FANBOYS ARE WRECKING THE SPORTS MEDIA, SO JOIN ME IN TRYING TO STOP THEM
Sports should be covered with adversarial guidelines to protect consumers who spend too much money, yet everyone is softening up from the Washington Post to Jim Nantz to columnists who hate the devil
If you wonder why a daily newspaper once sold 340,000 copies — and now has a zero removed at, say, 34,000 — one sad reason is a lack of bite. Sports sections that used to growl now chirp like pussy cats. Ben Johnson has been hired by the Chicago Bears with no head-coaching record on his resume, which means he is 0-0 in real life.
Maybe he succeeds. Maybe he fails. Yet I saw a columnist who listed a “coronation” of local and national praise for Johnson. He ended his Sunday piece with a comment: “The devil is an ass. And let’s hope that finally, for a while, upon Johnson’s grand arrival and seemingly ubiquitous approval, that devil stays the hell outta Chicago.”
The devil? I looked outside at a heavy rainstorm in Los Angeles, which might bring a risk of mudslides after the wildfires, and thought for a brief moment. Was the columnist talking about … me? Am I the devil? Must I stay the hell out of Chicago? The papers and radio stations have some locals who cheer and cry in a puberty mode. What if I returned and fired cruelties inside America’s ugliest sports town? What else would you call a place with a 121-loss baseball team, a 5-12 football team, the second-worst team in hockey, a crumbling NBA team and a Cubs team that can’t compete with the Dodgers, Mets and Yankees, according to the owner?
Oh, readership certainly would rebound. The website would explode. Legitimate sports followers, in a metropolis with nine million of them, don’t want goofs in the media. Yet my biggest concern about a dying craft concerns a proliferation of fanboys. They don’t care about owners who should be held more accountable about integrity — whether they want to win, given the massive mega-billions within the racket and gamblers tapping games. They don’t care about breaking stories, such as whether owner Jerry Reinsdorf will sell the White Sox. They don’t care about consumers, though they are the loudest version.
They exist as housemen and supporters. They are not journalists or newspersons. They don’t lash with flames. They think they’re responsible for a city’s “feel-good quotient’’ when they’re only around to make sound judgments. And when a team wins? The Washington Post, a paper I idolized after Watergate, saluted the NFL’s Commanders with burgundy on its building spires. This is an operation that brought down Richard Nixon and published the Pentagon Papers. In sports, the Post pummeled Daniel Snyder’s reign of terror and ushered a new era for the old Redskins, led by managing partner Josh Harris. Now, Post bosses were celebrating a berth in the NFC championship game and wanted to post “RAISE HAIL” banners in gold/burgundy if the Commanders won. It’s a tumultuous time at the paper, with many writers and cartoonists resigning as owner Jeff Bezos is viewed as “ingratiating” himself with President Trump.
Suddenly, they want to openly grandstand for teams? “Should news organizations be fanboys?” asked media writer Paul Farhi, who worked 35 years for the Post.
The rest of us are here not as fans or boys. We write nice columns and harsh columns and cover sports in usual news cycles. Fanboys create stupid hope and unleash absurd sorrow and should be nowhere near a keyboard or a microphone. I’ve often had editors call me out — two were White Sox fans who asked me to ease up, and others were friends of a Canadian baseball executive who liked Reinsdorf. One asked if I knew anything about sports business in wondering why the Sox, in the country’s No. 3 market, had baseball’s 17th-ranked payroll. Turns out they didn’t care after Reinsdorf refused to buy a table at a charity dinner, before he became the biggest single-season loser in U.S. sports history. I was fired from a Chicago radio show, despite having excellent ratings, because I didn’t cooperate with a management demand to not knock the Sox or Bulls. On ESPN’s “Around The Horn,” I was blown out when seen as overly jarring, such as when I cracked a league commissioner — or asked whether host Tony Reali looked like a Jonas Brother.
Why? No one tells the City Hall writer to shut up. No one tells the White House person. No one tells the movie critic or food reporter. Only in sports are we treated as, well, toy department workers. We’re back to that silliness? Why? Too much money in the trade? Too many editors and program people in bed with sports executives who wield influence?
When in doubt, media bosses hire fanboys. Ever watch Scott Van Pelt mush it down? Never mind if the hardest task we attempt, as serious columnists and commentators, is drubbing someone. When Jerry Krause’s wife sobbed about Bulls fans booing her late husband, I wonder if she also was talking about me in the paper. We owe it to fans who spend money and time, and we must criticize important people when necessary. We owe it to consumers when an owner sucks and should be driven out of town. You think it’s easy on my soul to make those claims?
So the fanboy just shows up and makes his money with an empty gun. Credit goes to Sam Mellinger, a Kansas City Star columnist who decided to abandon the business for a public-relations position with the Royals — as vice president of communications. More fanboys should do the same and leave sports journalism to the rest of us. It’s difficult for some when they notice Jim Nantz, a golden voice in broadcasting, acknowledge he has close friendships with Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, Tom Brady and Peyton Manning and their families.
“There might be some people who say, ‘Isn’t that blurring the lines? How does that work?’ ” Nantz told the Los Angeles Times. “But sometimes you can’t help it. Life takes its course.”
Life takes its course when the NFL is blurred by scandals, which Nantz knows about yet never will touch. He makes his fortune and avoids Roger Goodell and the golf bosses, who have problems with the PGA Tour and LIV. Jim Nantz is a fanboy. Gee whiz.
In Chicago, a writer suggested Ozzie Guillen should be next on the White Sox’s stadium statue list. This was a manager who was fired in part because his sons went online to mock his boss, Ken Williams. He later was dismissed by the Miami Marlins, based in Little Havana, because he praised Fidel Castro. He once called me a “f—ing fag.”
We’re memorializing Guillen for being a creep?
Fanboyism kills sports media.
Can I kill the fanboys?
###
Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.