The new SEC Network is airing a documentary tonight at 9 p.m. ET about a special era for Auburn.“Bo, Barkley, and The Big Hurt” focuses on the school having three transcendent athletes on its campus during the 1980s: Bo Jackson, Charles Barkley and Frank Thomas.
The three were reunited last year at the Auburn-Alabama football game. Barkley contends he is the top Auburn athlete; Jackson is second and Thomas is third.
As the clip shows, the guys weren’t about to argue with Barkley.
Earlier today, I posted my Q/A with Paul Finebaum. However, I thought this was worth a headline.
Paul Finebaum didn’t get to where he is today by holding back his views. He’s outspoken, candid, and of course, critical when events warrant. Just ask some of his targets through the years.
So naturally, people will be watching to see how Finebaum handles himself now that he works at a TV property that bears the SEC’s name. Here is his answer when I asked him about it.
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Finebaum: What I’ve been told, is we are going to be able to do the same thing on this program we’ve always done. There are a lot of people out there waiting for a train wreck or waiting to see what happens when we criticize a coach or a president or an athletic director. Sure, I covered sports for a long time. That’s what I would be looking for.
And I don’t know what the answer to that is, but I intend to keep doing the same thing I’ve always done. My bosses to a person have all told me, ‘We want you to be you. We’re not asking you to be a shill, we’re not asking you to be a house organ, we’re asking you to do a show under the same auspices and the same guidelines that you’ve always done.’
In his poorly-worded diatribe about the Washington nickname, Mike Ditka threw out this statement: “We’re going to let the liberals of the world run this world?”
Indeed, whenever I write about the debate over whether to keep the name, I often get tweets or comments saying all the fuss is due to a bunch of liberals.
In responding to a post this week about Phil Simms’ stand on the issue, a reader wrote: “Give me a break. Tempest in a Liberal Teapot.”
Really, this about liberals and conservatives?
Does that mean conservative have a lack of sensitivity to a group of Americans, Native Americans in this case, who say the Washington nickname is extremely offensive?
What’s so hard to understand? The team’s nickname is based on the color of someone’s skin. Nowhere in society would you be allowed to use that reference when discussing Native Americans or the heritage of anyone else. Except, of course, for the NFL team that plays in the nation’s capital.
This isn’t about liberals and conservative or political correctness run amok. This is about a level of decency, understanding and compassion.
Plain and simple: If a large group of people say they are offended by a nickname that is related to their heritage, you don’t say, “Get over it.” You change make the change.
My latest entry for Awful Announcing is my Q/A with Paul Finebaum.
Here is an excerpt.
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It’s good to be Paul Finebaum these days.
He has a daily ESPN radio show that is simulcast on the new SEC Network. He will be featured prominently on the SEC Network’s pregame coverage on Saturdays and on ESPN’s College GameDay.
And Finebaum has a new best-selling book, “My Conference Can Beat Your Conference: Why The SEC Still Rules College Football.” It is co-written by his old University of Tennessee classmate and current ESPNer, Gene Wojciechowski.
It all comes as a surprise to Finebaum, who reveals in a Q/A that as late as two years ago he was told to forget about working for ESPN. He thought he was just going to be regional personality in Birmingham.
He also discusses his drive to complete some unfinished business after getting turned down by papers like the New York Times early in his career.
Q: These are pretty heady times for you. You’ve got a book, SEC Network, ESPN, GameDay coming up. Do you feel like you’ve kind of won the lottery, so to speak, with all that’s happening?
FINEBAUM: A little bit. Listen, I’ll try to spare you the ‘I am blessed line,’ but it’s pretty amazing. It’s been a good career, but I feel like there’s been more failure than success, and I didn’t see this coming. I walked out of a meeting about two years ago in New York. Someone sent me to see this guy. He basically said, ‘Whatever talents you have, you’re going to be in Birmingham and be a regional guy and ESPN won’t hire you.’ I said, OK. I’ve had a good career and I’ll continue to do whatever I can. Then I was introduced to someone else, and it completely changed my career, my life.
Q: What happened?
FINEBAUM: Joe Tessitore, who’s a friend of mine, said, ‘I want you to meet a guy name Nick Khan, who is an agent at CAA.’ He now represents Kirk Herbstreit and Olbermann, a lot of other people. I met him at DFW airport. He said, ‘I think you could go to ESPN very easily.’ The next thing you know ‑‑ it took a few months, but my contract was up at the end of the year, and he put it together. Everything he said happened.
It just took someone who believed in me and knew the right people and did it the right way. It also, by the way, coincided with the launch of the network.
Q: Right, your timing was good here, too. You had a huge following in Birmingham. Why did you feel the need to expand your reach?
FINEBAUM: I wanted to at least explore and exhaust the possibilities. I mean, I did have a really nice career and a nice life, and it wasn’t like I had to do this. My greatest disappointments came 25 years ago in the newspaper business. I thought I would be in New York and in Chicago at the Tribune and Sun Times. That’s where I thought I was going to be.
I didn’t have to have it. I wanted to at least have a conversation, and Nick made sure that happened, and it did.
Q: So was there a little bit of a feeling of unfinished business?
FINEBAUM: Yeah, it was a little bit of that. I wanted just to simply get an evaluation. Could what I do translate (beyond Alabama)?
Q: And then you wrote a book. How did this book come about?
FINEBAUM: The book came about very simply. And by the way, this is another key component here, which I’m about to tell you. About a little over two years ago, I got a call from a guy who writes a sports blog at the New Yorker magazine, and he wanted to talk to me about an article. OK, I didn’t really give it any thought. Turns out that he had an idea. They wanted to do a profile of someone in college football, and he came to me.
He hung around me on and off for six months. The article came out in December of 2012. I was in New York for a conference. The next day I got a call from a literary agent, and he said, ‘There’s a book in this.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, yeah, ‘I think there’s really a big book in this.’
I was about to end my contract. I thought it could be pretty messy. I was not overly excited about diving in, so I ended up hooking up with Gene. I said, what do you think? Gene said, ‘I think it’s a great idea.’
Q: What is the point of the book? What did you hope to say?
FINEBAUM: Well, it was a couple of books in one. I mean, the original idea was to make it autobiographical but bring the SEC and the radio show in. I frankly didn’t think my story was all that interesting. I thought the SEC was a much bigger vehicle, and we started thinking about the launch of the network, timing it, and that’s really the genesis of that.
And then the GameDay thing happened, so we used GameDay as the basic point or the jumping off point of the narrative week by week with GameDay.
Q: Then you had that great finale of the Alabama‑Auburn game. You really couldn’t have scripted it any better for a book.
FINEBAUM: No, it was pretty dramatic.
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And there’s more.
Guess we know where ‘Da Coach’ stands on the issue. And it isn’t pretty.
He likely went a bit too far an interview with Mike Richman at Redskinhistorian.com.
“What’s all the stink over the Redskin name?” Ditka said. “It’s so much [expletive] it’s incredible. We’re going to let the liberals of the world run this world. It was said out of reverence, out of pride to the American Indian. Even though it was called a Redskin, what are you going to call them, a Brownskin? This is so stupid it’s appalling, and I hope that owner keeps fighting for it and never changes it, because the Redskins are part of an American football history, and it should never be anything but the Washington Redskins. That’s the way it is.
“Its been the name of the team since the beginning of football. It has nothing to do with something that happened lately, or something that somebody dreamed up. This was the name, period. Leave it alone. These people are silly — asinine, actually, in my opinion.”
Really, a ‘Brownskin?’ That won’t go over well with Native Americans, and I imagine, ESPN.
Living in Chicago, I love Ditka. But really, Mike.
Expect some fallout here.
New York Post columnist Phil Mushnick isn’t a big fan of Showtime’s “Inside the NFL” using Brandon Marshall as a regular analyst this year.
His Sunday column included an item that labeled the Bears receiver a “miscreant”:
“Rinse, lather, repeat: Since his rookie year with the Broncos in 2006, talented WR Brandon Marshall, now with the Bears, has relentlessly coveted and won extra on-field TV attention through unsportsmanlike, me-first, excessive demonstrations, not to mention extra off-field attention. Frequently arrested, he eventually earned a suspension for violating the NFL’s personal code of conduct.
“And that must explain why of all the active NFL players that Showtime/CBS’ “Inside the NFL” could this year choose as a regular player/panelist/analyst, the shot-callers chose Brandon Marshall.”
The assessment seems a bit harsh. While Marshall did have problems earlier in his career with Denver and Miami, he acknowledged in 2011 that he has been receiving treatment for borderline personality disorder. During his two Pro Bowl seasons with the Bears, his headlines have occurred on the field.
Showtime isn’t holding Marshall’s past problems against him. The network believes Marshall has plenty to say, and won’t be shy about saying it.
As readers of this blog know, Jason Whitlock and I haven’t been the best of friends.
So I wasn’t expecting much when I saw the latest entry in Still No Cheering in the Press Box, the sportswriter interview project by the Povich Center for Sports Journalism at Maryland. The subject was none other than my old pal Jason.
You could be sure there was plenty of Whitlock’s bravado in there. Such as:
I’m sure I’ve said many things I regret, but what you need to keep in mind about me that’s different than most is that I’m 47, I’m not married and I don’t have kids.
I can be more provocative and fearless than many of my peers, who are married with kids. The repercussions that they suffer affect other people. Here, it’s just me.
That’s a somewhat ridiculous statement, considering there are plenty of provocative and fearless journalists who are married with kids. Whitlock’s hero, Mike Royko, was married and had children.
Whitlock also had an interesting perspective on his initial break-up with ESPN and then his reunion.
I worked at ESPN for six years, left for seven years and during the six or seven years that I left, I was a thorn in ESPN’s side. Not because I disliked ESPN but because ESPN has been the world’s most powerful institution in sports and it needed to be questioned by someone with stature and credibility.
Whitlock later says he left because ESPN wasn’t paying him enough. Regardless, there definitely was considerable bitterness that led to him lashing out at his former company. Now all is hunky dory again.
Yet despite all the bluster, Whitlock actually had some insights and advice on journalism that are worth sharing.
Whitlock felt he benefited by starting small:
After a year of writing various stories, The Charlotte Observer interviewed me and gave me a job covering high school sports for them at one of their bureaus in South Carolina.
That was my first full-time job and I think I got paid $403 a week. I was a growing boy; it was hard to eat on $403 dollars a week.
Starting in smaller markets is the route to go. There are a lot of people that study at journalism school and say “Oh, I think it’ll be cool,” and they get out of school and they find out they have to go to a small market and this is particularly true for African-Americans.
We want to be in a big city where there are a lot of African-Americans and a good social life and we say, “No, I am not going to do that.”
I wanted it so badly that I didn’t care where I had to go to get a job. I wrote nearly every newspaper in the country looking for a job.
You go to a small market like that, and particularly for someone like me who wasn’t very good, it was a great place to learn and hone my craft.
When I did get to a major market, I would be better than someone that came out of college and goes to a major market and has to do all the learning that I did in the minor leagues.
Whitlock talked about developing a niche:
When something happens in the NFL, people think “Oh, let me see what Peter King says.” Everybody has to have something like that, and for me, I knew it was going to be the intersection of sports and culture and sports and race.
When something that goes on in the sports world goes along racial lines, I wanted people to think “Oh, I want to see what Whitlock has to say.”
On stirring the pot:
I think most people are sheep, and again, one of the things that I like to tell young journalists is if you’re going to be a journalist and not just a writer, you have to be comfortable when other people are uncomfortable around you.
Too many people enter this profession hoping that they’ll walk into a press box or walk into a locker room hoping that everyone is happy to see them. I don’t really care. … I want my family to be happy to see me; I want my friends to be happy to see me; I relatively want my coworkers to be happy to see me, but the people that I cover, it’s not that I want them to hate me, but I don’t care what they’re feeling.
On his new website at ESPN:
I’m going to be launching this website that will be directed at African American sports fans, and I think that that will
1: foster an environment where we as African Americans can do some self-analysis, and
2: I think it will help some people in the African-American community understand where I’m coming from.
I feel like sometimes people think “You’re too tough on us; you’re too tough on black people.”
And I think, by doing this website, they’re going to see that it’s tough love, it’s not disrespect. It’s belief and self-confidence in us that we can handle self-examination and some of the things that we are doing in our culture. That’s healthy for us. I think that if things go well, my voice on black cultural issues will get stronger and more respected.
On learning the landscape:
My advice [to young journalists] would be to really understand and study journalism. So many people are focused on how they can capitalize on all of these new opportunities in journalism, but they have virtually no understanding of what journalism is.
And on the power of the written word:
You have to remember that broadcasting is, to me, mostly for entertainment. It’s for marketing your written content; for marking the other stuff that you do.
I’m a journalist at the end of the day, so I believe in the written word, I believe in newspapers and I believe that the most important conversations and analysis happens in writing.
But, I do think that the things you do on TV can elevate your reach as a writer and it’s important.
I think that we’re reading more than ever, we’re just reading it on the Internet and in different forms.
We’re reading with more immediacy than previously intended, and so, while some of it isn’t as thoughtful, we will eventually figure it out: How to be thoughtful on the Internet, the same way we were thoughtful in the newspapers.
I never thought I would say this, but I am going share Whitlock’s story with my sports journalism class at DePaul this fall. There are some good lessons in there.
Hey, it’s August. College football doesn’t start until next week, and there’s still three weeks until the NFL plays for real.
So why not?
At SI.com, managing editor Chris Stone explains the decision.
Thirteen-year-old sensation Mo’ne Davis, who plays for Philadelphia’s Taney Dragons, has become the first Little Leaguer to grace the national cover of Sports Illustrated. The 5-foot-4 inch, 111-pound eighth grader is not only taking the Little League World Series by storm, but also she has captured the nation’s attention.
“Last week, this week, maybe next week, she’s owned the sports conversation,” Sports Illustrated manager editor Chris Stone said. “How often do you get to say this about a 13-year-old girl? It’s the easiest type of story to identify as a cover story.”
“The writer, Albert Chen, said it perfectly in the story, ‘She’s a lot of things to a lot of different people, all of them good things: a totem for inner-city baseball, a role model for your 10-year-old niece, a role model for your 10-year-old nephew,’ ” Stone said. “Most of all, she’s a laid-back kid just having a really good time.”
Score another victory for Chicago’s Little Leaguers. They topped a couple of big stars, Johnny Manziel and Chris Sale, in the local TV ratings Monday night.
Jackie Robinson West’s 8-7 victory over Rhode Island pulled a 3.5 rating on ESPN2 in Chicago. That means the game was seen in an estimated 125,000 homes in the area; 1 local ratings point is worth nearly 36,000 homes.
Jackie Robinson topped the 3.0 local rating for the Manziel show during ESPN’s coverage of the Washington-Cleveland game. Meanwhile, despite Cy Young candidate Sale on the mound, the White Sox-Orioles game only did a 1.0 rating on Comcast SportsNet.
The kids figure to rule again tonight when Jackie Robinson West takes on Texas at 7:30 p.m. ET on ESPN.
Meanwhile, on the national level, Manziel continued to deliver ratings. The game did a 4.8 overnight rating, the second highest ever for a preseason game on ESPN. The highest was a 5.5 for the Minnesota-Houston game on Aug. 31, 2009 during Brett Favre’s first season with the Vikings.
You can follow Ed Sherman on Twitter at @Sherman_Report.
Phil Simms made the most headlines yesterday since his days as the Giants quarterback.
The CBS analyst said he decided he probably won’t use the derogatory nickname for the Washington team when he calls one of their games.
From Barry Wilner’s story in the Associated Press.
“My very first thought is it will be Washington the whole game,” Simms told The Associated Press on Monday.
Simms will work the Thursday night package the network acquired this season and will have Giants-Redskins on Sept. 25. He isn’t taking sides in the debate over whether Washington’s nickname is offensive or racist. But he says he is sensitive to the complaints about the name, and his instincts now are to not use Redskins in his announcing.
“I never really thought about it, and then it came up and it made me think about it,” Simms added. “There are a lot of things that can come up in a broadcast, and I am sensitive to this.”
Tony Dungy also said he won’t use the nickname when he discusses the team on NBC.
Simms, though, carries more weight because he will be on the call for an entire game with Washington. A lead network analyst not using the nickname makes a powerful statement.
Last night, in his opening segment (above), Keith Olbermann suggested Simms’ decision could be “the tipping point” in this controversy. By taking a strong stand, it potentially opens the door for other analysts to follow his lead.
Interestingly, Simms’ partner, Jim Nantz, said he will continue to use the nickname. He said it is “not my job to take a stance.”
That is the same position taken by the New York Times in regards to using the nickname. There is some editorial justification in that decision.
Yet as Olbermann suggests, if Simms opts not to use the nickname, it increases the momentum for it to be eliminated completely. That day is coming.