He’s an odd interview subject. He’s probably as slick as ever, and he’s obviously a top all-time player who should be given respect for his playing career, but how does someone do a legitimate interview with him without being openly disrespectful when asking about everything else?
“How do you feel about being considered the worst executive of all time?”
“Did you try to kill yourself?”
“If so, did you try to kill yourself because of how much basketball fans made fun of you?”
It’s either a fluff interview with no relevance or it’s awkward– either way, maybe you shouldn’t listen either.
A fan’s podcast, like the DOC or Basketball Jones, has a certain innocence to it if only because we are all doing it for free, on our own time, and the subject matter is one we really care about. I once heard George Carlin say that he hated performing in Las Vegas because the audience was not 100% there to see George Carlin, something he could take for granted in every other city. There is a similar difference between sports radio and podcasts. Nobody should be listening to a podcast more than once by accident. The tough thing about many sports radio shows is that collective habit and inertia can take over, letting a story come along and overshadow everything else. . . even if both the host and the listeners are sick of it. There’s something very negative about the whole experience when nobody involved seems to be having any fun. That should happen on NPR after a natural disaster or Bloomberg Radio on a bad day for the economy, where they would be irresponsible to look away, but isn’t sports the thing we all go for an escape?
Why should we let A-Rod muck our escape?
It really is a shame when sports radio gets caught in a rut, because when done properly it is intimate, familiar, and a great way to relax.
Brett Favre and his antics have always been the kind of story that brings sports radio to a complete halt. Terrell Owens, too. And Barry Bonds. If one of these guys does something, anything, then Jim Rome or Dan Patrick beat it into the ground for an entire week. Every caller has to rehash an already expressed opinion. Every guest has to summarize the reactionary and over-simplified column that they wrote about the annoying subject in that morning’s paper. It becomes like medicine that everybody has to take, as if there is no free will involved. The host will often editorialize that he wants that story to go away, as if it is the listener’s fault. Even good local shows do that. WMVP in Chicago , a normally OUTSTANDING station and an ESPN affiliate, stops everything when Brian Urlacher misspeaks—which happens often because Urlacher can’t actually talk good. In New York Alex Rodriguez has been that type of story since he was traded to the Yankees in 2004. And even if you are a Yankee fan who loves constant Yankee talk . . . well, there are other players on the team, right?
