HOW DOES GAMBLING TAINT MEDIA? LOOK NO FURTHER THAN DAN LE BATARD

Before he was a cartoon character who sold out to betting and DraftKings, I remember the Miami personality as a gifted journalist who could have been one of the best sportswriters of his generation

     The stinkbomb of legalized sports gambling finally is contaminating Congress. Letters were written to commissioners and presidents of 12 pro leagues and the NCAA, with NFL boss Roger Goodell asked to address “suspicious sports betting activity” that isn’t suspicious — it’s as real and filthy as a $500,000 debt. We’re heading toward fixing scandals, of course, in a careless culture that makes it too easy for problem gamblers to lose everything and young fools to go awry.

     Think Dan Le Batard will address any of this corruption on his show, live from the Elser Hotel & Residences in Miami?

     Not as long as a betting company, DraftKings, is paying him in a lucrative content distribution deal.

     Many years ago, when an editor in Chicago was searching for young writing talent, I told him about a guy whose game story I’d just read in Miami. “Check out someone named Dan Le Batard,” I told him. As time passed, Le Batard proved me right. He became a columnist at the Herald, his own man, and his stuff was potent. I remember a piece he did with Alex Rodriguez, who was trying to find himself in the world. Later, when my job travels brought me to South Beach, I’d occasionally see him at the Clevelander outdoor bar and we’d have beers with other writers.

     He was cool.

     Until TV.

     That’s when Le Batard forgot who he was — a great American sportswriter — and morphed into a cartoon character. Just as ESPN tried to turn me into something I wasn’t, subjecting me to a mute button on a debate show called “Around The Horn,” the network turned him into a goof-off. He hosted a silly afternoon show with his father, which might have been cute if it didn’t further distance Le Batard from what he once did best: journalism. He liked to say we didn’t “get the show,” but we did: In the process of mocking sports radio, he was bastardizing himself. He was promoted and protected internally by his ESPN champion, president John Skipper, who loved using the program to promote diversity in the ranks via other contributors, which was fine.

     Until Skipper was extorted by a cocaine dealer and lost his job.

     And Le Batard cried on the air.

     “I know I look it and I sound like a fool right now, but I want you to understand something — and I don’t know what is coming, I haven’t talked to him, so I don’t know how he is doing, and I care about him,” he said that day on his radio show. “But just so that you understand, this person has created everything that exists here at ESPN for us. He did it because of how he cares about minorities and their causes. So every success that we’ve had — I didn’t want to work for ESPN, I wanted to work for this man.”

     From that point on, Le Batard and his brigade of on-air friends declared war on the company. Jimmy Pitaro replaced Skipper, but Le Batard wanted no part of any regime without his friend. He parted ways with ESPN — and cried again on the air. Soon enough, he and Skipper were forming their own company, Meadowlark Media, and before you knew it, Dan The Ex-Journalist was selling out to DraftKings. His multi-year podcast deal reportedly is for tens of millions, but people in that racket lie about amounts. Point being, the spectacular writer I’d spotted decades earlier now is taking checks from scumballs who could become ensnared in wrongdoing.

     “People don’t understand,” Dan said.

     Sure, we do. You took dirty money. If Saudi Arabia and Qatar are guilty of sportswashing, Le Batard and Skipper are practicing ESPN-washing. The show tries to appeal to a bro-dude wagering crowd. His trusty sidekick, Stugotz, is still beside him. Stugotz’s real name is Jon Weiner, and for a brief moment, I mistook him for another Miami radio type, Len Weiner, a guy I worked for in Chicago sports radio. Len had me meet him at an Arby’s in the Loop one day, demanding I sign a document that I wouldn’t criticize the White Sox or Bulls, Jerry Reinsdorf’s teams, which had rights deals on the station. When I refused, I was fired at 8 a.m. the day after Christmas, though my ratings were clobbering the city’s rival sports station and I was owed a sizable incentives check.

     Chicago came up the other day on Le Batard’s interview show, “South Beach Sessions.” His guest was Michael Wilbon, who told the story of how he almost left the Washington Post and took the job of his South Side childhood dreams, as lead columnist at the Tribune. This would have changed the face of recent ESPN history, removing him from the “Pardon The Interruption” studio where he and Tony Kornheiser have spent afternoons for almost 22 years. I called him during his Tribune courtship and suggested we do a TV show in Chicago, but I didn’t have the sway of a certain Michael Jordan, who told him to stay on the East Coast. Good call. I’m sure Wilbon and I would have ruled his hometown — and I was privileged to provide eight years of lead-in ratings for “PTI” on “ATH” — and he made a point of telling Le Batard that we got along quite well.

     Oddly, Dan didn’t want to hear that. No way Wilbon ever would get along with a rogue like me, he said, saying I’d have been a worse teammate than Skip Bayless, a notorious TV host. WTF? Where does Dan The Ex-Journalist get his information, from trashy websites? The very programmer who turned him loose at ESPN, Erik Rydholm, once described my interactions with the “ATH” staff as “great.” Gee, is this is where I tell stories about Le Batard screaming at editors in the Herald newsroom? Welcome to show business, kids, the land of phonies. It’s worthy of laughter, but just the same, something deeper was going on here.

     I understand how awful Bayless is on the air; I’ve chronicled his long trail of insensitivity at Fox Sports 1. But it’s amnestic and hypocritical of Le Batard to elevate himself above other TV talkers in a bizarre recent morality play. Beyond Wilbon, all of these folks are guilty of schlocky entertainment that is watched by far fewer numbers than they think. It didn’t stop Le Batard from having another ESPN host, Stephen A. Smith, on his podcast and scolding him in the same breath as Bayless.

     “I hate what you two have done to sports TV,” he said.

     This from the man who put his father on the air every day.

     And took money from DraftKings.

     I see Le Batard is on Substack. Hopefully, he writes instead of bloviating for millennials and shilling for touts. Sports journalism needs him back.

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     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.