Service to slap his ppe,
she provided him quote with four noble suggested uses of
your authority as Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. One
enhancing funding for victim witness advocates, two expanding funding for
(05:00):
testing all rape kits. Three supporting the Credible Messengers Program
which helps to turn around children in trouble within the
criminal justice system. And four insuring adequate funding to support
state crime labs which test for drugs like ventanyl And
I don't know who Number four is supposed to be
meant for Jordan Trump, maybe Mace or maybe Derek Van
(05:26):
Orden of Wisconsin, seen at the January sixth coup attempt,
and seen telling Robert Reich spelled r Eh that he
should change his first name to third and last scene
swearing at and threatening a bunch of teenage Senate pages.
Van Orden has now reportedly sworn at a bunch of
briefers from the White House who were updating a group
(05:48):
of congressmen about Israel. When Democratic Representative Phillips of Minnesota,
who is Jewish, replied, shame on you. Van Orden dropped
an f bomb on him too. So maybe the fentanyl
thing isn't sufficient for this guy. Sounds more like he
needs chloroform. And of course, all of this drug talk
takes us back to Trump, who has interrupted his week
(06:12):
long tirade against the real enemy in the world right
now Forbes magazine, which dropped him from the Forbes four
hundred and some sort of conspiracy between a magazine and
New York's Attorney General to inform us that Israel was
attacked because the twenty twenty election was rigged, which is
(06:33):
nuts even for Trump.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
And if the election wasn't rigged, there would be nobody
even thinking about going into Israel. Instead of keeping terrorists
and terrorist sympathizers out of America, the Biden administration is
inviting them in. You know why, because he's got a boss.
Who's his boss, Barack Hussein Obama, Barack Husain, Barack Hussein Obama.
(07:00):
Remember the great Rush Limbaugh, Barack Houssein Obama. Here goes
Barat Hussein Obama.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Helloly.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Unbelievably, the corrupt Biden Department of Justice recently invited an
Iranian back judge from Iraq to visit our nation's capital.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Isn't that nice?
Speaker 2 (07:20):
He couldn't have been too impressed with our capital.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
It looks like shit.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
I'll never forget that bb Net and Yahoo let us down.
That was a very terrible thing, I will say that.
So we were disappointed by that, very disappointed.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
But we did the.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Job ourselves at It was absolute precision, magnificent, beautiful job.
And then uh Bbe tried to.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Take credit for it. That wasn't good.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
That didn't make me feel too good. But that's all right.
So they got to strengthen themselves up.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Trump has also submitted his delay of the weak motion
he demands from Judge Chutkin in the insurrection case in Washington.
Subpoena is to the Archivist of the United States, the
House of Representatives, Homeland Security, the successors to the January
sixth Many, a Special Counsel to the President, and Congressman
Benny Thompson, and Barry Laudermilk. This is more than just
(08:11):
Trump's usual stall. This is clearly his lawyer's latest attempt
to humor him and validate this story he heard somewhere
or maybe he read it on a fortune cookie that
there are quote missing records from the January sixth Committee.
Even though there aren't missing records, there is a wonderful
(08:32):
irony in there that Trump and his ambulance chasers, of course,
do not acknowledge that some of the supposed records they
say would serve as evidence of where Trump and other
White House staffers were and what they were saying on
January sixth, facts which even though Trump and his attorneys
and his apologists seem to have forgotten this is kind
(08:53):
of the point of the trial. A couple of other
side notes from the slowly turning wheels of justice. Jack
Smith has also filed a seemingly inscrutable motion, one that
indicates that about twenty five witnesses in the Washington case,
including one unidentified member of Trump's family, have withheld information
(09:14):
from the Special Counsel's office based on attorney client privilege
and so what well Smith wants Chutkin to order Trump
to disclose by December eighteenth, whether or not he intends
to raise the advice of council defense about which his
public apologists spoke constantly for about a month. There. You know,
(09:38):
how can you indict him for simply doing what his
lawyers told him? And how can it be illegal to
simply get bad advice from your attorneys. In his filing,
Smith notes that if Trump's defense really is the devil
lawyers made me do it, then nobody in the case
can say I can't talk about that because of attorney
(09:58):
client privilege. Bottom line here is Trump has lived his
life by outlasting and outstalling his opponents in a million
different courtrooms. It continues to be ever more abundantly clear, however,
that in Jack Smith he has met the bay ruth
of courtroom process. There is another ruling now from a
(10:22):
court in the Southern District of New York that supposedly
extends Jessica Denson's escape from the non disclosure agreement she
was forced to sign when she worked for the Trump
campaign in twenty sixteen to all campaign employees. And you
don't have to be a political expert or a legal
one to understand what would happen if the NDAs don't
(10:42):
apply anymore. But I do find it hard to believe
that Trump will let this go with at least no
fewer than seventy three more appeals. And to that end,
Law and Crime News reports that the bid to disqualified
Trump from the ballot via the Fourteenth Amendment, the one
that continues to unfold in Colorado now include perhaps the
(11:05):
most finely split hair in constitutional history. Trump's attorneys are
trying to get that case dismissed because while they concede
there is a disqualification clause in the Fourteenth Amendment, and
it is not limited to use after the Civil War,
it still doesn't apply to Trump because it doesn't apply
(11:27):
to presidents. They insist that the clause specifies only government
officers who are required to quote support unquote the Constitution,
while the oath of the president reads Preserve, protect, and
defend the Constitution. And again, the constitutional hair split may
(11:50):
or may not have any validity. But the problem here
is Trump sure does have us on the facts, because
if there is one thing that is inescapably true about
Donald Trump, it is that he has never, not once
supported the Constitution Internationally. While the war continues to escalate,
(12:17):
the hunt for some direct evidence that Iran was specifically
involved in the attack on Israel continues to narrow. It
is now five days later and nobody's found a gun let,
alone a smoking one. This is not to whitewash Iran.
It has supported and supplied Hamas in the past. Its
hands are not clean. But as the State Department spokesman
(12:38):
John Kirby told CNN, quote, we have seen no evidence
in the intelligence that they were witting on it, pre aware,
or were involved in any of the planning, resourcing, or
even directing of the operation unquote. Just as assuredly, while
the exact time frame is still moving around, it seems
(12:59):
that the reports that Egyptian intelligence warned some authority in Israel,
its intel counterparts, or the Netanyahu government, or Netanyahu himself,
or all of them. This is now written in stone.
Even the Republican Chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee,
Michael McCall, admits it. Quote, we know that Egypt had
(13:21):
warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like
this could happen. We know that this has been planned
as long as a year ago. Asked if he was
relaying intelligence that he'd seen or heard, or just something
he'd heard on say This podcast, McCall answered, quote, I
(13:44):
don't want to get too much in the classified, but
a warning was given, and the bottom line here is
Iran may still later prove to be implicated directly, but
it looks less and less likely. The unindicted co conspirator
here is Russia, where Hamas leadership traveled twice in the
last year to meet with the Foreign Minute Lavrov. As
(14:06):
I emphasized yesterday, if any American politician tries to rationalize
pulling our support out from under Ukraine so the money
can instead be sent to Israel, he or she is
in fact acting as a Russian asset, because to hurt
Ukraine is to help Russia, and to help Russia is
(14:28):
to help Hamas, and to help Hamas is to hurt Israel.
And not to bounce around too much. But I closed
with something I first heard weeks ago and was so
convinced it was a clerical error that I actually tweeted
it must have been misheard information and it ain't. Semaphore
(14:51):
News reports the commentator Jank Yuger is running for president
of seriously, he challenging Biden for the Democratic nomination. Quote,
I'm going to do whatever I can to help him
decide that this is not the right path. If he
(15:15):
retires now, he's a hero. He beat Trump, he did
a good job of being the steward of the economy.
If he doesn't, he loses to Trump, and he's the
villain of the story. Unquote. If JENK Huger upholds his
own track record, this means Biden will win next year
in a landslide over some other Republican nominee. I have
(15:38):
never in my life seen any liberal commentator or analyst
more wrong, more often by more of a margin than
JENK Huger at MSNBC years ago. I had the additional
sinking feeling that he had a hard time separating what
was true for what he wanted to be true. I
(16:02):
forbade my staff from booking him as a guest after
I left MSNBC. They hired him to do I think
the six PM show, then fired him, and the people
I still knew there said they had had the same worries.
Plus he was the opposite of a ratings draw. Huger
then contacted my employers at Current TV and would not
leave them alone until I put him on countdown there
(16:24):
to discuss his MSNBC exit. My bosses wanted to know
if they should sign him as a host or a contributor,
and I said no, not yet. Use the ratings for
his guest shot on my show as your guide. And
our ratings not only did not go up that night,
they dropped, and naturally, Joel Hyatt, al Gore's partner, co
(16:50):
owner of the network and the operational chief who was
one of the real life models for the Jason Robard's
character in the film Philadelphia, the guy who fired his
law office chief there because he contracted AIDS, promptly hired
Jank Huger. Hiring was the first of the thirty forty
final straws that led me to leave current and sue
(17:11):
their asses. More importantly and relevantly, Joe Biden has no
earthly clue who Jenk Huger is. So this idea that
Huger is going to help him decide not to run
is nonsense, bordering on delusions of grandeur. As is the
(17:34):
most important issue. Jank Huger was born in Turkey. He
emigrated here at the age of eight. Constitution is rather
exact on this point. He's not eligible to be president.
Yet he tells Semaphore News that more than two centuries
of constitutional precedents are wrong, that you don't have to
be born here, or at least born outside the country,
(17:57):
but the child of US citizens who happened to be
outside the country to become president. He predicts he would
receive a quote slow dunk victory on this in the
Supreme Court. Sure, Alexander Hamilton did not challenge it, even
though he was born in the West Indies barely twenty
years before the country was born. But you you'll get
(18:19):
a slam dunk victory from the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court.
Let me sum this up, Jank Huger is an idiot.
Please stay the f home. The grownups are trying to
resolve this. Also of interest here nothing just Charlie Kirk's
(18:47):
turning point USA equating Zionism and communism during the middle
of the Israel Hamas shooting war. That's next. This is countdown.
This is countdown with Keith Oberman, my crazy friend still
(19:26):
ahead on countdown like that guy should talk. I just noticed,
I mean, I just noticed. This October first was the
thirtieth anniversary of the day we launched ESPN two. And
they didn't do anything to commemorate it. And I didn't
do anything to commemorate it. I forgot, God knows. When
(19:49):
we started it in nineteen ninety three, we treated it
as if we had invented alchemy. What happens when executives
decide that their new product is going to be hip
and that's in order. Coming up in Things I Promised
No to Tell, or for today we'll call it Things
I Promise Not to Tell two first time for the
(20:11):
daily roundup of the misgrants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects
specimens who constitute today's worst persons in the world of
the Bronze, and there is a sports theme. Senator Tommy
Tuberville of Alabama. If he's not the dumbest man in America,
he's close to it. And he was reminded of that
fact yesterday. If only he understood. July twelfth, it was
(20:34):
when Tommy the Tuba, who supports Russia in its invasion
of Ukraine and whose block of American military promotion has
hampered this country's response to the taking of the American
hostages in Gaza, said of the president, quote, you watch
Joe Biden over in Europe, I'm afraid he's gonna fall
down every time I turn on Tabolvision. Apart from the
(20:58):
inanity of the remark, so you're saying you think he'll
fall down because you turned on the television. Coach Tommy
forgets that. The Internet never forgets, never, never, never. Yesterday.
From twenty fourteen, the Internet regurgitated video of Tubberville, then
a failed college football coach, as opposed to a failed senator,
(21:20):
coming down a flight of stairs from an airplane after
a football bowl game. He hits one wrong stare and
literally falls down and slides down more than one dozen
steps punchline. Tuberville's slip and slide took place as his
University of Cincinnati team lost that Bowl game, and it
(21:41):
was the Military Bowl. You know, you would have thought,
by the way those giant Dumbo ears of his would
have provided Tuberville some balance or maybe even some ballast.
The runner up National Hockey Leage Commissioner Gary Bettman told
you the other day this was not going away. Betman
cave to homophobes and Russians and first refused to defend
(22:04):
Pride Knights at NHL games when they attacked them, and
has now in essence, banned Pride nights and with them,
virtually every other cause night that the league is so
prominently celebrated recently, no player related events, no warm up
uniforms with Pride colors, not even any Pride colored sports
tape for players who want to to put on their
(22:26):
hockey sticks. Well, Gary's going to have to have a
problem with that one. Scott Lawton of the Philadelphia Flyers
now reacts to the Pride band by saying, try me quote,
you'll probably see me with the Pride tape on that
night anyway, unquote. And Brian Burke, who has run six
different NHL franchises and is now the head of the
(22:46):
Professional Women's Hockey League Players Association, basically told members of
the LGBTQ community and every other group that has been
betrayed by Gary Bettman to ignore Gary Bettman quote. This
is a surprising and serious setback. Burkey writes. If you
are a member of one of the communities who has
been celebrated as part of the Hockey is for Everyone initiative,
(23:09):
please know that you are still a valued member of
the hockey community. We will not lose the incredible progress
we've made in inclusion over the last decade, and we
are counting on the league for continued support and leadership
in this area. Unquote. I suspect that what Brian Burke
is implying here is that this is a serious enough
blunder that it could escalate to the point of costing
(23:31):
Commissioner Bettman his job. God knows enough people in hockey
have wanted to get rid of him for years anyway,
and he's just added to that. Because that catch phrase
that Burke mentioned, hockey is for everyone, well, Gary Bettman
has personally in essence changed it to hockey is for homophobes.
(23:53):
But the winners. Speaking of which, right wing troll and
balloonhead Charlie Kirk and his fascist organization Turning Point USA
tp USA, or as it is alternatively known, toilet Paper USA,
one of its so called ambassadors, Morgan Ariel or maybe
it's Ariel Morgan or Mariel Organ. It's hard to say
(24:16):
whoever she is. She has decided to position Charlie Kirk
and Turning Point kind of oddly. As the Middle East
goes up in flames, miss Ariel tweeting quote Zionism and
communism go hand in hand unquote. So if you'd like
to make a list of the TPUSA staffers and donors
and advisors who Miss Ariel just identified as belonging to
(24:39):
an anti Semitic organization while Israel is at war, there's
Benny Johnson, Jack Pasovic, and of course Ginny Thomas, Morgan,
Ariel Oriel Morgan Organ, whatever her name is, Turning Point USA,
and Charlie Kirk to day's worst anti Semitic persons the world.
(25:19):
ESPN two. They talked me into becoming the face of
this first of ESPN's endless clones of its television self.
I wore a brown leather bomber jacket, and I said
the first words in the first actual program in those
words were good evening and welcome to the end of
our careers. And that's pretty much all anybody remembers of
this unmitigated disaster. ESPN two exists today, of course, and successfully,
(25:43):
but it only became successful when they stopped trying to
make it something different from original ESPN, and management, with
genuine heartbreak, accepted the idea that all the nation wanted
was more ESPN, not different kinds of ESPN that begat
ESPN News, ESPN U, ESPN plus ESPN the o Cho
(26:04):
Tartar control ESPN. But that's not what they wanted ESPN
two to be. They wanted it to be hip and cool,
you know, for kids, and they were going to make
it hip and cool and force it to be hip
and cool if it killed them and you and for
that matter me. It is why they took the co
(26:26):
anchor of their most successful sports center ever and broke
up the partnership and moved him to a new network
that almost literally had more people who thought they were
in charge of it than watched it. And why three
months later, when Sports Illustrated magazine chose ESPN two as
the seventh worst thing to happen in sports in the
year nineteen ninety three, only the seventh worst. We were grateful,
(26:50):
and I then scurried back to Sports Center and we
all pretended like ESPN two it never happened, and we
almost never mentioned it again. But the saga of why
it went so desperately and immediately wrong is worth telling
in brief, and if you will listen to it, I
will tell you something I have never admitted publicly before.
(27:11):
Why when they asked me to leave Sports Center after
a very first successful year on Sports Center to go
do this kakamamie new network thing. Why on earth? Given
the choice, I actually said, yes, nobody knows this, you
will in a few minutes. But first, By the time
(27:34):
I went to work there in nineteen ninety two, ESPN
had finally moved out of its perennial status of near
bankruptcy and near irrelevancy to profit and prominence. From the
launch in nineteen seventy nine through the mid nineteen eighties,
the place had always either had a new owner, or
a new schedule, or a new plan to avert bankruptcy.
When I joined the fledgling sports department at CNN in
(27:55):
nineteen eighty one, I used to watch my high school
classmate Chris Berman do his show called Sports Center from
what was obviously a closet with one light, no air conditioning,
and no teleprompter. Sometimes it would be twenty minutes long.
Sometimes it would be two minutes long. Each time I'd
look at poor Chris schitzing and looking a little claustrophobic,
and I'd say, well, hooray for CNN Sports. We're not
(28:19):
the worst. But by nineteen ninety two, ESPN had begun
to be willing to spend a little money to bring
in a prominent local sportscaster from Los Angeles Me and
give him the keys to the eleven o'clock Sports Center.
And this company, which did not have any merchandise, did
not sell anything with its logo on it, finally decided
(28:41):
to expand and launch an all sports radio network, And
when those plans did not go very well, they spent
a little extra money and they talked me into moving
to Connecticut three months earlier than planned to launch the
radio network, and it was an instantaneous hit by early
nineteen ninety three. Then there were rumblings and then rumors,
and finally an announcement that they would build upon the
(29:02):
radio success by starting a second television network. ESPN and
ESPN two. But and from the beginning, this was the point.
It was not going to be just another ESPN or
the ESPN spillover channel, or the channel for when there's
a great basketball game and a great football game at
the same time and we want to cover both. It
(29:23):
was going to be different. There'd be live broadcasts of games,
just like ESPN. There'd be a studio sports show just
like Sports Center, but it'd be hip, you know, for
kids in the Sports Center newsroom. The assumption was the
face of ESPN two was going to be Mike Turrico.
Mike had had a very tough nineteen ninety two and
(29:46):
it seemed like something that could re establish him in
the company, or if he had a tough nineteen ninety three,
something he could be jettison from if the whole thing
went up in flames. I heard Robin Roberts name mentioned
once or twice, and I don't know if they ever
approached Robin, and I think Tarico told me once they
had mentioned it to him, but never seriously. So when
they called me into my boss's office in the spring
(30:07):
of nineteen ninety three, I just assumed they were yelling
at me for something I said, since that's what they
usually called me in for, or called me and Dan
Patrick in for, or called Dan in just to yell
at him for something I had said. Instead, they offered
me ESPN two. We want you to be to ESPN two,
said John Walsh, who basically ran everything ESPN did that
(30:30):
was not a ballgame. We want you to beat for
ESPN two what Chris Berman is to ESPN. They explained
that there would be younger sports on their ex game
stuff and mountain biking. They kept talking about mountain biking
and a lot of stuff with trees, but that the
flagship program would match my sense of humor exactly, that
it would just be snarky and flip and with it
(30:52):
and hip and cool, you know, for kids. They said
they would let me continue on Sports Center until August
and then have me work for two months helping them
design and rehearse the new show. Oh, they actually wanted
my opinion, and they offered to give me like a
twenty five percent raise. Understand though ESPN of nineteen ninety
(31:13):
three would fight you over an eleven dollars cab ride
on an expense report. They would call you into a meeting,
they would spend thirty minutes on this. They would then
offer you eight dollars a twenty five percent raise was
the nineteen ninety three ESPN equivalent of Eternal Life. Still,
(31:34):
I had my doubts for one thing. As it was,
we seemed to be pretty hip and cool on Sports Center.
As it was, Dan Patrick and I had an on
air relationship that you could not practice, nor design, nor cast.
It was just there or it wasn't. We were the
two guys in the World War One bunker who knew
that the Jerry's would eventually get us right in the psalm,
(31:56):
so all we could do was first take out as
many of them as we could and sing and laugh
while we did it. But I had two reasons for
saying yes anyway, and I'll save the one I've never
told anybody at all for the end of this recollection.
The other reason was, believe it or not, I'm I'm
(32:18):
a team player. I am not the guy who will
come in and lie on behalf of the team. And
I am not the guy who will turn away and
say nothing when the coach is slapping the crap out
of one of my teammates. But if you say we
are management, we have thought this through. We want you
to leave Sports Center to go do ESPN two and
be hip and cool, you know for kids. I will
(32:40):
say yes, plus money only they had not thought it through.
As it proved, the first problem was the new network
that was supposed to be different from ESPN, and the
new show that was supposed to be different from ESPN.
Sports Center was going to be run by John Walsh,
the guy who ran SportsCenter and basically created what you
(33:03):
saw then and what you see now. And to actually
produce the show, he chose Mike Bogad, who was the
coordinating producer of the eleven o'clock Sports Center that I
was doing with Dan Patrick, and Norby Williamson, who was
the line producer of the eleven o'clock Sports Center with
me and Dan Patrick. And although they would not give
me a title other than anchor, the other guy running
it was me the co host of the eleven o'clock
(33:25):
Sports Center. To add to this crowd of rebellious, innovative
anti establishment thinkers who yesterday had been the establishment, John
Walsh hired the sports editor of the Boston Globe, Vince Doria.
To my mind, Vince would cover himself in glory at
ESPN two by once proposing a really bad idea the
(33:46):
laugh track for the Nick mackay comedy segments. And when
I said, that's a really bad idea, it's still a newscast.
What if we have a laugh track someday when some
team's plane crashes, He said, you're right. I'm thinking maybe
I don't know as much about this TV stuff as
I thought I did. Will you tell me the next
time I have an idea that's that bad. But at
(34:07):
this point, Vince was thinking maybe we could differentiate ESPN
two from ESPN by showing baseball and basketball box scores overnight.
There was an opinion, and Vince held it that we
should be the Christian science monitor of sportscasts on ESPN two,
which was definitely not, you know, for kids. The show
producers they brought in were also mainstream. My friend and
(34:30):
producer Ron Grellik came in from Los Angeles. He actually
thought they meant the stuff about younger sports. He bought
a magazine rack and subscribed us to all kinds of
biking magazines and hiking magazines, and nobody ever read them.
They hired producers from Madison Square Garden Network. They hired
associate producers from Sports Center and made them producers to
(34:50):
join me on the anchor desk. They hired a newspaper
columnist from Detroit named Mitch Album, and they hired all
the local sportscasters they did not have room for on SportsCenter,
and among them was a guy named Stu Stu Scott,
and Stu was great, and everybody else just came in
and did regular sports casts, just as if they'd been
on regular flavor ESPN. Finally to be my real co host,
(35:13):
they were going to hire, well, we never found out
who they were going to hire, because one day the
word came through that the chairman of ABC Cap Cities,
which owned ESPN and everything else, had seen this weekend
sportscaster in West Palm Beach doing a tennis tournament of
some sort or rain delay during a tennis tournament or
something and thought she was great, and overnight there was
a bidding war for her, and we had just hired
(35:35):
her to be my co host. And her name was
Susie Calber. Everybody on this renegade network, including me, was
thoroughly non renegade. It became rather apparent rather quickly that
management's understanding of what made something cool and hip, you
know for kids? Was you ready? What clothing we wore?
(35:59):
This is the story of the infamous leather jacket I
wore the first night, which you will hear when countdown continues.
After this, back to the number one story on the
countdown and things I promised not to tell on Saturday's
twenty ninth anniversary of the launch of ESPN two, or
(36:21):
as I described it to Kenny Maine for his podcast yesterday,
the Titanic Only It's on fire first, as I said,
the organizing principle was forced hipness, and the organizing principle
of forced hipness was the clothing we wore. And that
brings us to the primary image that still appears whenever
(36:42):
the launch of ESPN two is broached or googled. My
infamous brown leather bomber jacket. Fall comes early to Bristol, Connecticut.
And if it were not cold enough there at the
end of September nineteen ninety three, there was also something
wrong with our new ESPN two studio. No matter what
they did to the air conditioning system in there, it
(37:04):
was it's like forty eight degrees all the time. So
I was standing outside one day, trying to get warm,
contemplating the succession of train wrecks that had been our
first five or six pilot shows and dry runs. And
I was wearing my brown leather bomber jacket because I
was cold. When another of the many executive producers, John Lack,
(37:25):
came over to say hi, and he was in mid
sentence when he looked at the jacket and went stone cold, silent. Wait,
he finally said, the word eureka forming over his head.
Would you could you if I asked you, would you
wear that jacket on the show? I pretended to hesitate.
(37:48):
I realized only the jacket could save me from freezing
to death in our winter on the TV version of
The Donner Party, And so I said, I suppose, And
that's why I was wearing that jacket. It was cold
in the studio. Why they gave Steve Buckley from the
Boston Herald a base ball cap to wear on the
air for his segments and wear backwards. Why they put
(38:09):
other guys in football helmets and insisted that nobody wear
a tie ever, not even former Boston College football coach
Jack Picknell. That should be obvious, you know, for kids,
it became rapidly apparent that all ESPN two was ESPN
dressed up differently. I had a leather coach, the on
(38:30):
screen graphics were in lowercase letters only. The camera was
not on a tripod. It was carried around by a
cameraman who soon had a bad back. The other problem
was exemplified by that fellow John Lack. I liked him.
He had run MTV News, and he actually had some
ideas about differentiating presentation and content for younger audiences. But
(38:52):
by the time he suggested the jacket, he also had
a second message for me. Listen, he said, I can't
get through to these people. They tell me I'm in charge,
and then they tell me our first new hip revolutionary
story is going to be a profile of Doug Flutie,
the quarterback. And I say, how's that different from Sports Center?
And they look at me like I'm crazy, and they say,
he's playing in Canada. We'll be doing a story about Canada.
(39:13):
Who would believe we're going to do a story about Canada.
But I know you get it, Keith. So when we're
actually on the air, you have to keep it different.
You have to be in charge. When we're on you
are the executive producer. This was extremely bad news because
(39:34):
by my count, this would have made me the fifteenth
or sixteenth different person who believed they were in charge.
There was John Lack, There was Walsh. There was a
new vice president named Howard Katz. There was Vince Doria.
There were the two Sports center guys, Norby and Bogie.
There were the line producers. There were a couple of consultants.
There was the president of ESPN, Steve Bornstein. There was
the chairman of ABC who had discovered Susie Calber. There
(39:57):
was the guy who put in the state of the
art air conditioning system in the studio. There was the
other guy, Walter Cronkite's lighting director. As he kept telling
us who put in the state of the art lighting system,
all of us individually in charge, so nobody was in charge.
The night before the premiere, so September thirtieth, nineteen ninety three,
(40:19):
John Walsh, the Sports Center man, saw me in the
hallway and said, listen, I just got some amazing information
from audience research. Do you know which show in all
of television has the highest percentage of viewers who are
aged eighteen to twenty four. This was an important question
a relevant question because these were the kids, you know
(40:40):
for kids. ESPN two had been created to get that
eighteen to twenty four year old audience, So I guess
the answer was, I don't know, some show on MTV. No,
Walsh said, gleefully, it's Sports Center, and I froze, and
I said, wait, John, if we already have the eighteen
(41:01):
to twenty four year old audience, why are we starting
a network to get the eighteen to twenty four year
old audience. Do you really think they're gonna give up
the show they like and move to a new show
on a new channel just cause? And Walsh laughed and
shrugged and shuffled down the hallway, and I called a
(41:23):
cab to take me to the Hartford Airport so I
could leave the country. Only at the last minute I
chickened out. The premiere October first began with me, I
swear this is true, going to shave in my house
and instead dropping and breaking a mirror. The network signed
on at seven pm with the national anthem and some
(41:44):
sort of statement from Chris Berman blessing it, and then
a very long sketch parody of the then hit film
The Fugitive, in which I was the fugitive from Sports Center.
Get it, the fugitive from Sports Center. You get it.
Then the lights came on. The poor guy with the
camera staggered in and I said, good evening, and welcome
to the end of our careers. The television sorts writer
(42:05):
the Associated Press, John Nelson was there in the studio.
He immediately flashed that quote to a not waiting world,
and ESPN two and Sports Night were born, you know,
for kids. The first night seemed okay, largely because ESPN
threw a party in the parking lot under a gigantic tent,
(42:27):
free food and booze. Hundreds of staffers and guests and
celebrities and free booze. That place later became known as
the Tent of Consent. Don't ask me. I was on
the air for three hours. I had nothing to do
with this. Later that night, near the tent, the network
(42:48):
president stumbled crossing a little bridge over a stream and
wound up in the water. And he still had a
better night than we did. The shows bounced from topic
to topic and mood to mood, once with Bill Pedo
anchoring with me. Sports Night ran a mini documentary on
a high school basketball star who chose which college to
go to to play ball at entirely by letter and telephone.
(43:13):
Only when he arrived did he discover he was the
only white guy in an entirely black conference. We showed
the first ten minutes of this extraordinary story, then we
promised to show you the rest of it, and then
we welcomed a live studio guest, Eddie Layton, the organist
from Yankee Stadium. He played a few tunes, and then
(43:36):
we went back to part two of this very grim
documentary about this very dim basketball player, and that hour
was kind of good compared to the rest of them. Eventually,
we moved Sports Night from Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights
to Monday through Friday at five pm, so Sports Night
was on in the afternoons. Though it was December, the
(43:58):
limitless air conditioning continued. Susie Cawber began to wear a
blanket on her lap just out of camera view. I
begged to be returned to Sports Center, and they agreed,
provided I gave back the rays and extended my contract
for a year and gave back a little bit more.
Sports Illustrated at that point, still the leading and most
influential sports media outlet in the World warned us it
(44:21):
was going to list in its year end issue the
worst things to happen in sports in nineteen ninety three,
and we ESPN two were going to be on it.
And when the magazine came out, there on the list,
behind the stabbing of the tennis star Monica Selis by
a fan of her rival, stephie Groff, and behind Michael
Jordan's retirement, and behind a college football player suing his
coach because somebody else became the starting quarterback. There we
(44:41):
were Sports Illustrated's choice as the seventh worst thing in
sports for nineteen ninety three. And the reaction of the
anchors and the staff and even the management and all
eighteen people were in charge of ESPN two Sports Night
was unanimous, Hooray, We're not the worst. We're not the worst.
We're not the worst. In my last week anchoring the show,
(45:05):
we discovered that Walter Kronkite's lighting guy had never spoken
to the guy who put in the air conditioning system.
Walter Kronkite's lighting guy had focused the principal backlight in
his state of the art lighting system directly onto the
principal monitor for the other guy's state of the art
air conditioning system, so the state of the art air
(45:25):
conditioning system had spent six months thinking the temperature in
the studio was two hundred and seventeen degrees. They let
me go back to Sports Center, providing I gave back
all the extra money, and I happily did it and
a little more. Sports Night staggered on for a few
more weeks before being canceled, and all the talent Stuart Scott,
(45:46):
Susie Calber, bil Pedo, and the guy they hired to
replace me when I escaped back to Sports Center, Kenny, Maine.
They all went on to do SportsCenter. As to ESPN two.
We all pretended that never happened. It's just a bad dream.
And then there was that other reason I had agreed
to try it. I have not told anybody this. I
(46:09):
don't even think I told the other person involved this.
But the night before ESPN management called me in and
said we'd like you to leave Sports Center and become
the face of ESPN two, a woman I worked with
at ESPN said, yes, she would like to go out
with me, but that doing that while we worked together
would be a disaster. So after management's offer, I asked
(46:33):
her if my new schedule, which took me away from
her department, was sufficient professional distance so that she'd feel
comfortable dating. And she said yes, So I said yes,
and we started dating and that didn't work out either.
(47:04):
Then all the damage I can do here, Thank you
for listening. Countdown has come to you from the Vin
Scully studio at the Older Woman Broadcasting Empire HI atop
the Sports Capsule Building in New York. The music you've
heard was for the most part, arranged, produced, and performed
by Countdowns musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Schanel.
Brian Ray handled guitars, bass and drums. John Phillip Schanel
(47:27):
did the orchestration and keyboards, and it was produced by
Tko Brothers. Other music, including other works of Beethoven, arranged
and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. The sports
music is courtesy of ESPN, Inc. It was written by
Mitch Warren Davis. We call it the Olderman theme from
ESPN two. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by
(47:49):
Nancy Fauss, the best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer
today was my friend Tony Kornheiser and everything else was
pretty much my fault. So that's countdown for this, the
one thousand and tenth day since Donald Trump's first attempted
coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
Convict him now while we still can. The next scheduled
(48:11):
countdown is tomorrow. Bulletins has the news warrants till then.
I'm Keith Oldraman, good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For
(48:33):
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. Well,
if you were the Republicans who had a choice of
making the guy who covered up the rape of college
(00:26):
wrestlers you're new Speaker of the House, or of making
the guy who gave a speech to David Duke's white
supremacist organization your new Speaker of the House, but not both,
how could you make up your mind? I mean, they're
both perfect in their own ways, right. The only relevance
of the choice Republicans completely failed to make yesterday Representative
(00:51):
Beelzebub or Representative Lucifer is that Trump endorsed Jim Jordan,
and even in conference, House Republicans rejected Trump's endorse one
hundred and thirteen to ninety nine, with two caveats. The
first caveat being it was a secret ballot, so those
who betrayed the will of their Lord and Savior and
(01:13):
voted for Scalise will be unknown to him until their
colleagues wrap them out, And one wonders, if it had
been a voice vote in public and on the record,
if anybody would have voted for Scalise. The second caveat
is unless the Republicans have changed the numbers one hundred
and thirteen plus ninety nine is two hundred and twelve
(01:37):
and at least two hundred and seventeen have to vote
for the nominee for speaker, and ken Buck said he
didn't vote for either of them and won't vote for
either of them on the floor. And Boburt and Max
Miller and Barney Rubble and Bob Good and a couple
of others say they'll vote for Jim Jordan, or at
least not for Scalise, and the chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee, and yes, that name is chosen, ironically says
(01:58):
he's not sure. And George Santos put out a press
release literally saying he will vote for whoever will not
excpt spell him from Congress, and Congresswoman's Sparks of Indiana says, quote,
I cannot tell you what I'm going to do on
the floor right now. And nobody has ever better summed
up the Republican agenda more concisely. Oh, and Nancy May
(02:19):
says she's voting Jordan anyway, and that quote, I've actually
talked to Democrats who trust him, and clearly that a
that she wore on her shirt Tuesday, that was for Ambion,
And now what does Jordan do here? He was all
ready to shut down the government until the Democrats agreed
to not let in any more immigrants ever again. And
(02:42):
instead he's got Troy Nell's out there saying now is
the time to bring in Trump a speaker. Things are
desperate enough for Jordan that Time magazine says his allies
were last night trying to portray Steve Scalise as just
another Washington insider, a swamp creature whose congressional campaign had
(03:04):
as wait for it, spent more than half a million
dollars at a DC restaurant called the Capitol Grill since
twenty eleven. And I hate to have to defend Steve Scalise,
but since twenty eleven, that's one hundred and thirteen dollars
a night, and one hundred and thirteen dollars a night
(03:27):
at Capitol Grill is literally the price of two file
at Mignons and a side of creamed spinach for the
table and no tip. And anyway, you're burying the headline
right here, Jim Jordan allies evidence of a Republican actually
paying for something himself. By the way, if Jim Jordan
(03:52):
were not having enough of a bad week. Fannie Willis
wrote him yesterday basically accusing him of obstruction of justice,
something I suggested the last time she wrote to Jordan,
which was on September seventh. Only this time she cited
the actual interference statute by number in the Georgia State
Penal Code, and she did it in her fourth sentence,
(04:14):
and hot damn, I think she might actually try to
indict him now. She does give him another option, however,
quote that you are ignorant of the United States and
Georgia constitutions and codes, and again tells him that his
demands for information about federal funding for her office and
details of any contact with the Attorney General's Office of
Special Counsel, and specifics of her indictment of Trump he
(04:38):
already has or has no right to have. She ends
by reminding him that six weeks ago, the last time
she used the US Postal Service to slap his ppe,
she provided him quote with four noble suggested uses of
your authority as Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. One
enhancing funding for victim witness advocates, two expanding funding for
(05:00):
testing all rape kits. Three supporting the Credible Messengers Program
which helps to turn around children in trouble within the
criminal justice system. And four insuring adequate funding to support
state crime labs which test for drugs like ventanyl And
I don't know who Number four is supposed to be
meant for Jordan Trump, maybe Mace or maybe Derek Van
(05:26):
Orden of Wisconsin, seen at the January sixth coup attempt,
and seen telling Robert Reich spelled r Eh that he
should change his first name to third and last scene
swearing at and threatening a bunch of teenage Senate pages.
Van Orden has now reportedly sworn at a bunch of
briefers from the White House who were updating a group
(05:48):
of congressmen about Israel. When Democratic Representative Phillips of Minnesota,
who is Jewish, replied, shame on you. Van Orden dropped
an f bomb on him too. So maybe the fentanyl
thing isn't sufficient for this guy. Sounds more like he
needs chloroform. And of course, all of this drug talk
takes us back to Trump, who has interrupted his week
(06:12):
long tirade against the real enemy in the world right
now Forbes magazine, which dropped him from the Forbes four
hundred and some sort of conspiracy between a magazine and
New York's Attorney General to inform us that Israel was
attacked because the twenty twenty election was rigged, which is
(06:33):
nuts even for Trump.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
And if the election wasn't rigged, there would be nobody
even thinking about going into Israel. Instead of keeping terrorists
and terrorist sympathizers out of America, the Biden administration is
inviting them in. You know why, because he's got a boss.
Who's his boss, Barack Hussein Obama, Barack Husain, Barack Hussein Obama.
(07:00):
Remember the great Rush Limbaugh, Barack Houssein Obama. Here goes
Barat Hussein Obama.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Helloly.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Unbelievably, the corrupt Biden Department of Justice recently invited an
Iranian back judge from Iraq to visit our nation's capital.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Isn't that nice?
Speaker 2 (07:20):
He couldn't have been too impressed with our capital.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
It looks like shit.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
I'll never forget that bb Net and Yahoo let us down.
That was a very terrible thing, I will say that.
So we were disappointed by that, very disappointed.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
But we did the.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Job ourselves at It was absolute precision, magnificent, beautiful job.
And then uh Bbe tried to.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Take credit for it. That wasn't good.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
That didn't make me feel too good. But that's all right.
So they got to strengthen themselves up.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Trump has also submitted his delay of the weak motion
he demands from Judge Chutkin in the insurrection case in Washington.
Subpoena is to the Archivist of the United States, the
House of Representatives, Homeland Security, the successors to the January
sixth Many, a Special Counsel to the President, and Congressman
Benny Thompson, and Barry Laudermilk. This is more than just
(08:11):
Trump's usual stall. This is clearly his lawyer's latest attempt
to humor him and validate this story he heard somewhere
or maybe he read it on a fortune cookie that
there are quote missing records from the January sixth Committee.
Even though there aren't missing records, there is a wonderful
(08:32):
irony in there that Trump and his ambulance chasers, of course,
do not acknowledge that some of the supposed records they
say would serve as evidence of where Trump and other
White House staffers were and what they were saying on
January sixth, facts which even though Trump and his attorneys
and his apologists seem to have forgotten this is kind
(08:53):
of the point of the trial. A couple of other
side notes from the slowly turning wheels of justice. Jack
Smith has also filed a seemingly inscrutable motion, one that
indicates that about twenty five witnesses in the Washington case,
including one unidentified member of Trump's family, have withheld information
(09:14):
from the Special Counsel's office based on attorney client privilege
and so what well Smith wants Chutkin to order Trump
to disclose by December eighteenth, whether or not he intends
to raise the advice of council defense about which his
public apologists spoke constantly for about a month. There. You know,
(09:38):
how can you indict him for simply doing what his
lawyers told him? And how can it be illegal to
simply get bad advice from your attorneys. In his filing,
Smith notes that if Trump's defense really is the devil
lawyers made me do it, then nobody in the case
can say I can't talk about that because of attorney
(09:58):
client privilege. Bottom line here is Trump has lived his
life by outlasting and outstalling his opponents in a million
different courtrooms. It continues to be ever more abundantly clear, however,
that in Jack Smith he has met the bay ruth
of courtroom process. There is another ruling now from a
(10:22):
court in the Southern District of New York that supposedly
extends Jessica Denson's escape from the non disclosure agreement she
was forced to sign when she worked for the Trump
campaign in twenty sixteen to all campaign employees. And you
don't have to be a political expert or a legal
one to understand what would happen if the NDAs don't
(10:42):
apply anymore. But I do find it hard to believe
that Trump will let this go with at least no
fewer than seventy three more appeals. And to that end,
Law and Crime News reports that the bid to disqualified
Trump from the ballot via the Fourteenth Amendment, the one
that continues to unfold in Colorado now include perhaps the
(11:05):
most finely split hair in constitutional history. Trump's attorneys are
trying to get that case dismissed because while they concede
there is a disqualification clause in the Fourteenth Amendment, and
it is not limited to use after the Civil War,
it still doesn't apply to Trump because it doesn't apply
(11:27):
to presidents. They insist that the clause specifies only government
officers who are required to quote support unquote the Constitution,
while the oath of the president reads Preserve, protect, and
defend the Constitution. And again, the constitutional hair split may
(11:50):
or may not have any validity. But the problem here
is Trump sure does have us on the facts, because
if there is one thing that is inescapably true about
Donald Trump, it is that he has never, not once
supported the Constitution Internationally. While the war continues to escalate,
(12:17):
the hunt for some direct evidence that Iran was specifically
involved in the attack on Israel continues to narrow. It
is now five days later and nobody's found a gun let,
alone a smoking one. This is not to whitewash Iran.
It has supported and supplied Hamas in the past. Its
hands are not clean. But as the State Department spokesman
(12:38):
John Kirby told CNN, quote, we have seen no evidence
in the intelligence that they were witting on it, pre aware,
or were involved in any of the planning, resourcing, or
even directing of the operation unquote. Just as assuredly, while
the exact time frame is still moving around, it seems
(12:59):
that the reports that Egyptian intelligence warned some authority in Israel,
its intel counterparts, or the Netanyahu government, or Netanyahu himself,
or all of them. This is now written in stone.
Even the Republican Chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee,
Michael McCall, admits it. Quote, we know that Egypt had
(13:21):
warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like
this could happen. We know that this has been planned
as long as a year ago. Asked if he was
relaying intelligence that he'd seen or heard, or just something
he'd heard on say This podcast, McCall answered, quote, I
(13:44):
don't want to get too much in the classified, but
a warning was given, and the bottom line here is
Iran may still later prove to be implicated directly, but
it looks less and less likely. The unindicted co conspirator
here is Russia, where Hamas leadership traveled twice in the
last year to meet with the Foreign Minute Lavrov. As
(14:06):
I emphasized yesterday, if any American politician tries to rationalize
pulling our support out from under Ukraine so the money
can instead be sent to Israel, he or she is
in fact acting as a Russian asset, because to hurt
Ukraine is to help Russia, and to help Russia is
(14:28):
to help Hamas, and to help Hamas is to hurt Israel.
And not to bounce around too much. But I closed
with something I first heard weeks ago and was so
convinced it was a clerical error that I actually tweeted
it must have been misheard information and it ain't. Semaphore
(14:51):
News reports the commentator Jank Yuger is running for president
of seriously, he challenging Biden for the Democratic nomination. Quote,
I'm going to do whatever I can to help him
decide that this is not the right path. If he
(15:15):
retires now, he's a hero. He beat Trump, he did
a good job of being the steward of the economy.
If he doesn't, he loses to Trump, and he's the
villain of the story. Unquote. If JENK Huger upholds his
own track record, this means Biden will win next year
in a landslide over some other Republican nominee. I have
(15:38):
never in my life seen any liberal commentator or analyst
more wrong, more often by more of a margin than
JENK Huger at MSNBC years ago. I had the additional
sinking feeling that he had a hard time separating what
was true for what he wanted to be true. I
(16:02):
forbade my staff from booking him as a guest after
I left MSNBC. They hired him to do I think
the six PM show, then fired him, and the people
I still knew there said they had had the same worries.
Plus he was the opposite of a ratings draw. Huger
then contacted my employers at Current TV and would not
leave them alone until I put him on countdown there
(16:24):
to discuss his MSNBC exit. My bosses wanted to know
if they should sign him as a host or a contributor,
and I said no, not yet. Use the ratings for
his guest shot on my show as your guide. And
our ratings not only did not go up that night,
they dropped, and naturally, Joel Hyatt, al Gore's partner, co
(16:50):
owner of the network and the operational chief who was
one of the real life models for the Jason Robard's
character in the film Philadelphia, the guy who fired his
law office chief there because he contracted AIDS, promptly hired
Jank Huger. Hiring was the first of the thirty forty
final straws that led me to leave current and sue
(17:11):
their asses. More importantly and relevantly, Joe Biden has no
earthly clue who Jenk Huger is. So this idea that
Huger is going to help him decide not to run
is nonsense, bordering on delusions of grandeur. As is the
(17:34):
most important issue. Jank Huger was born in Turkey. He
emigrated here at the age of eight. Constitution is rather
exact on this point. He's not eligible to be president.
Yet he tells Semaphore News that more than two centuries
of constitutional precedents are wrong, that you don't have to
be born here, or at least born outside the country,
(17:57):
but the child of US citizens who happened to be
outside the country to become president. He predicts he would
receive a quote slow dunk victory on this in the
Supreme Court. Sure, Alexander Hamilton did not challenge it, even
though he was born in the West Indies barely twenty
years before the country was born. But you you'll get
(18:19):
a slam dunk victory from the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court.
Let me sum this up, Jank Huger is an idiot.
Please stay the f home. The grownups are trying to
resolve this. Also of interest here nothing just Charlie Kirk's
(18:47):
turning point USA equating Zionism and communism during the middle
of the Israel Hamas shooting war. That's next. This is countdown.
This is countdown with Keith Oberman, my crazy friend still
(19:26):
ahead on countdown like that guy should talk. I just noticed,
I mean, I just noticed. This October first was the
thirtieth anniversary of the day we launched ESPN two. And
they didn't do anything to commemorate it. And I didn't
do anything to commemorate it. I forgot, God knows. When
(19:49):
we started it in nineteen ninety three, we treated it
as if we had invented alchemy. What happens when executives
decide that their new product is going to be hip
and that's in order. Coming up in Things I Promised
No to Tell, or for today we'll call it Things
I Promise Not to Tell two first time for the
(20:11):
daily roundup of the misgrants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects
specimens who constitute today's worst persons in the world of
the Bronze, and there is a sports theme. Senator Tommy
Tuberville of Alabama. If he's not the dumbest man in America,
he's close to it. And he was reminded of that
fact yesterday. If only he understood. July twelfth, it was
(20:34):
when Tommy the Tuba, who supports Russia in its invasion
of Ukraine and whose block of American military promotion has
hampered this country's response to the taking of the American
hostages in Gaza, said of the president, quote, you watch
Joe Biden over in Europe, I'm afraid he's gonna fall
down every time I turn on Tabolvision. Apart from the
(20:58):
inanity of the remark, so you're saying you think he'll
fall down because you turned on the television. Coach Tommy
forgets that. The Internet never forgets, never, never, never. Yesterday.
From twenty fourteen, the Internet regurgitated video of Tubberville, then
a failed college football coach, as opposed to a failed senator,
(21:20):
coming down a flight of stairs from an airplane after
a football bowl game. He hits one wrong stare and
literally falls down and slides down more than one dozen
steps punchline. Tuberville's slip and slide took place as his
University of Cincinnati team lost that Bowl game, and it
(21:41):
was the Military Bowl. You know, you would have thought,
by the way those giant Dumbo ears of his would
have provided Tuberville some balance or maybe even some ballast.
The runner up National Hockey Leage Commissioner Gary Bettman told
you the other day this was not going away. Betman
cave to homophobes and Russians and first refused to defend
(22:04):
Pride Knights at NHL games when they attacked them, and
has now in essence, banned Pride nights and with them,
virtually every other cause night that the league is so
prominently celebrated recently, no player related events, no warm up
uniforms with Pride colors, not even any Pride colored sports
tape for players who want to to put on their
(22:26):
hockey sticks. Well, Gary's going to have to have a
problem with that one. Scott Lawton of the Philadelphia Flyers
now reacts to the Pride band by saying, try me quote,
you'll probably see me with the Pride tape on that
night anyway, unquote. And Brian Burke, who has run six
different NHL franchises and is now the head of the
(22:46):
Professional Women's Hockey League Players Association, basically told members of
the LGBTQ community and every other group that has been
betrayed by Gary Bettman to ignore Gary Bettman quote. This
is a surprising and serious setback. Burkey writes. If you
are a member of one of the communities who has
been celebrated as part of the Hockey is for Everyone initiative,
(23:09):
please know that you are still a valued member of
the hockey community. We will not lose the incredible progress
we've made in inclusion over the last decade, and we
are counting on the league for continued support and leadership
in this area. Unquote. I suspect that what Brian Burke
is implying here is that this is a serious enough
blunder that it could escalate to the point of costing
(23:31):
Commissioner Bettman his job. God knows enough people in hockey
have wanted to get rid of him for years anyway,
and he's just added to that. Because that catch phrase
that Burke mentioned, hockey is for everyone, well, Gary Bettman
has personally in essence changed it to hockey is for homophobes.
(23:53):
But the winners. Speaking of which, right wing troll and
balloonhead Charlie Kirk and his fascist organization Turning Point USA
tp USA, or as it is alternatively known, toilet Paper USA,
one of its so called ambassadors, Morgan Ariel or maybe
it's Ariel Morgan or Mariel Organ. It's hard to say
(24:16):
whoever she is. She has decided to position Charlie Kirk
and Turning Point kind of oddly. As the Middle East
goes up in flames, miss Ariel tweeting quote Zionism and
communism go hand in hand unquote. So if you'd like
to make a list of the TPUSA staffers and donors
and advisors who Miss Ariel just identified as belonging to
(24:39):
an anti Semitic organization while Israel is at war, there's
Benny Johnson, Jack Pasovic, and of course Ginny Thomas, Morgan,
Ariel Oriel Morgan Organ, whatever her name is, Turning Point USA,
and Charlie Kirk to day's worst anti Semitic persons the world.
(25:19):
ESPN two. They talked me into becoming the face of
this first of ESPN's endless clones of its television self.
I wore a brown leather bomber jacket, and I said
the first words in the first actual program in those
words were good evening and welcome to the end of
our careers. And that's pretty much all anybody remembers of
this unmitigated disaster. ESPN two exists today, of course, and successfully,
(25:43):
but it only became successful when they stopped trying to
make it something different from original ESPN, and management, with
genuine heartbreak, accepted the idea that all the nation wanted
was more ESPN, not different kinds of ESPN that begat
ESPN News, ESPN U, ESPN plus ESPN the o Cho
(26:04):
Tartar control ESPN. But that's not what they wanted ESPN
two to be. They wanted it to be hip and cool,
you know, for kids, and they were going to make
it hip and cool and force it to be hip
and cool if it killed them and you and for
that matter me. It is why they took the co
(26:26):
anchor of their most successful sports center ever and broke
up the partnership and moved him to a new network
that almost literally had more people who thought they were
in charge of it than watched it. And why three
months later, when Sports Illustrated magazine chose ESPN two as
the seventh worst thing to happen in sports in the
year nineteen ninety three, only the seventh worst. We were grateful,
(26:50):
and I then scurried back to Sports Center and we
all pretended like ESPN two it never happened, and we
almost never mentioned it again. But the saga of why
it went so desperately and immediately wrong is worth telling
in brief, and if you will listen to it, I
will tell you something I have never admitted publicly before.
(27:11):
Why when they asked me to leave Sports Center after
a very first successful year on Sports Center to go
do this kakamamie new network thing. Why on earth? Given
the choice, I actually said, yes, nobody knows this, you
will in a few minutes. But first, By the time
(27:34):
I went to work there in nineteen ninety two, ESPN
had finally moved out of its perennial status of near
bankruptcy and near irrelevancy to profit and prominence. From the
launch in nineteen seventy nine through the mid nineteen eighties,
the place had always either had a new owner, or
a new schedule, or a new plan to avert bankruptcy.
When I joined the fledgling sports department at CNN in
(27:55):
nineteen eighty one, I used to watch my high school
classmate Chris Berman do his show called Sports Center from
what was obviously a closet with one light, no air conditioning,
and no teleprompter. Sometimes it would be twenty minutes long.
Sometimes it would be two minutes long. Each time I'd
look at poor Chris schitzing and looking a little claustrophobic,
and I'd say, well, hooray for CNN Sports. We're not
(28:19):
the worst. But by nineteen ninety two, ESPN had begun
to be willing to spend a little money to bring
in a prominent local sportscaster from Los Angeles Me and
give him the keys to the eleven o'clock Sports Center.
And this company, which did not have any merchandise, did
not sell anything with its logo on it, finally decided
(28:41):
to expand and launch an all sports radio network, And
when those plans did not go very well, they spent
a little extra money and they talked me into moving
to Connecticut three months earlier than planned to launch the
radio network, and it was an instantaneous hit by early
nineteen ninety three. Then there were rumblings and then rumors,
and finally an announcement that they would build upon the
(29:02):
radio success by starting a second television network. ESPN and
ESPN two. But and from the beginning, this was the point.
It was not going to be just another ESPN or
the ESPN spillover channel, or the channel for when there's
a great basketball game and a great football game at
the same time and we want to cover both. It
(29:23):
was going to be different. There'd be live broadcasts of games,
just like ESPN. There'd be a studio sports show just
like Sports Center, but it'd be hip, you know, for
kids in the Sports Center newsroom. The assumption was the
face of ESPN two was going to be Mike Turrico.
Mike had had a very tough nineteen ninety two and
(29:46):
it seemed like something that could re establish him in
the company, or if he had a tough nineteen ninety three,
something he could be jettison from if the whole thing
went up in flames. I heard Robin Roberts name mentioned
once or twice, and I don't know if they ever
approached Robin, and I think Tarico told me once they
had mentioned it to him, but never seriously. So when
they called me into my boss's office in the spring
(30:07):
of nineteen ninety three, I just assumed they were yelling
at me for something I said, since that's what they
usually called me in for, or called me and Dan
Patrick in for, or called Dan in just to yell
at him for something I had said. Instead, they offered
me ESPN two. We want you to be to ESPN two,
said John Walsh, who basically ran everything ESPN did that
(30:30):
was not a ballgame. We want you to beat for
ESPN two what Chris Berman is to ESPN. They explained
that there would be younger sports on their ex game
stuff and mountain biking. They kept talking about mountain biking
and a lot of stuff with trees, but that the
flagship program would match my sense of humor exactly, that
it would just be snarky and flip and with it
(30:52):
and hip and cool, you know, for kids. They said
they would let me continue on Sports Center until August
and then have me work for two months helping them
design and rehearse the new show. Oh, they actually wanted
my opinion, and they offered to give me like a
twenty five percent raise. Understand though ESPN of nineteen ninety
(31:13):
three would fight you over an eleven dollars cab ride
on an expense report. They would call you into a meeting,
they would spend thirty minutes on this. They would then
offer you eight dollars a twenty five percent raise was
the nineteen ninety three ESPN equivalent of Eternal Life. Still,
(31:34):
I had my doubts for one thing. As it was,
we seemed to be pretty hip and cool on Sports Center.
As it was, Dan Patrick and I had an on
air relationship that you could not practice, nor design, nor cast.
It was just there or it wasn't. We were the
two guys in the World War One bunker who knew
that the Jerry's would eventually get us right in the psalm,
(31:56):
so all we could do was first take out as
many of them as we could and sing and laugh
while we did it. But I had two reasons for
saying yes anyway, and I'll save the one I've never
told anybody at all for the end of this recollection.
The other reason was, believe it or not, I'm I'm
(32:18):
a team player. I am not the guy who will
come in and lie on behalf of the team. And
I am not the guy who will turn away and
say nothing when the coach is slapping the crap out
of one of my teammates. But if you say we
are management, we have thought this through. We want you
to leave Sports Center to go do ESPN two and
be hip and cool, you know for kids. I will
(32:40):
say yes, plus money only they had not thought it through.
As it proved, the first problem was the new network
that was supposed to be different from ESPN, and the
new show that was supposed to be different from ESPN.
Sports Center was going to be run by John Walsh,
the guy who ran SportsCenter and basically created what you
(33:03):
saw then and what you see now. And to actually
produce the show, he chose Mike Bogad, who was the
coordinating producer of the eleven o'clock Sports Center that I
was doing with Dan Patrick, and Norby Williamson, who was
the line producer of the eleven o'clock Sports Center with
me and Dan Patrick. And although they would not give
me a title other than anchor, the other guy running
it was me the co host of the eleven o'clock
(33:25):
Sports Center. To add to this crowd of rebellious, innovative
anti establishment thinkers who yesterday had been the establishment, John
Walsh hired the sports editor of the Boston Globe, Vince Doria.
To my mind, Vince would cover himself in glory at
ESPN two by once proposing a really bad idea the
(33:46):
laugh track for the Nick mackay comedy segments. And when
I said, that's a really bad idea, it's still a newscast.
What if we have a laugh track someday when some
team's plane crashes, He said, you're right. I'm thinking maybe
I don't know as much about this TV stuff as
I thought I did. Will you tell me the next
time I have an idea that's that bad. But at
(34:07):
this point, Vince was thinking maybe we could differentiate ESPN
two from ESPN by showing baseball and basketball box scores overnight.
There was an opinion, and Vince held it that we
should be the Christian science monitor of sportscasts on ESPN two,
which was definitely not, you know, for kids. The show
producers they brought in were also mainstream. My friend and
(34:30):
producer Ron Grellik came in from Los Angeles. He actually
thought they meant the stuff about younger sports. He bought
a magazine rack and subscribed us to all kinds of
biking magazines and hiking magazines, and nobody ever read them.
They hired producers from Madison Square Garden Network. They hired
associate producers from Sports Center and made them producers to
(34:50):
join me on the anchor desk. They hired a newspaper
columnist from Detroit named Mitch Album, and they hired all
the local sportscasters they did not have room for on SportsCenter,
and among them was a guy named Stu Stu Scott,
and Stu was great, and everybody else just came in
and did regular sports casts, just as if they'd been
on regular flavor ESPN. Finally to be my real co host,
(35:13):
they were going to hire, well, we never found out
who they were going to hire, because one day the
word came through that the chairman of ABC Cap Cities,
which owned ESPN and everything else, had seen this weekend
sportscaster in West Palm Beach doing a tennis tournament of
some sort or rain delay during a tennis tournament or
something and thought she was great, and overnight there was
a bidding war for her, and we had just hired
(35:35):
her to be my co host. And her name was
Susie Calber. Everybody on this renegade network, including me, was
thoroughly non renegade. It became rather apparent rather quickly that
management's understanding of what made something cool and hip, you
know for kids? Was you ready? What clothing we wore?
(35:59):
This is the story of the infamous leather jacket I
wore the first night, which you will hear when countdown continues.
After this, back to the number one story on the
countdown and things I promised not to tell on Saturday's
twenty ninth anniversary of the launch of ESPN two, or
(36:21):
as I described it to Kenny Maine for his podcast yesterday,
the Titanic Only It's on fire first, as I said,
the organizing principle was forced hipness, and the organizing principle
of forced hipness was the clothing we wore. And that
brings us to the primary image that still appears whenever
(36:42):
the launch of ESPN two is broached or googled. My
infamous brown leather bomber jacket. Fall comes early to Bristol, Connecticut.
And if it were not cold enough there at the
end of September nineteen ninety three, there was also something
wrong with our new ESPN two studio. No matter what
they did to the air conditioning system in there, it
(37:04):
was it's like forty eight degrees all the time. So
I was standing outside one day, trying to get warm,
contemplating the succession of train wrecks that had been our
first five or six pilot shows and dry runs. And
I was wearing my brown leather bomber jacket because I
was cold. When another of the many executive producers, John Lack,
(37:25):
came over to say hi, and he was in mid
sentence when he looked at the jacket and went stone cold, silent. Wait,
he finally said, the word eureka forming over his head.
Would you could you if I asked you, would you
wear that jacket on the show? I pretended to hesitate.
(37:48):
I realized only the jacket could save me from freezing
to death in our winter on the TV version of
The Donner Party, And so I said, I suppose, And
that's why I was wearing that jacket. It was cold
in the studio. Why they gave Steve Buckley from the
Boston Herald a base ball cap to wear on the
air for his segments and wear backwards. Why they put
(38:09):
other guys in football helmets and insisted that nobody wear
a tie ever, not even former Boston College football coach
Jack Picknell. That should be obvious, you know, for kids,
it became rapidly apparent that all ESPN two was ESPN
dressed up differently. I had a leather coach, the on
(38:30):
screen graphics were in lowercase letters only. The camera was
not on a tripod. It was carried around by a
cameraman who soon had a bad back. The other problem
was exemplified by that fellow John Lack. I liked him.
He had run MTV News, and he actually had some
ideas about differentiating presentation and content for younger audiences. But
(38:52):
by the time he suggested the jacket, he also had
a second message for me. Listen, he said, I can't
get through to these people. They tell me I'm in charge,
and then they tell me our first new hip revolutionary
story is going to be a profile of Doug Flutie,
the quarterback. And I say, how's that different from Sports Center?
And they look at me like I'm crazy, and they say,
he's playing in Canada. We'll be doing a story about Canada.
(39:13):
Who would believe we're going to do a story about Canada.
But I know you get it, Keith. So when we're
actually on the air, you have to keep it different.
You have to be in charge. When we're on you
are the executive producer. This was extremely bad news because
(39:34):
by my count, this would have made me the fifteenth
or sixteenth different person who believed they were in charge.
There was John Lack, There was Walsh. There was a
new vice president named Howard Katz. There was Vince Doria.
There were the two Sports center guys, Norby and Bogie.
There were the line producers. There were a couple of consultants.
There was the president of ESPN, Steve Bornstein. There was
the chairman of ABC who had discovered Susie Calber. There
(39:57):
was the guy who put in the state of the
art air conditioning system in the studio. There was the
other guy, Walter Cronkite's lighting director. As he kept telling
us who put in the state of the art lighting system,
all of us individually in charge, so nobody was in charge.
The night before the premiere, so September thirtieth, nineteen ninety three,
(40:19):
John Walsh, the Sports Center man, saw me in the
hallway and said, listen, I just got some amazing information
from audience research. Do you know which show in all
of television has the highest percentage of viewers who are
aged eighteen to twenty four. This was an important question
a relevant question because these were the kids, you know
(40:40):
for kids. ESPN two had been created to get that
eighteen to twenty four year old audience, So I guess
the answer was, I don't know, some show on MTV. No,
Walsh said, gleefully, it's Sports Center, and I froze, and
I said, wait, John, if we already have the eighteen
(41:01):
to twenty four year old audience, why are we starting
a network to get the eighteen to twenty four year
old audience. Do you really think they're gonna give up
the show they like and move to a new show
on a new channel just cause? And Walsh laughed and
shrugged and shuffled down the hallway, and I called a
(41:23):
cab to take me to the Hartford Airport so I
could leave the country. Only at the last minute I
chickened out. The premiere October first began with me, I
swear this is true, going to shave in my house
and instead dropping and breaking a mirror. The network signed
on at seven pm with the national anthem and some
(41:44):
sort of statement from Chris Berman blessing it, and then
a very long sketch parody of the then hit film
The Fugitive, in which I was the fugitive from Sports Center.
Get it, the fugitive from Sports Center. You get it.
Then the lights came on. The poor guy with the
camera staggered in and I said, good evening, and welcome
to the end of our careers. The television sorts writer
(42:05):
the Associated Press, John Nelson was there in the studio.
He immediately flashed that quote to a not waiting world,
and ESPN two and Sports Night were born, you know,
for kids. The first night seemed okay, largely because ESPN
threw a party in the parking lot under a gigantic tent,
(42:27):
free food and booze. Hundreds of staffers and guests and
celebrities and free booze. That place later became known as
the Tent of Consent. Don't ask me. I was on
the air for three hours. I had nothing to do
with this. Later that night, near the tent, the network
(42:48):
president stumbled crossing a little bridge over a stream and
wound up in the water. And he still had a
better night than we did. The shows bounced from topic
to topic and mood to mood, once with Bill Pedo
anchoring with me. Sports Night ran a mini documentary on
a high school basketball star who chose which college to
go to to play ball at entirely by letter and telephone.
(43:13):
Only when he arrived did he discover he was the
only white guy in an entirely black conference. We showed
the first ten minutes of this extraordinary story, then we
promised to show you the rest of it, and then
we welcomed a live studio guest, Eddie Layton, the organist
from Yankee Stadium. He played a few tunes, and then
(43:36):
we went back to part two of this very grim
documentary about this very dim basketball player, and that hour
was kind of good compared to the rest of them. Eventually,
we moved Sports Night from Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights
to Monday through Friday at five pm, so Sports Night
was on in the afternoons. Though it was December, the
(43:58):
limitless air conditioning continued. Susie Cawber began to wear a
blanket on her lap just out of camera view. I
begged to be returned to Sports Center, and they agreed,
provided I gave back the rays and extended my contract
for a year and gave back a little bit more.
Sports Illustrated at that point, still the leading and most
influential sports media outlet in the World warned us it
(44:21):
was going to list in its year end issue the
worst things to happen in sports in nineteen ninety three,
and we ESPN two were going to be on it.
And when the magazine came out, there on the list,
behind the stabbing of the tennis star Monica Selis by
a fan of her rival, stephie Groff, and behind Michael
Jordan's retirement, and behind a college football player suing his
coach because somebody else became the starting quarterback. There we
(44:41):
were Sports Illustrated's choice as the seventh worst thing in
sports for nineteen ninety three. And the reaction of the
anchors and the staff and even the management and all
eighteen people were in charge of ESPN two Sports Night
was unanimous, Hooray, We're not the worst. We're not the worst.
We're not the worst. In my last week anchoring the show,
(45:05):
we discovered that Walter Kronkite's lighting guy had never spoken
to the guy who put in the air conditioning system.
Walter Kronkite's lighting guy had focused the principal backlight in
his state of the art lighting system directly onto the
principal monitor for the other guy's state of the art
air conditioning system, so the state of the art air
(45:25):
conditioning system had spent six months thinking the temperature in
the studio was two hundred and seventeen degrees. They let
me go back to Sports Center, providing I gave back
all the extra money, and I happily did it and
a little more. Sports Night staggered on for a few
more weeks before being canceled, and all the talent Stuart Scott,
(45:46):
Susie Calber, bil Pedo, and the guy they hired to
replace me when I escaped back to Sports Center, Kenny, Maine.
They all went on to do SportsCenter. As to ESPN two.
We all pretended that never happened. It's just a bad dream.
And then there was that other reason I had agreed
to try it. I have not told anybody this. I
(46:09):
don't even think I told the other person involved this.
But the night before ESPN management called me in and
said we'd like you to leave Sports Center and become
the face of ESPN two, a woman I worked with
at ESPN said, yes, she would like to go out
with me, but that doing that while we worked together
would be a disaster. So after management's offer, I asked
(46:33):
her if my new schedule, which took me away from
her department, was sufficient professional distance so that she'd feel
comfortable dating. And she said yes, So I said yes,
and we started dating and that didn't work out either.
(47:04):
Then all the damage I can do here, Thank you
for listening. Countdown has come to you from the Vin
Scully studio at the Older Woman Broadcasting Empire HI atop
the Sports Capsule Building in New York. The music you've
heard was for the most part, arranged, produced, and performed
by Countdowns musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Schanel.
Brian Ray handled guitars, bass and drums. John Phillip Schanel
(47:27):
did the orchestration and keyboards, and it was produced by
Tko Brothers. Other music, including other works of Beethoven, arranged
and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. The sports
music is courtesy of ESPN, Inc. It was written by
Mitch Warren Davis. We call it the Olderman theme from
ESPN two. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by
(47:49):
Nancy Fauss, the best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer
today was my friend Tony Kornheiser and everything else was
pretty much my fault. So that's countdown for this, the
one thousand and tenth day since Donald Trump's first attempted
coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
Convict him now while we still can. The next scheduled
(48:11):
countdown is tomorrow. Bulletins has the news warrants till then.
I'm Keith Oldraman, good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For
(48:33):
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
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