MARLY RIVERA WANTED AN INTERVIEW — SHE LOST HER COOL AND HER JOB
The sports media racket is filled with backstabbers, but when the now-former ESPN baseball reporter snapped and slurred an interloping rival, she gave a layoffs-minded company a reason to fire her
There are prison workyards more civilized than press boxes. Think about it: You’re cooped up in a designated space, sometimes hermetically sealed, with desperate people of varying agendas and allegiances in a cutthroat business of layoffs and management frauds. I always tried to stay to myself, focusing on my column, realizing hundreds of thousands of readers paid for the newspaper at the time and deserved my undivided attention.
Sometimes, trouble found me anyway.
“Cancer!” a so-called teammate chanted suddenly, from a couple of seats away at Chicago’s Soldier Field, as my immediate family was dealing with the disease. Another writer shushed him. Stunned, and embarrassed for him, I said nothing.
When I went in to tell the Sun-Times’ editor-in-chief, I was yelled at.
In the media racket, you’re supposed to deal with crap and carry on.
Marly Rivera, unfortunately, did not. When the ESPN baseball reporter thought a freelance TV reporter was angling for an interview with Aaron Judge last week, by the batting cage at Yankee Stadium, Rivera fumed because she thought she’d been promised imminent private time with the superstar. Rather than seek out a team media-relations person, she screamed at Ivon Gaete in Spanish, then and there, as Judge signed autographs for young fans. If she noticed the nearby cameras capturing her rant, she didn’t seem to care in mid-rage, as Gaete responded to her.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you speak English now,” Rivera told Gaete in a derisive tone, before committing a fireable verbal offense within earshot of Judge and the kids.
“What a f—ing c—,” she said.
Her company, which is owned by Disney and still likes to view itself in fairy-tale terms, is undergoing layoffs that will trim 7,000 jobs from the payroll. Here was a convenient reason to reduce the headcount by one. Shouldn’t Rivera have been suspended, not fired? Wasn’t she upset in the context of trying to secure a Judge interview — a scoop, perhaps — for her network? I could cite numerous people who’ve remained on ESPN’s airwaves after similar, or uglier, misconduct in work situations. Was she a victim of a job-trimming culture?
More to the point, ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro has close ties with Major League Baseball based on a long-term media partnership — and, it should be mentioned, his love of the sport and the Yankees, including Judge. Gaete’s husband is John Blundell, an MLB vice president of communications. In any dispute over who was right or wrong by the batting cage, or whether Gaete was committing her own sin by undercutting Rivera’s prearranged Judge interview, it was clear who would win this fight. Once MLB began an investigation into Rivera’s work habits and professional comportment, the smear campaign was underway — legitimate or otherwise. ESPN never should accept results from a probe of an employee conducted by a sports league, which must be separated journalistically by the network regardless of a standing business relationship. Sure enough, Pitaro and his lieutenants used the information to fire Rivera, while the network’s human resources division looked into the matter for two-way corroboration.
This is how people sometimes are purged in sports media. A network that has forgotten about newsgathering and investigative journalism uses a bedfellow — a league it should be covering, not colluding with — to do its in-house dirty work. How about applying such energy to how many baseball sluggers are using performance-enhancing drugs?
I won’t join those in a sleazy business, filled with oily politicians, who are dismissing Rivera as a bad person today. They don’t know her well enough, nor do I. Was she stressed out by the ongoing layoffs? Was she picked on by packs of local reporters who, in certain settings, derive strength from cooperative numbers at ballparks, instead of competing fiercely against each other? Should we wholly believe unnamed reporters who told horror stories about Rivera to the Washington Post? I’m impressed she held her ground for a Judge interview. If Gaete indeed was cutting in — and taking advantage of her husband’s position — well, put it this way: I’ve seen reporters in similar situations, most of whom were male, respond more angrily than Rivera. And they weren’t fired. In some cases, they were praised.
“There were extenuating circumstances, but that is not an excuse,” Rivera told the Post’s Ben Strauss. “I believe these are mischaracterizations of who I am. Disagreements between media members are part of the nature of our business and happen on a regular basis, yet I am being singled out.”
Where she blew it, in what might be a fatal career flaw, was putting herself in position to be ousted by two unified corporate behemoths. That’s where Rivera cannot be defended, with children in the equation. God knows how many times I’ve had to keep my cool in such moments.
Let’s return to the aforementioned Chicago teammate. Years before, he approached me at halftime of a Bulls game and wanted to go outside — to fight, presumably. I began to wonder if the guy was having issues following a football career, so I tried to be empathetic, especially when I heard he’d gotten rough during a pickup basketball game. The weirdness didn’t subside. Some time later, he sought me out in a locker room at my suburban health club and berated me. That night, an item appeared on a rogue website that I’d just been spotted in the sauna at the club; one of the guy’s kids was known to comment about me on social media. When I went in to tell the same editor-in-chief, which came after the same so-called teammate had ripped me on a local TV program, there finally was a reprimand: I was told they weren’t sending him to the Beijing Olympics with me, a good thing, or he might have dumb-assed his way into landing us both in a Chinese penal camp.
When I finally ditched the Sun-Times, rightfully convinced it was too corrupt and turbulent to survive as a serious operation, the same editor-in-chief led an unhinged front-page trashing of me. His counterpart at the Tribune, meeting me for a drink at a hotel bar, suggested I sue the paper. Nah.
In the media racket, you’re supposed to deal with crap and carry on.
A Tribune reporter, who later sold out and joined a grimy gambling site, would try to goad me in the Wrigley Field press box. I ignored him … until the day he wrote, inaccurately, that I’d objected to website comments published under my column. In truth, if he’d called me, the Sun-Times security chief was worried that some comments contained threats. The facts didn’t stop the Tribune, in a sign of the apocalypse, from asking readers to send thoughts about me to its website. Next day, I laughed about it with a Tribune columnist who might have liked his editors to run reader feedback about him.
I love to write, as you might have gathered. I don’t love the sports media business. Too many rubes are covering their asses, with job security a bigger worry than ever, while tip-toeing obediently inside the stadiums and arenas of teams they should be scrutinizing in an $800-billion industry. One of the guilty corporate suckups, ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt, didn’t like my Twitter assessment of his soft work a few years ago. He replied with crude insults, without checking his facts, and I responded in kind. I shouldn’t have stooped to his level.
In the media racket, you’re supposed to deal with crap and carry on.
Marly Rivera did not, turning ugly near young people who were meeting their hero in an innocent moment. If nothing else, Judge should give her an interview as she applies for unemployment.
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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.