Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on what is, in everything but name, George Bush’s pardon of Scooter Libby.
“I didn’t vote for him,” an American once said, “But he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.” That — on this eve of the Fourth of July — is the essence of this democracy, in 17 words. And that is what President Bush threw away yesterday in commuting the sentence of Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
The man who said those 17 words — improbably enough — was the actor John Wayne. And Wayne, an ultra-conservative, said them when he learned of the hair’s-breadth election of John F. Kennedy instead of his personal favorite, Richard Nixon, in 1960.
“I didn’t vote for him but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.” The sentiment was doubtlessly expressed earlier. But there is something especially appropriate about hearing it, now, in Wayne’s voice: The crisp matter-of-fact acknowledgment that we have survived, even though for nearly two centuries now, our commander in chief has also served, simultaneously, as the head of one political party and often the scourge of all others.
We as citizens must, at some point, ignore a president’s partisanship. Not that we may prosper as a nation, not that we may achieve, not that we may lead the world, but merely that we may function.
But just as essential to the 17 words of John Wayne is an implicit trust, a sacred trust: that the president for whom so many did not vote can in turn suspend his political self long enough, and for matters imperative enough, to conduct himself solely for the benefit of the entire republic.
Our generation’s willingness to state “We didn’t vote for him, but he’s our president, and we hope he does a good job” was tested in the crucible of history, and earlier than most.
And in circumstances more tragic and threatening. And we did that with which history tasked us. We enveloped our president in 2001. And those who did not believe he should have been elected — indeed those who did not believe he had been elected — willingly lowered their voices and assented to the sacred oath of nonpartisanship.
And George W. Bush took our assent, and reconfigured it, and honed it, and shaped it to a razor-sharp point and stabbed this nation in the back with it.
Were there any remaining lingering doubt otherwise, or any remaining lingering hope, it ended yesterday when Mr. Bush commuted the prison sentence of one of his own staffers.
Did so even before the appeals process was complete. Did so without as much as a courtesy consultation with the Department of Justice. Did so despite what James Madison — at the Constitutional Convention — said about impeaching any president who pardoned or sheltered those who had committed crimes “advised by” that president.
Did so without the slightest concern that even the most detached of citizens must look at the chain of events and wonder: To what degree was Mr. Libby told, “Break the law however you wish — the president will keep you out of prison”?
In that moment, Mr. Bush, you broke that fundamental compact between yourself and the majority of this nation’s citizens, the ones who did not cast votes for you.
In that moment, Mr. Bush, you ceased to be the president of the United States. In that moment, Mr. Bush, you became merely the president of a rabid and irresponsible corner of the Republican Party.
And this is too important a time, Sir, to have a commander in chief who puts party over nation. This has been, of course, the gathering legacy of this administration. Few of its decisions have escaped the stain of politics. The extraordinary Karl Rove has spoken of “a permanent Republican majority,” as if such a thing — or a permanent Democratic majority — is not antithetical to that upon which rests our country, our history, our revolution, our freedoms.
Yet our democracy has survived shrewder men than Karl Rove. And it has survived the frequent stain of politics upon the fabric of government. But this administration, with ever-increasing insistence and almost theocratic zealotry, has turned that stain into a massive oil spill.
The protection of the environment is turned over to those of one political party who will financially benefit from the rape of the environment.
The protections of the Constitution are turned over to those of one political party who believe those protections unnecessary and extravagant and quaint.
The enforcement of the laws is turned over to those of one political party who will swear beforehand that they will not enforce those laws.
The choice between war and peace is turned over to those of one political party who stand to gain vast wealth by ensuring that there is never peace, but only war.
And now, when just one cooked book gets corrected by an honest auditor, when just one trampling of the inherent and inviolable fairness of government is rejected by an impartial judge, when just one wild-eyed partisan is stopped by the figure of blind justice, this president decides that he, and not the law, must prevail.
I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war. I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. I accuse you of firing the generals who told you that the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient. I accuse you of causing in Iraq the needless deaths of 3,586 of our brothers and sons, and sisters and daughters, and friends and neighbors. I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but sincerely motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but to stifle dissent. I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people, of creating the very terror you claim to have fought. I accuse you of exploiting that unreasoning fear, the natural fear of your own people who just want to live their lives in peace, as a political tool to slander your critics and libel your opponents. I accuse you of handing part of this republic over to a vice president who is without conscience and letting him run roughshod over it.
And I accuse you now, Mr. Bush, of giving, through that vice president, carte blanche to Mr. Libby to help defame Ambassador Joseph Wilson by any means necessary, to lie to grand juries and special counsel and before a court, in order to protect the mechanisms and particulars of that defamation with your guarantee that Libby would never see prison and, in so doing, as Ambassador Wilson himself phrased it here last night, of becoming an accessory to the obstruction of justice.
When President Nixon ordered the firing of the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre” on October 20th, 1973, Cox initially responded tersely, and ominously.
“Whether ours shall be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and, ultimately, the American people.”
President Nixon did not understand how he had crystallized the issue of Watergate for the American people. It had been about the obscure meaning behind an attempt to break in to a rival party’s headquarters, and the labyrinthine effort to cover up that break-in and the related crimes.
And in one night, Nixon transformed it. Watergate — instantaneously — became a simpler issue: a president overruling the inexorable march of the law, insisting — in a way that resonated viscerally with millions who had not previously understood — that he was the law.
Not the Constitution. Not the Congress. Not the courts. Just him. Just, Mr. Bush, as you did, yesterday.
The twists and turns of Plamegate, of your precise and intricate lies that sent us into this bottomless pit of Iraq; your lies upon the lies to discredit Joe Wilson; your lies upon the lies upon the lies to throw the sand at the “referee” of prosecutor Fitzgerald‘s analogy, these are complex and often painful to follow and too much, perhaps, for the average citizen.
But when other citizens render a verdict against your man, Mr. Bush, and then you spit in the faces of those jurors and that judge and the judges who were yet to hear the appeal, the average citizen understands that, Sir.
It’s the fixed ballgame and the rigged casino and the prearranged lottery all rolled into one, and it stinks.
And they know it.
Nixon’s mistake, the last and most fatal of them, the firing of Archibald Cox, was enough to cost him the presidency. And in the end, even Richard Nixon could say he could not put this nation through an impeachment. It was far too late for it to matter then, but as the decades unfold, that single final gesture of nonpartisanship, of acknowledged responsibility not to self, not to party, not to “base,” but to country, echoes loudly into history.
Even Richard Nixon knew it was time to resign. Would that you could say that, Mr. Bush. And that you could say it for Mr. Cheney. You both crossed the Rubicon yesterday. Which one of you chose the route no longer matters. Which is the ventriloquist, and which the dummy, is irrelevant. But that you have twisted the machinery of government into nothing more than a tawdry machine of politics is the only fact that remains relevant.
It is nearly July Fourth, Mr. Bush, the commemoration of the moment we Americans decided that rather than live under a king who made up the laws, or erased them, or ignored them — or commuted the sentences of those rightly convicted under them — we would force our independence and regain our sacred freedoms.
We of this time — and our leaders in Congress, of both parties — must now live up to those standards which echo through our history. Pressure, negotiate, impeach: get you, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney, two men who are now perilous to our democracy, away from its helm.
And for you, Mr. Bush, and for Mr. Cheney, there is a lesser task. You need merely achieve a very low threshold indeed. Display just that iota of patriotism which Richard Nixon showed on August 9th, 1974.
Resign.
And give us someone — anyone — about whom all of us might yet be able to quote John Wayne, and say, “I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.”
Most of us have learned to simply accept the fact that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. exists in the world, just as we’ve come to accept that there are terrorists among us, as well as people who scam grandmothers out of their savings.
And then every once in a while the News Corp. will do something so rapacious, so pathetic, that one has to stand up and say no more, to call for legal and moral measures to stop it, even if all gestures prove futile.
The latest, final line crossed? In December, News Corp.’s scandal sheet, the New York Post, reported in its Page Six gossip column that an unnamed baseball Hall of Famer had been blackmailed into cooperating with a best-selling biography about him — blackmailed under threat that the unnamed woman writer would otherwise claim the Hall of Famer was gay. At the time, the blind item got almost no attention.
Now, as it turns out, Sandy Koufax, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Hall of Famer, is the subject of the only recent best-selling baseball biography written by a woman (Jane Leavy’s “Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy”). It also turns out that Koufax has quit as a special instructor for the Dodgers because the team is also owned by the News Corp.
The Post’s blind item ran Dec. 19, but it was virtually unknown among legitimate sports media outlets until news leaked out about Koufax’s resignation. And Koufax’s resignation — after 48 years as a Dodgers pitcher, minor league coach, spring instructor and unofficial pitching guru — apparently took place over a month ago. Yet it was not discovered until this week, when sportswriters arriving from Los Angeles for the Dodgers’ annual spring training in Vero Beach, Fla., asked where the Hall of Famer was. The team revealed that Koufax told Dodgers senior vice president Derrick Hall that “it does not make sense for me to promote any” of Murdoch’s companies, and that he would “feel foolish to be associated with or promote one entity if it helps another,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
Koufax has long been one of sports’ truest enigmas. After two years as a little-used “bonus baby” with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and four more as an often brilliant, often lost starting pitcher with the team, he turned, seemingly overnight, into the most dominant left-hander baseball has ever seen. He broke all extant strikeout records, threw a no-hitter every year from 1962 through 1965, and in the last six seasons of his career won 111 games and lost only 34. His retirement at the age of 31 — as abrupt as his transformation into an unhittable pitcher — only added to the legend.
The childhood friend of an extraordinary array of Brooklyn characters running the gamut from Larry King to current New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon, Koufax was married twice, the most recent union ending in divorce about five years ago. For her part, author Leavy denies both the Post’s insinuations about the blackmail and Koufax’s sexuality. In fact, what’s interesting is that so far, Koufax’s sexuality is the McGuffin in this story. The not-so-blind Post item may as well have been about his actually having been a gentile all these years (Koufax was an observant Jew who refused to pitch on Yom Kippur). The point is the News Corp.’s journalistic and ethical malfeasance, and this time around, reporters seem to get that.
It is the New York Post, of course, that published another piece of homophobic baseball gossip last spring that led the New York Mets’ Mike Piazza to feel he had to publicly announce he was not gay. Besides the Post, the News Corp. also owns Fox Television, Fox News Channel, and other companies that produce products structurally similar to “news.”
And in what is perhaps the most subtle twist of this serrated knife, the News Corp. also owns HarperCollins — the company that published the biography about Koufax in the first place.
Read the Post’s December item about the “Hall of Fame baseball hero,” then, in that context. Koufax, the Post wrote, “cooperated with a best-selling biography only because the author promised to keep it secret that he is gay. The author kept her word, but big mouths at the publishing house can’t keep from flapping.” So here’s how it worked: The same corporation that published the rumor is actually the source of the rumor. It also profited from the alleged blackmail and employed the victim.
Their book. Their tabloid. Their team. Their scandal. It is a spectacular example of synergy, working at its most efficient (when all moral, ethical and professional standards have been eliminated from the process and thus cannot gum up the works).
Finally, though, on Friday, after the news of Koufax’s principled resignation made national headlines, the News Corp. apologized — sort of. Here’s the press release.
The following will run on Page Six in tomorrow’s New York Post:
A two-sentence blind item we ran here on Dec. 19 about a “Hall of Fame baseball hero” has sparked a series of unfortunate consequences for which we are very sorry. The item said the sports hero “cooperated with a best-selling biography only because the author promised to keep secret that he is gay.” Two weeks later, the Daily News’ Michael Gross, after finding “Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy” by Jane Leavy on the bestseller list, named Koufax as the player and ran a photo of him. Koufax himself, an intensely private man, was deeply offended by our item. The author has denied making any deal with Koufax and called our item “erroneous.” We apologize to both Koufax and Leavy for getting it wrong.
Note that even the supposed “apology” tries to blame the scandal on a competitor at the Daily News. That’s typical. I worked for News Corp. — for its Fox network and one of its cable sewers, Fox Sports Net, for three years. They were swine. Many companies are swine. But the Koufax episode is something extraordinary. This is the triangulation of swine — three bullies beating up one kid called decency.
Early in 2001, as a show of good faith with the company, I signed a contract with the News Corp.’s publishers, HarperCollins, to write a sports book. Its production was tabled after the terrorist attacks. Now I will not write the book. I’m sending the money back. My reasons are ethical and practical.
Practical?
Though the advance was only five figures, I think the News Corp. can use the dough. It might let Rupert Murdoch and his employees buy their souls back.
When I was a kid, I collected baseball cards — old baseball cards. Boy, did I get a lot of funny looks.
Today, if you have a collection, whether it’s of Elvis Presley’s hair, the many typewriters of Ann Landers, or every check ever made out by Ty Cobb, and if you didn’t obtain at least part of that collection via auction, there would appear to be something wrong with you.
We’ve become eBay Nation.
The process by which collecting something outside the mainstream (art, stamps and coins) went from being a dirty secret to an interesting quirk took ages. The next step, to pervasive hobby, went faster than the average eBay auction — and obviously it’s primarily because of the Internet. Today, not only can you buy the kitsch of the world from the comfort of your laptop, but, perhaps more important, you don’t have to ask anybody for it. If you’re hopelessly addicted to memorabilia from the Schwebebahn — the monorail suspended above the river in Wuppertal, Germany — you no longer have to admit this to anybody but the guy from whom you’re buying its commemorative ashtray.
EBay and its rivals have brought not just the collections, but also the collectors, out of the closet. Thirty years ago I was one of literally half a dozen kids involved in the definitely grimy card-collecting game. Devotees met almost in secret until the advent of twice-annual “conventions” in the basement of a New York union hall beginning in 1973. The scene — table after table stacked with old cards, books, photos and occasionally equipment; buyers and sellers, nearly all of them wizened adults, spending literally tens of dollars on this junk — never failed to bring out gawkers. At least one local television news crew attended each of the first eight or nine shows, at which point the novelty, and the suspicion that we were all nuts, began to fade.
The extraordinary appreciation of the value of sports stuff no doubt hastened the newfound respectability of collecting anything and everything. Only within the last decade or so — more or less since the Jackie Onassis auction — have the quirkier fields burst into prominence. This transmogrification almost parallels the journey of the Montgomery, Ala., city bus that Rosa Parks boarded in 1955 on her way to history. The vehicle remained in service for a time, then sat unused in a garage, and was finally junked. Last year, a company called MastroNet, which runs Web and phone sports and “Americana” auctions almost monthly, sold the bus — complete with its “Cleveland Ave.” destination sign — for a mind-boggling $492,000.
The political auction has taken off, too, to the point that one almost expects to see influence being sold not in smoke-filled rooms, but being offered, with a money-back guarantee, on the Web. Two unused tickets to the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson in 1868 have been sold in the last six weeks alone. The first fetched nearly $5,000. A campaign pin from the woefully underfunded 1920 Democratic presidential ticket of James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt sold for $27,000. Over the years, a series of copies of the note by which Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon — authentically signed by Ford for an undisclosed fee — have been sold for several thousand apiece. One of the actual Broward County, Fla., voting machines that helped make the 2000 election linger so long in everyone’s consciousness has been put up for bid. “This fascinating item,” the catalog breathlessly reads, “is the perfect keepsake from the ‘electile dysfunction’ of 2000, ideal as a conversation piece …”
And, of course, there’s Abraham Lincoln’s hair.
Strands of the martyred president’s mane have appeared in several auctions, accompanied by labyrinthine explanations as to their legitimacy, and muddy photocopies of 19th century newspapers explaining the veritable hedge-clipping that must have gone on in the sad little boardinghouse across from Ford’s Theatre the night Lincoln died. The oddest part of this is not the ghoulishness it seems to represent (saving the hair of a loved one or prominent figure was, 150 years ago, considered a compliment to the manufacturer), but that there is every reason to believe that it really is Abe’s hair. Somewhere deep inside each bidder — and I confess to having been one of them — is one simple thought: cloning.
More prosaically, a hunka-hunka Elvis Presley’s hair sold at auction last month. The explanation of provenance was even more complicated than the ones accompanying Lincoln’s locks. The 3-inch-wide hairball had been shorn by the King’s own barber, then turned over to one of the earliest of the Elvis disciples, who had for a time in the ’70s operated a souvenir shop across the street from Graceland. This was what was left of his stock, vacuum-sealed in an apothecary jar and looking very much like all that was left of a victim of the proverbial explosion at the goiter clinic. Somebody paid $115,000 for it. Again, if cloning wasn’t the idea, what was? Very small toupees for balding Elvis impersonators? Celebrity merkins?
It’s odd, considering that sports memorabilia was the seminal point for all this buying and selling, that when his former girlfriend Greer Johnson attempted to auction off locks of Mickey Mantle’s hair, only then did somebody step in. The Mantle family, their lawyers straining at the leash, convinced Ms. Johnson and the auction house to withdraw the item on a pretext long since seemingly eliminated from the equation: good taste.
The mainstream auction houses have gotten into the act. Christie’s sold 312 lots of NASA and Soviet Space Program items in 1999, much of them obtained directly from the astronauts or their families, ranging from the infamous dimes Gus Grissom sneaked onboard Mercury 4, to the NASA patch from Jim Irwin’s suit from Apollo 15, complete with a few smudges that just happened to be moon dust. Next month, Sotheby’s offers a series of Harry Potter lots, including a 93-word preview of the next book by author J.K. Rowling. Bidding between Potter aficionados and British tabloids is expected to goose the price past $10,000. And last month, Butterfield’s of San Francisco sold $250,000 worth of the cream of the knickknacks of the late Eppie Lederer, including an IBM Selectric typewriter on which she wrote her advice columns, for $400. A second Landers-used model went for $200 to Seattle Stranger editor Dan Savage who also writes — what else? — an advice column.
Still, there are not enough marquee items to explain a craze, nor feed its participants’ hunger. There must be a market for tapes of long-forgotten TV series like “Name of the Game,” or a toothpick found in the jacket of baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver, or gum discarded by various athletes, to keep all this going.
And to become part of American culture, the auction process must become an arena for protest. Just this week, the members of the varsity swimming teams at Dartmouth were informed that their programs would be eliminated after this season as part of a budgetary cutback at the Ivy League school. How did they lash back, and seek to publicize the lashing? They posted themselves on eBay – offering a corporate sponsorship and just happening to mention how odd it seemed that an institution of higher learning with an endowment of about two billion dollars needed to save 0.02 percent of that by dropping swimming. A minimum bid of $211,000 (and it hasnt happened yet) would get you all the Dartmouth swimmers you could ever want – just add water.
And the final evidence of the growing auction mania is the appearance of the hoards. When one toothpick shows up, it’s a collector’s item. When a thousand do, it’s a seller’s market. The next MastroNet auction features a collection of 103 different canceled checks made out by baseball immortal Ty Cobb, and given a minimum bid of $20,000. That there was a Ty Cobb collector, or investor, who wanted, or needed, to have 103 checks in the hand of baseball’s dark prince, should be no surprise.
That another lot in the same auction offers a collection of 100 different canceled checks made out by Sal Maglie — best remembered, if at all, for being the losing pitcher in the Don Larsen perfect game in the 1956 World Series — should testify to just how far the auction madness has really gone.
This story has been corrected.
A long, long time ago, one of my bosses at ESPN told me that during times of contention, I always showed too much backbone.
Well, he was damned right.
A whining sacroiliac sent me to the chiropractor’s last week and the X-rays proved my old boss literally correct. I am part of that hidden minority, the spinal mutants, who have six lumbar vertebrae instead of the customary five. I do have too much backbone.
This was the final sign that it was time to do something that for months has been crystallizing out of the gauzy haze of the unconsciousness that surrounds us all: I need to apologize to ESPN.
This began to become evident weeks ago when the deputy mayor of Indianapolis attacked Chris Mortensen, one of my reportorial role models. I once watched Mort protect a source who not only publicly denied what he’d told Mort in private but also questioned his ethics. Just this month, Mort went on the air and criticized the thoroughness of his own reporting on a story. Mortensen is the gold standard, and this hack politician slashed him and said ESPN was “a sports channel first and a news organization fifth.” I was amazed to find my hackles rising and myself rushing to defend my old employers on my radio sportscast.
It all became remarkably clear after that. This isn’t about my skeletal freakiness, or Chris Mortensen, or even, particularly, the primary area of wounded feelings for my former bosses and colleagues, Mike Freeman’s book about the network. This isn’t even about specific events or people, although nearly everybody at ESPN merits an apology from me, and I give it willingly and with great sadness, but with some hope that it will explain if not erase my actions, and might even be of some inspiration to any who might be afflicted in the same curious way I’ve come to learn I am.
This is about not knowing why you do things — literally, not knowing for years and years — and then suddenly beginning to scratch the surface of understanding. That earlier imagery about the gauzy haze is almost factually precise: It feels as if I’ve been coming out of a huge fog bank.
Enough preamble. After five and a half years there, I left ESPN at the end of June 1997. My decision inspired a lot of head-scratching, everything from graffiti on a wall in a syndicated comic strip, to shouts of “traitor” from a viewer at a World Series game. There have been a lot of explanations conjectured, by myself and others, but heretofore I have never definitively stated why I left — in large part because until recently, I didn’t really know. In point of fact, I couldn’t handle the pressure of working in daily long-form television, and what was worse, I didn’t know I couldn’t handle it.
Not the broadcasts themselves, mind you — I’ve rarely had as much fun in life as I used to during those hours on the air with Dan Patrick. I’m talking about an inability to digest all that led up to those hours, about which I had no clue at all. And unless somebody at ESPN had the insight to look for a big-picture pattern, nobody else had any clue at all. I think some executives, most notably John Walsh, had a sense that something was wrong. But whatever any of them said about “insecurity” or “perfectionism,” I know I just took it as an attack and stiffened my extra-long spine.
On top of everything else about it that can destabilize the soul, television is fraught with a million commonplace things that can go wrong. A surprisingly large number of things can go wrong even when everybody involved is giving their all. It’s the nature of a medium so complex it would’ve made Rube Goldberg blanch.
But I didn’t see it that way.
I have lived much of my life assuming much of the responsibility around me and developing a dread of being blamed for things going wrong. Moreover, deep down inside I’ve always believed that everybody around me was qualified and competent, and I wasn’t, and that some day I’d be found out. If you think that way, when somebody messes up, you can’t imagine that it just “happened.” Since they’re so much better than you are, how could they not complete a task successfully? They have to be not trying hard enough — and when they don’t try and the show goes to hell, who gets blamed? You do.
In other words, you start thinking like George Steinbrenner, circa 1977.
Mix that in to the very public nature of the field, and especially the high-profile nature of a job like hosting “SportsCenter,” and you have a combustible combination.
The results can probably be summarized by this conversation I recall from the weeks after the infamous launch of ESPN2 in 1993. After three hours of live shots failing, news breaking, entire 20-minute segments of the show being swapped during commercial breaks, tapes physically falling apart, and production assistants wiping out as they ran through the snow to try to get us information, the producers, my co-host Suzy Kolber and I somehow managed to cover Michael Jordan’s first retirement professionally and entertainingly.
Afterwards, the coordinating producer, Norby Williamson, greeted us like the survivors of a World War I foxhole at Ypres. “Great job. Great show,” he said.
“The hell it was,” I said.
Wrong answer.
You suspend — no, let’s be exact about this, I suspended — the whole human part of the equation. It never occurred to me that most of the problems were the result of mere events. Even the chaos that surrounded the entire launch of the experimental show “SportsNight” was merely the inevitable result of the fact that it was experimental.
And it never, ever occurred to me that if it failed, I wouldn’t be found out, fired, banished, finished.
The oddest thing about all this, is that even when I left — and in six weeks I will have been gone longer than I was there — executives like Walsh and Howard Katz underscored that I was welcome to return at some distant future date, despite all the Sturm und Drang. And, man, I was usually producing both the Sturm and the Drang. Months later, Katz even approached me about contributing to ESPN Classic, shortly after the company had bought that network.
Of course, I could not know that the major bone of contention, the veritable sixth lumbar vertebra of contention, still awaited: Freeman’s book. I should herein point out that none of this should reflect on Mike: He did an exhaustively thorough job, and more to this point, he didn’t misquote me, not once, nor did he use anything I said out of context. Nor did he cajole or sweet-talk me into discussing topics I didn’t want to discuss. Also, this isn’t some kind of loudspeaker confession from George Orwell’s “1984.” I’m not going to renounce most of my criticisms of the place. I did not consort with Goldstein. I don’t think I was wrong on the issues — I think my methodology was wrong. Outstandingly wrong.
My answers to Freeman constituted the ultimate act of somebody who lived in terror of being blamed. After I left for NBC in 1997, I was unprepared for a question I would literally hear daily — on the street, at events, even on the air on MSNBC: “Why’d you leave ‘SportsCenter’?” If you make a decision in your life, even one as eminently logical and self-improving as “Why’d you start washing your hair every day?” and you start getting questioned hourly about it, you’re going to start second-guessing yourself. I eventually got up to about my millionth guess.
So. The logic was impeccable. To answer that question, I couldn’t take the blame (responsibility) for the disaster (career growth) about which I was being persecuted (sympathetically asked about). Why did I leave “SportsCenter”? Obviously, because it was a medieval torture chamber (fairly typical television workplace providing a high level of ego gratification and creative freedom).
There’s a lot in Freeman’s book that I regret. I won’t inundate you with details, but a few require specificity. Referring to ESPN’s executives, I told Freeman that “other than Steve Anderson, I don’t think any of them are any good.” Well, that was ridiculous then and it is ridiculous now. Without even judging how good they were, just to keep a monolith like ESPN on the air every day requires as many good executives as they have at NORAD.
As suggested earlier, I don’t regret my stances on the work environment there, but to say that some actions management took were merely “covering their ass legally” was to subtract the humanity from the equation. It never dawned on me that some of these guys had been thrown in at the deep end of the pool, or would have to expose, prosecute and fire friends and colleagues who themselves had done things that until a decade before had been standard operating procedure at every corporation in America.
I now read with horror of my ESPN2 co-host, Ms. Kolber, sequestering herself in the women’s bathroom and weeping over how I treated her. She told Freeman that as things deteriorated, I wouldn’t talk to her. She’s wrong: I couldn’t talk to her. I pumped up some small-scale complaints into a scenario in which she was at fault for everything ESPN2 hadn’t become. I wasn’t completely obtuse back then, and if anything would have cut through my neuroses, it would’ve been a colleague’s tears. If I had known, I think I could’ve jumped over the fence I’d built around myself and said what the inner guy always knew: No TV show is worth crying over. Suzy: I’m sorry.
There are lots of little gratuitous shots in there that also reflect an insensibility to parts of reality. I get queasy at all of them, but one stands out as representative. Freeman accurately quotes me as complaining about how a labor-intensive participatory field piece I did in 1996 about what the first-base coach does and says during a game, got little airtime. A year later, ESPN ran a similar piece in which the coaches of the Anaheim Angels wore microphones. I complained to the relevant coordinating producer, Jeff Schneider, and he replied that the new ESPN-Disney-Angels connection explained why one piece ran and the other didn’t. It is almost certain that Schneider was joking, or tweaking me, or, most probably, protecting me from a fact I could never have admitted to myself or have survived hearing from him or anybody else: My coaching piece just wasn’t that good.
Several ESPN folks suggested to Freeman that I was trying deliberately to violate the rules — appearing on other networks and writing for publications without notifying them just to tweak management. That was almost right on the money. But it wasn’t as simple as merely trying to annoy ESPN or John Walsh or whoever else. It was me trying to give myself an excuse to get out from under the pressure of working in an environment of my own creation in which I daily expected the blame ax to fall. It was prepackaged sour grapes.
Oddly, I did figure some of this out then, which is why, even after we’d finalized my departure I went back and proposed to them that I do one show a week. That really was instinct cutting through all of these neuroses. That was, should’ve been, and remains my ideal TV schedule: one or two days a week, and the other five or six to remember that I’m not going to be blamed for everything by anybody — even myself.
So, I’m sorry. It should have been done differently. It wasn’t. Then again, I’m only finding out now about that extra vertebra and the extra steps I have to take to learn how to be, well, flexible.
Historians covet the small picture.
Nothing, generation after generation of them have concluded, brings alive a great moment of the past, or helps the reader to understand its context, better than an irony or twist in its minutia.
Who writes about the First World War without mentioning the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand? And who writes about Ferdinand without mentioning that his chauffeur hung a right at the wrong intersection and had to pull to a stop directly in front of the place where Serbian terrorist Gavrilo Princip was standing?
What story of the Civil War is complete without the journey of Wilmer McLean? He was a Virginia farmer who had a house near Manassas Junction, Va. After the first major battle of the war was fought along the banks of the stream that McLean’s home overlooked — Bull Run Creek — Wilmer moved his family far away, for safety’s sake. He picked a place called Appomattox Court House. Grant and Lee would use his new home for the signing of the armistice four years later.
Edmund Morris opened his first book on Theodore Roosevelt not with his subject’s first day as president, nor the occasion of his charge up Kettle Hill in Cuba, but rather on Jan. 1, 1907, as T.R. shook hands with hundreds of ordinary citizens as part of the “open house” tradition of New Year’s Day at the White House.
And perhaps, in some future day, when historians are looking for that little extra spice to explain the curious and tragic early years of the 21st century, they will add to the roster of Gavrilo Princip, and Ferdinand’s driver, and Wilmer McLean, and the anonymous recipients of Roosevelt’s handshakes, the names of Nick Zahab and Nader Zehtab. If anybody can help you paint the small picture of the years 2001 and 2002, it’ll be these innocent bystanders.
Fourteen months after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the CIA, FBI, and Defense Department readily admit to a continuing shortage of employees who speak the languages of the Middle East — particularly Arabic, Dari, Farsi, and Pashto. There has been no acknowledged successful recruitment of bilingual would-be opponents of the Evildoers. You’d think there’d have been some kind of Dick Cheney Memorial Scholarship in place by now. But we don’t know of any night school at Arlington or Langley teaching staffers how to read these languages.
That this collective bureaucratic shrug of incomprehension should have existed on Sept. 10, 2001, is tragic in a way that requires no words to explain. That it should still exist 14 months later is farcical in a way that may require those future historians to explain.
Which is where Nick Zahab and Nader Zehtab come in.
They speak Farsi. They not only speak it, but they also speak both it and English well enough to translate fast-paced events from one language to the other, in an otherwise almost exclusively English-speaking environment, amid the raucous voices of literally thousands of Americans, under the pressures of deadlines and general public excitement.
Zahab and Zehtab would seem to be exactly the kind of guys who should be recruited personally by Tom Ridge, the director of Homeland Security, wherever he is these days. But the two men are very busy in Los Angeles, and anyway, they probably wouldn’t be available before June. Unless Shaquille O’Neal’s toe is much worse than everybody’s saying.
Nick Zahab and Nader Zehtab are the radio announcers for the Los Angeles Lakers’ basketball broadcasts — in Farsi. Over Southern California station KIRN, they have expanded the reach of what for three years has been an all-Farsi broadcast by this season bringing the exploits of O’Neal, Kobe Bryant and Phil Jackson to those who call themselves members of the Persian community of Los Angeles.
There will be, to our now proverbial future historians, something faintly naïve and endearing about the fact that the country couldn’t summon enough people to understand the languages of those who wished to destroy it, but that at least there were a couple of guys to translate “slam dunk” into Farsi in Los Angeles.
Contained in this — and no offense is meant to Mr. Zahab or Mr. Zehtab, nor is their loyalty questioned; hell, I’d rather announce the Lakers games than work for Don Rumsfeld, too — is a kernel of that corny old American pursuit-of-happiness thing. Our perceived security crisis must compete with our desire to hear hoops on the radio.
And there will be, decades ahead, that familiar nostalgic glow provided by such a milestone in the continuing cultural assimilation of the nearly 100 percent of immigrants who, whether they intend to or not, wind up as American as Dennis Rodman — often through the seemingly unimportant passageway of sports or music or media.
On the other hand, as our successors contemplate the Bush Doctrine and our time’s bid for empire, as they try to reconstruct our thoughts not about the worst-case scenario but about the best one, they will wonder how in the hell we thought we were going to try to pacify Afghanistan, rebuild Iraq, shape up Saudi Arabia, dismantle al-Qaida, and neutralize worldwide hatred of America when the smart guys who happen to speak one of the other side’s languages are otherwise occupied because the Houston Rockets were in Los Angeles one night and they had to translate an interview with the imported center, Yao Ming, from Chinese to English to Farsi.
