WELCOME, BOB KRAVITZ — AND HOW THE ATHLETIC DODGED A LEGAL BULLET
The acclaimed columnist has landed at Substack, and his time at the sports site included his profile about me — if published, my subsequent lawsuit would have exposed a toxic Chicago workplace culture
The Substack freedom riders are building one of America’s great sportswriting sites, by happenstance more than design. Through the open doors of fierce independence and cleansed perception — do I sound like Jim Morrison? — comes Bob Kravitz, a survivor of health scares and a long-ago snowstorm in the French Alps, where he and I almost died after hitching a ride with a deranged driver during the Winter Olympics.
I still don’t understand why he was laid off by The Athletic, in that he’s better than 90 percent of the remaining writers. He wasn’t happy there — who IS in the corporate end of sports media, except the posers who run those places? — and one reason for his general discontent was a story involving … me.
He’d spent a full day and night interviewing me in Chicago, where a Gibson’s bartender comped our drinks because he likes my Sun-Times column (though I’d fled the newspaper years earlier). Of course, his finished profile was a hot potato in his newsroom. Why wouldn’t it be? My media career is filled with lies and b.s. because, oh, I don’t know, I wrote the best-read sports column in a major market and appeared on the ESPN blowtorch for a half-hour on most weekdays and was prominent enough to be a target of various media and sports weenies. At least Kravitz sought the truth about topics important and trivial, and I explained how life beyond the national media marquee is so much better by the ocean in Los Angeles, where I can breathe without interruption from Chicago crazies and industry frauds.
But his bosses chose not to run the story, after months of dawdling. As he speculates this week in his first Substack offering, they were concerned about legal ramifications. Damn right, they should have been. No one — and I mean, no one — has accurately reported the details of a 2010 court case, which means anything you might see on Google or Wikipedia is incomplete and wrong. We prevailed in the civil case, important because someone wanted a lot of money and got none, but no one reported it. The entire matter was expunged, but no one reported it. If I’d wanted to spend a fortune on a defamation lawsuit, what would it mean if no one reported my victory? So, yeah, The Athletic had to get it right — to avoid being part of a reckless conspiracy that reflects why media shouldn’t be trusted these days. Kravitz called my attorney — another first — and was apprised of the full truth. Apparently, this made his editors queasy. I could hear them: “What, Mariotti had a favorable conclusion? Really? We didn’t know that.” Of course, they didn’t. No one ever asked.
They had a bigger reason to be concerned, actually. In contacting the mopes who’ve pulled muscles and fractured bones in slandering me through the years — welcome to the media racket, kids — Kravitz spoke to my former editor-in-chief in Chicago, Michael Cooke, a hothead and favorite ragdoll of the New York Post’s Page Six column during his brief stint as the Daily News’ editor-in-chief.
“A bully,” Cooke called me, while spilling all sorts of venom, 13 years after I’d handed back a freshly signed contract and said his paper was about to free-fall, as it promptly did via bankruptcy, a hodgepodge of owners including a plumbers’ union, and an 85-percent circulation plunge.
A bully? The pot wasn’t just calling the kettle black. Donald Trump was calling someone a thug. Draymond Green was calling someone a monster.
This is what disturbed me and my attorney. This is why we would sue The Athletic and Cooke. Here I was, the subject of a profile by a major sports site, sitting on all sorts of ugly stories about a toxic Sun-Times newsroom and the number of times I had to play peacemaker during my 17 years there. A bully? I should have won a Nobel Peace Prize. A side of me wanted to tell all. A side of me felt sorry for the Sun-Times. A side of me wanted to have a drink in a town where readers were cool and a futile sports community was not.
When the story didn’t run, none of it mattered — yet. But it did contribute to Kravitz’s tense relationship with his editors, who eventually made him one of the 20 layoffs after the New York Times bought the site and bundled it into a gee-whiz subscription product — All The News That’s Fit to Monetize — with cooking recipes, crossword puzzles and reviews of dishwashers and vibrators.
If you’ve read me in recent days, amid Northwestern’s football hazing scandal, I’ve brought to light several of those toxic episodes. In Chicago, a college locker room isn’t the only hostile place. If you haven’t read, I’ll repeat verbatim. The stories are more relevant now because a former Northwestern football player, Rick Telander, was a workplace bully — protected by Cooke and previous editors because … I’m not sure why. He obviously doesn’t attract many eyeballs, or the daily print circulation wouldn’t have slumped to almost zilch since my departure. The digital subscriptions are at zero after a paywall was removed.
How about the time Telander chirped “Cancer!” in the Soldier Field press box as I sat two seats away, dealing with the disease in my family? Telander wanted to fight one night in an out-of-town arena, among his other wild debacles, and football reporter Mike Mulligan — now a local talk host — routinely engaged staff writers Brad Biggs, Greg Couch and Mark Potash in wicked one-sided arguments. How about the day I had to fetch the Sun-Times security director, Mike Weaver, to stop a news columnist from bothering me and my producer before tapings of “Around The Horn” — the daily ESPN show that helped keep the paper nationally relevant for eight years? In a normal workplace, these people would have been suspended or fired on the spot. The top editors didn’t care, because Cooke was a nutball himself, like his predecessor, Nigel Wade, who was let go after he forearm-shivered me in his office.
You might wonder why no one put an end to it. I told the Chicago Newspaper Guild, which fought the good fight in the name of stewards Charles Nicodemus and Jerry Minkkinen, both no longer with us. But the longtime Sun-Times owners — future jailbirds Conrad Black and David Radler, convicted for skimming profits — hated unions and anyone connected to them. They also didn’t like me as a frequent critic of Bulls and White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, who was tight with their Canadian baseball friend, Paul Beeston. This made me persona non grata in the newsroom, where Cooke screamed at me after I told him the “Cancer” story. One day, Cooke and his management cohort, John Cruickshank, told me I knew “nothing” about sports business because I’d wondered in print why Reinsdorf’s Sox payrolls were low. Weeks later, I asked them if I still knew nothing about sports business. Seems they no longer cared because, as Cruickshank said, “Jerry” didn’t buy a table at one of their events.
Then there was the night Telander wanted to go outside and fight, for some reason, during halftime of a Bulls game in Washington, which must have amused Al Gore as he walked past. There was the time he admonished me for several minutes at my health club in the north suburbs — don’t worry, clothes were worn — and when I returned home, a blog item on a juvenile website placed me in the same club that night. When I appeared on a local public-affairs show, mainly to talk about Tiger Woods, I was shown a video clip of Telander ripping me for some reason. Next day, as I wrote in a private booth in the Wrigley Field press box, Telander and baseball writer Chris De Luca confronted me and forced me to squeeze past them as they stood in the doorway. I went downstairs and reported them to a Cubs security guard — yes, this happened — but dopes at a Deadspin-type sleaze site painted me as the instigator. Wonder who told them that lie? Good thing a local writer, Brian Hedger, was in the next booth and heard the entire thing. De Luca eventually was put in charge of the sports department. Getting the picture of what went down there? Mob stuff, dying-newspaper version.
How old was Telander then? Sixty? He had a hard time with his mild relevance in Chicago. I ruled the town. I was on national TV every day. He was a child about it. I laughed. We called him Biff.
But there was more. Telander tried to intimidate me, as you might expect from a Northwestern football player. He made a fool of himself after Ozzie Guillen, who managed the White Sox then, called me a “f—ing fag.” Telander interviewed the clubhouse attendant and and asked if I’d been there lately, which is why Guillen was upset. Well, no, I was away covering multiple national events — I did almost all of them — and, frankly, I was tired of being badgered in the Sox clubhouse through the years. My editors were too busy schmoozing Reinsdorf to care. Never mind that Tony Phillips engaged me in a back-and-forth volley of “mother f—ers,” a setup that allowed the team’s flagship radio station to blame me in an absurd breaking-news story. Never mind that badass Carl Everett threatened me. Never mind that I found a nail in my tire in the stadium parking lot. Did Telander call me and ask? A good reporter calls and asks. Nah. He wrote a hit piece about me — in my own newspaper. It was so ridiculous, I bought the house a round at O’Callaghan’s and dedicated a toast to him. My response, as I would tell them at The Daily Northwestern or any student operation: Ignore it. Keep doing great work. Keep trying to breathe life into a struggling news business.
I was offered a $1 million contract, a big deal at the time. I signed it. People weren’t happy in the newsroom. Weeks later, after an abysmal website failed us at the Beijing Olympics, I resigned and handed back the fully guaranteed deal. Telander was supposed to go with us to China, but he was told to stay home after the health-club harassment. When I decided to leave a ship of fools, I was being watched by almost a million viewers a day on ESPN, and circulation at the Sun-Times was 330,000.
Today, the print run is a ghastly 48,000, a far cry from when I was available to 1.3 million media consumers a day. So I figured I’d give the Sun-Times a peek the other day, after both Chicago papers were destroyed on the NU story by the kid journalists in Evanston. Telander condemned the hazing, as all of us should. But does he have a short memory? Does he think it’s normal behavior to challenge a colleague to a fight on press row? Isn’t that workplace harassment? In the same toxic family as hazing? Do they teach that at Northwestern?
Yet, Cooke told The Athletic that I’m a “bully.”
If his quote had run, we would have sued, just as we threatened to sue GQ in the mid-2010s. Guilty of the same sloppy disregard for the truth, the magazine — using one of Deadspin’s writers — falsely accused me of videotaping an ESPN executive who stumbled around the restaurant bar of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. We forced the GQ editors to retract the story, but not before we held up the print publication run for an entire weekend while considering our options.
So, while congratulating Bob for his first Substack column, I also said The Athletic dodged a bullet. He didn’t know it at the time. Now he does. Twice in recent months, I’ve tried to reach Cooke, inquiring about his availability for a Sun-Times-related film project I’m exploring — something about the death of American newspapers. He hasn’t gotten back to me.
Nor will he.
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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.