#44 - Jeremy Schaap, ESPN journalist: upsets, doping, triumphs, and the importance of sports

Foreign. Hey everyone. Welcome to the Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia. The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful, top performing individuals in the world, and this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics@peterattiamd.com. Hey everybody. Welcome to this week's episode of the Drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast and why instead we've chosen to rely entirely on listener support. If you're listening to this, you probably already know, but the two things I care most about professionally are how to live longer and how to live better. 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Again, the podcast will remain free to all, but my hope is that many of you will find enough value in 1 the podcast itself and 2 the additional content, exclusive for members to support us at a level that makes sense for you. I want to thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. My guest this week is Jeremy Shap, one of the preeminent journalists at ESPN and a wonderful guy. We spend a lot of time in this episode talking about sports. Obviously, Jeremy has done a lot of amazing work and he's written the book Cinderella man, which is an incredible story of James J. Braddock, who many of you probably have not heard of. But I think by the end of this episode you'll understand why the story is so beautiful. We also talk a lot about his most recent project, which is directing a 30 for 30 special called 42 to 1, which is the of the Buster Douglas upset of Mike Tyson. We get into a lot of things that go beyond sports, or at least are associated with sports, such as why these things matter to us, what they teach us about life and the challenges that he faced following in his father's enormous footsteps and ultimately coping with his father's early death as a result of a medical error. This episode could have gone on for a really long time, but we kind of had a time limit on it, and we had to draw it to a close earlier than either one of us would have liked to. But with that said, I think you'll really enjoy my conversation with Jeremy Shap. Hey, Jeremy, thanks for coming, man.

It's my pleasure, Peter. Thank you for having me.

First trip on the second subway, huh?

I guess it's been a couple of years now. I mean, they've been building it since 1929, but it was nice to, you know, I went out of my way to get a chance to see the 72nd street station. It was pretty impressive.

Not having been in New York that long, I don't appreciate the morass of, like, nonsense.

Oh, you know, by the year 2400, it should extend a little bit farther downtown, I would expect.

Apparently, it's going all the way to Tribeca.

Yeah. And then there's the lirr, you know, extension to Grand Central. And, you know, the city is always improving, just sometimes very slowly.

So there's so many things I want to talk about on the sports front, But I also realize that maybe not everybody wants to hear all of this stuff, but I want to start with something in boxing, because you and I have something in common, which is we are both completely obsessed with the history of boxing. And we were talking about over dinner a few months ago, I don't think I know anything that has happened in boxing from about the year 1996 forward. If you asked me to rattle off one champion in one division, that year.

Probably coincides with the beginning of some new professional endeavor or, you know, once you start building a family and your career and all that, it's harder to be as obsessive about these things. And boxing itself has, let's face it, lost a lot of its luster over the last several decades. I'm certainly not as up on the sport as I was when I was covering it for ESPN on a regular basis. I was a ringside reporter for some time. I wrote a book about boxing history, but that didn't have anything to do with the contemporary sport. My assignment for about 10 years was being, like, the Mike Tyson reporter from 1995, when he got out of prison until 2005 when he retired. That constituted a lot of the work that I did.

His last fight was against Kevin McBride.

Kevin McBride. The Colonus Colossus. Unforgettable. Colonus Colossus in Washington, D.C. and I.

Guess I sort of. I'm exaggerating a little bit. I still followed it enough. I mean, I would.

If you remember Kevin McBride.

Yeah. The fact that I can remember the Kevin McBride fight tells you I was still somewhat paying attention, but I had an almost ridiculous obsession going back to about Jack Johnson. Okay, so from Johnson to Dempsey to Lewis to Marciano to Ali, all heavyweights. Yeah. And of course, you know, Robinson, Armstrong, like, it's hard to put in words how much I obsessed over that stuff. Like, I knew every detail of every one of their fights at one point.

That goes way beyond me. I mean, I had.

But you wrote about Braddock, which I'd love to just.

Yeah, I mean, I immersed myself in the 30s, and the book that I wrote about Braddock and Bear, it really was also kind of a primer on the first 50 years of the heavyweight division as well. Because those stories, for me, like you, are just so fascinating. These guys were such big stars, and so many of them were outsized personalities, and there was nothing else in sports that even approached the significance of the heavyweight championship of the world. That was it. I mean, you know, the middleweight champion of the world, men's. Remember, there were only eight divisions and, you know, middleweight.

One champion per division.

One champion per division. And there's something mythic about it, and it always fascinated me. And I grew up in the 1970s. I was born in 1969. I grew up in the 1970s. Obviously, in the sports business, there was a lot of interesting stuff going on, epic stuff going on in the heavyweight division. My father was very much Dick Shapp, very much a part of that. And I remember, you know, being six, seven years old, I still have it, this encyclopedia, boxing Champions, just sitting there memorizing it, whether it was about Stanley Ketchel, the great middleweight, or it was about the great heavyweights from the guys you named Dempsey and Johnson and Sullivan. There was something that always attracted me to those stories as well.

So you chose to dive into a really interesting story that is, I think, honestly, without your work, would be a footnote. Right. So most people wouldn't even know who James J. Braddock is were it not for the movie Cinderella man starring Russell Crowe, which, of course, was based entirely on your book.

Well, it pains me to disabuse you of that misimpression, but I feel obligated to do so. The movie was actually in the works before the book.

Oh, I didn't know that. I just assumed many people.

I wish the movie was in the works before the book.

Yes, I'M taking all that back.

Take all of it back.

Would have made everybody know who.

Yeah, exactly. There had not been a book written about since ever, really. A big Max Baer book. And not since the 30s had anyone written a book about Braddock. And I decided to make it kind of a dual biography as they are on this collision course towards this heavyweight showdown in 1935.

And so let's give people a little bit of a sense of that, because for me, I've always. I looked at all of those heavyweights. To me, the entire lineage from Sullivan to Johnson to Lewis, et cetera. I mean, every one of those guys seemed like a God. They didn't seem like they were mortal. They just. There was nothing about them that seemed normal. Behr was like, first of all, like, probably the most good looking guy I've ever seen in my life. Like, very handsome. It's hard to imagine a more handsome, beautiful, stunning human being. And his career gets off to kind of a weird start when he kills this guy. Was it Frankie Campbell?

He kills Frankie Campbell in the ring. And it has been about 15 years since I wrote the book. But if I recall correctly, Frankie died in a.

Five years later.

He died a couple days later. It was in San Francisco. Frank. It was 1930 and Bear was from the Bay Area. I think Frankie was from the Bay Area as well. He happened to be the older brother of Dolph Camille, who would end up being an excellent first baseman in the major leagues, the MVP of the National League in, I think, 1941 for the Brooklyn Dodgers. And there's an inquest. I mean, there is a criminal investigation because of the way in which Campbell was battered in the ring and then died.

Yeah, of course, all of the stuff I know about these things are from watching old documentaries and reading about it. But I read that Bear was never the same since after that fight. First of all, apparently he was just devastated by the fact that Campbell died. And I mean, I remember reading something that his son wrote many years later that said, look, my dad was. He was a showman. I mean, he was not in this to hurt people. He sort of took that as his job. But to have this guy die at your hands was. He was never quite the same.

By all accounts, it really did shake him. And it affected the way that he approached life. It affected the way that he approached his opponents in the ring. A few years later, he would be blamed for the death of another heavyweight, Ernie Shaft.

Although that one's a bit controversial because I believe there was an autopsy done that Suggested he actually had meningitis and he hadn't recovered from sort of a chronic meningitis at the time, that he actually died. Because he died in the ring at the hands of another fighter whose name I'm blanking on.

That's right. You know, and it's been a while. I think it was Carnera. Oh, you're right.

It was Primo Carnera. You're right.

I think it was Primo Carnera. It was at Madison Square Garden. Although Carnera ends up administering the blows in the fight in which Shaft dies.

But it was a very gentle blow. It was almost a jab.

It was the beating he took at the Hate Bear that had made it possible for that.

So all of this is to basically say when Max Baer finally beats Primo Carnera, which he does in ridiculous fashion, I think there was 10 knockdowns.

It's a laughable, laughable fight. Yeah.

Yeah. Bear looks invincible. And he'd already beaten Schmeling, correct?

He'd already beaten Schmeling. Yeah.

And there was no way that he was going to give Schmeling a rematch, given what was going on politically.

Again, it's been a while, Peter, but my recollection is nobody was interested in giving Max Schmeling a rematch against Bear just because he wasn't really. He was considered washed up, finished. I mean, when he beats Joe Lewis in 1936.

Yeah, it's ridiculous.

Washed up and finished. He wasn't even part of the discussion.

Yeah. So they decide to take a tune up fight basically with this guy who can't possibly win. Right.

Well, what happens, Jim Braddock has been out of the fight game. He's hurt. He had been a light heavyweight contender in the late 1920s. He'd lost his one shot to Tommy Loughran, who was a great light heavyweight. And at that point, Braddock's entire personal situation really falls apart. And his professional situation, not his personal. Really. His professional situation breaks his hand. He can't fight anymore. He can't make any money. The depression hits. He is working on the docks across the Hudson river from Manhattan. He's desperate. He goes on relief, which at that welfare, which at that time, in Braddock's mind, in the minds of a lot of people, that was a kind of humiliation, taking government assistance, especially a guy like Braddock, who had been so successful. He'd fought for the light heavyweight championship, which was a big, big deal in 1929 in a way that it's not now. And everybody thinks he's through, he's finished, he's done, totally kaput. But the interesting thing is by doing the work on the docks, because he doesn't have the money for bus fare or cab fare to get from his home to the docks. He's walking every day 20 miles. Ridiculous. He's working stevedore, you know, hauling giant bales and stuff like that. Even with a broken hand, he builds up this strength, especially in his left hand. He had never had a left hand before. The right hand is broken. So he's building strength. All of these things. It sounds like some kind of fairy tale or something make prepare him in a way he hadn't been prepared to seize the moment. He gets the shot against an up and comer named John Griffin. John Corn Griffin on the undercard of the Bear Carnera fight, right, and he.

Was not expected to beat Griffin.

He was just an opponent. He was the guy who was going to be a stepping stone for Korn Griffin on his way to fighting Max Baer. But Braddock is a different Braddock and he delivers against Korn Griffin, stunning the promoters, the people who had, you know, these high hopes for Corn Griffin, whose name is still in boxing circles, kind of stands for guy who couldn't get it done. Stepping stone. It's almost like a Wally Pip thing. And almost exactly a year later, I think it's 364 days later, he beats a couple of more impressive fighters on the way, sets himself up for a showdown with Max Baer for the heavyweight.

Title, which, but nobody gave him a shot. I believe it was eight or nine to one off.

He's a huge underdog. Eight, nine, 10 to one underdog, depending on who you ask, which at that time was, I think, the most lopsided odds ever in a heavyweight championship fight.

Of course we're going to come to one that's a little more lopsided in a minute.

And Braddock is this guy who's fighting for his family. He's got three little kids, he's got the wife.

They're living in poverty.

They're living in poverty. When this rise starts, after he wins one of the fights on the way that year, you know, he goes back, he shows up at the relief office. I mean, it almost sounds like it has to be apocryphal, but everybody said it really happened. He shows up at the relief office and returns the money. Returns the money, $35 or whatever, that he had taken on government relief. And he becomes the people's hero. But nobody thought he had a Chance against Max Baer, who looked utterly.

Yeah, I mean, Max Baer looked like an executioner. And he was physically demanding.

Bigger than him.

Oh, and he's a specimen.

We just saw Deontay Wilder fight for the heavyweight championship not long ago at £211. You know, it ends up being a draw with Tyson Fury. And he's 6 foot 7. Deontay Wilder, I think 6, 7, 6, 6. Max Baer is 6 2, and he weighs more. And he is cut.

You look at the pictures of him, he does not have enough. He is. He is ripped in a way that athletes were not ripped like that in that errand.

And he's 215 pounds. He weighs more than Deontay Wilder without being tubby. And Jim Braddock's, you know, a former light heavyweight who somehow gets all the way up to like 192, 193, something like that for the fight. It's not a good fight. It's a pretty boring fight. And Max Bear is clowning his way through it. He doesn't seem to be taking it seriously. It's his first title defense. For some reason, he seemed. Well, there are a lot of reasons why he was ambivalent about the sport. We talked about Frankie Campbell and Ernie Schaff, but he doesn't show up in Braddock. Braddock wins pretty easily.

Yeah. And, you know, it is a beautiful story because again, maybe it's. Maybe my recollection's not there, but I remember reading that leading up to the fight, Braddock said, I'm not losing this fight. Like, there is no way. He was fighting for his life, his honor, his family. He was fighting for something much more beyond him. And you don't get to see that often.

No, it literally was. I mean, you don't often have in a heavyweight championship fight a guy who. Is that where the. The scent of desperation is so recently in his nostrils? You know, I mean, if you're fighting for the heavyweight championship of the world, you're probably doing pretty okay for a while. At that point. You've been making money on other fights. You've been getting bigger and stronger. You've been accustomed to success and only success. And Braddock was a guy who had been broken. I mean, broken. And there was no chance he was ever going to challenge for anything like the heavyweight championship again. I mean, impossible. And this would be everything to him. And he inspired so many people. There were so many people pulling for him. But nobody really thought that he had a chance against Max Baer, who was.

Five years Younger, by every metric, was a superior man, should have won the fight. And then, of course, I think it was by that point, Schmeling had upset Lewis, which was, you know, 1936. That's right, 1936.

Yeah.

And I think at that point, Baer did have a chance. I mean, you could have argued he should have fought Schmeling. But by that point, the war was really starting to ramp up in Europe. And again, maybe this isn't true. Maybe this is just sort of revisionist history. But he had a choice to fight Lewis versus Schmeling. And the logical choice would have been Schmeling. Right. Because he had beat Louis. But the sort of more American choice.

Was you're gonna fight Braddock's choice, right?

Yes, sorry, Braddock's choice. That's right. So he fights Lewis. And I mean, we all know how the story ends, which is Lewis wins, and that goes on to create the most dominant heavyweight in the history of the sport. 12 years champion, 25 title defenses. But the fight was more compelling than people expected. I mean, Braddock put up a better fight.

Well, as I recall, he knocks down Joe Louis in the first round. Yeah, you know, that's really. I mean, he would fight one more.

Fight after Lewis, which he won, and then retired.

Which he won and retired. But he. The thing about Jim Braddock, what I think he embodies is this idea, whether or not you buy into it, that there is something noble about that sport and about the commitment required and about the dedication and about its code, whatever that code. You know, the code of courage, personal courage, of total commitment, of believing there's something honorable about fighting until you've got nothing left. None of that stuff mattered to Max Baer. That's the contrast, too. Max Baer thought this was. This was show business and it was a way for him to make a buck. And I think after he killed Frankie Campbell and had a hand in the death of Ernie Schaff, it was kind of like, I'd like to make some money. I'd like to be in movies. He was in movies. He was starring in Hollywood movies while he was champion, before he was champion, getting good notices, and of course, moved out to Hollywood later. And Braddock really felt, you know what? I'm going down like a Roman centurion on my back if he's taken my title. Joe Louis, he's younger.

He's going to damn near almost take my life.

That's exactly it. And, you know, there's the story in the corner after, you know, Louis almost rips off his head and he's battered and bloodied and he's. His corner, wants to throw in the towel. And he tells Joe Gould, who's his manager, his best friend, you know, the guy who's been there for everything with him, he says, if you throw in the towel, never talk to you again. And I think he meant it. Now today we'd say that's just silly. You know, Jim, that's Joe Louis, that's 23 year old Joe Lewis. Get out of the ring. But then it meant something.

And you know, you're so right about Joe Louis. I mean, it does break my heart a little bit today when you see people talking about this sport without an understanding of what came before, like what did it mean to be Joe Louis? Let's not even talk about the political and social side of it, which to me is just as beautiful as what he could do athletically. But when you go back and look at the film of him, including his rematch with Schmeling, which to me is one of the most remarkable fights ever, he breaks his vertebrae, he breaks one of the bones in his back in the first round in this revenge fight, everything he went on to do, you know, bringing it back to Max Baer. I remember reading that after. So Louis fought Behr two years later. So now Lewis is champion, Behr is not. And Lewis beats him badly. But Bear finishes on a knee. So you can. There's a very famous image in boxing where Max Baer is on his knee, clearly looking like he could get up and gets counted out.

Yeah, I mean, what I remember though is that Bear did not want to go into the ring. I think he had a hand injury. He should not have been in the fight in the first place.

And so at the press conference after one of the reporters says to Bear, Maxi, it looked like you could have beat the count. And he looks at him and he says something to the effect of he. You know, Bear always had a great way of saying stuff, including his last words before he died.

That's right.

But he said something to the effect of, if I'm going to get executed, you're going to have to pay a lot more than $35 to see it or whatever the ticket price was.

That's exactly right. Which is kind of the summation of everything he felt about the sport.

Yeah, and he died young, which broke my heart too. I mean, he died at 50, right? He had a heart attack.

50. And the famous line, you know, kid, you know, these things sound too good to be True.

We're so nerdy to talking about this.

You gotta be skeptical. But, you know, he's staying in a hotel in Hollywood, I think, and he calls down, yeah, he's having chest pain. He's having chest pain. And they.

Oh, no, there's two lines. One line is, we'll send the house doctor. And he says, I don't need a house doctor. I need a person doctor.

That's right, dummy. Right.

And then they send somebody up, and then, you know, this is actually bringing it back to sort of my world of heart disease. I mean, you didn't have any tools to help somebody having a heart attack back then the way we do today. So once someone's going down that path, they're gone. And. And by the time they did get the medical folks up to the hotel, he had a second heart attack. And his last words apparently were, oh, here I go. Or something to that effect. This is it. Here I go.

Yeah. He was a great. He was a fascinating figure. He was a colorful character. He loses the title fight, and then he fights Louis. And he didn't have any interest in the fight game anymore.

Is it a coincidence that you've written the New York Times bestselling book that describes the entire story of what we just described? And then you go on to make one of my favorite ESPN 30 for 30s, which is 42. 1. The parallels between Buster Douglas and James J. Braddock are comical. Right. He couldn't make it up.

Right. They're the two greatest underdogs in heavyweight.

Championship who also rose for a moment. I mean, that's right.

They're the two biggest underdogs, but they were bigger underdogs than all those guys who lost the fights. They're underdogs who win the fights, who seize the moment. And I've always loved the Buster Douglas story. To me, you know, as I said, I was born in 1969. I'm 49. I've seen everything you could see in sports. A lot of it I've seen in person. You know, other stuff I've watched on tv. And the night of that fight, it was nighttime here in the US it.

Was the night of the slam dunk contest in the NBA. I remember this like it was yesterday.

It was that night, and it was afternoon, early afternoon in Tokyo, and I found out the result that night. I couldn't find anywhere that had regular HBO to watch it. I wanted to watch it. I tried to locate regular hbo. I happened to be in Hanover, New Hampshire, that night, and I couldn't find it. But somebody told me later in the night, did you hear what happened? Just like millions of people around the world, did you hear what happened? Did you hear what happened? No. Can't be. Can't possibly be. Could not have possibly occurred. And then my mother sent me a vhs. She had recorded it off hbo. And watching it even a few days later in my apartment in college, it was still so thrilling, so exciting, that it's such a great fight.

It really is.

It's such an incredible fight. And for Buster Douglas to rise to the occasion, as he did again when the stakes were so high, could not have been higher 22 days after the death of his mother, when nobody thought he had a chance, when Mike Tyson looked utterly invincible, there's nothing else quite like it.

I obviously watched it as soon as it came out, and I think I'm going to watch it again with you tonight at the screening. But I had not seen the fight in about 15 years. Right. So I watched it probably a million times at the time, but I'd forgotten a lot of it. And I'd forgotten the ninth round. Oh, I'd for. I completely blanked on that round.

You don't see those kinds of rounds in heavyweight fighting.

No, you're not. You put that in the category of round 10 of Riddick Bowe versus Evander Holyfield round, you know, round 10. You put that in the round of Hagler Hearns, round one, which was, by the way, that's what got me into boxing.

That was something.

HEGLER Hearns, round one, April 1985 was when I decided I wanted to be the middleweight champion of the world. That was. That was. Luckily, I chose another path. But, no, the Douglas fight was unbelievable. And I don't know if you ever heard it, you know, I'm blanking on his name. Teddy Atlas was on Joe Rogan, I don't know, a while ago. And Teddy Atlas made a really interesting point. He said, you know, Tyson's never won a fight in his life because every fight he won, you know, won, technically, the opponent was beat before they got in the ring. Every fight he lost is because the guy came in and wasn't afraid. And Douglas was, in many ways the most impressive of those because he was the first one to beat him. And then, of course, Holyfield would go on to do it twice, and then Lewis and then ultimately McBride. I think those were Tyson's five losses, correct?

Yeah, it was Williams, McBride two to Holyfield and Lewis, McBride two to Holyfield AND Buster.

Yeah. But the Douglas one is a different level.

It's a different level because it's the first and because he gave us not only the blueprint, but because it was Mike Tyson at 23, not Mike Tyson after prison, not Mike Tyson at 37. It was the Mike Tyson who had annihilated Michael Spinks and humiliated Larry Holmes.

And, and remember his previous fight to Douglas, if I recall, wasn't it Frank Bruno who. He had obliterated the fight right before.

It was. I think it was Frank. I'm getting mixed up now. There's Carl Williams.

Oh, you're right. No, no, you're right, you're right, you're right. It was Carl Williams In July of 89 was the previous one. And before that was Frank Bruno.

Right.

And before that was. And before that was Spinks.

Right. He was 37 and 0, 34 knockouts. He got. Tony Tucker had taken him the distance, but it wasn't a close fight at all.

No. And then Bone Crusher Smith had taken him the distance.

That's right.

And basically clinching the whole way there. He'd gone the distance twice before. Quick Tillis took him the distance.

Three of them. Yeah, yeah, it was three of them. Right. And so there was a sense maybe some big guys could give him some trouble, you know, if they approach. But those guys weren't in those fights. Those fights were not close fights. There was no one who had stood up to him and who had matched him punch for punch. And Buster Douglas did more than that. The thing about the Buster Douglas story, why I really wanted for this to be given this kind of treatment is because I've known Buster for a long time. I did stories about the 20th anniversary of the fight, the 25th anniversary of the fight. And this moment for me as a young person was just so. It was such a transcendent sports moment. I said, and people don't get it. They don't want to give Buster credit. They want to say it was a one hit wonder or he got lucky with a punch or that he wasn't. He didn't deserve to even be in the same ring with Mike Tyson. Everything people thought they knew about Buster Douglas was really wrong. Buster Douglas, of course, you know, dominates that fight. I mean, it is an epic performance. He doesn't get lucky. It's not Hasim Rahman in South Africa against Lennox Lewis. It's not one punch. It is a butt kicking, it's an.

Ass kicking by round three. Yeah, like if you go back and watch that fight, knowing the outcome, which of course now we would all do, you're not blinded by the way you are the first time you saw it live, which is you're in denial. You're in denial. And by the way.

Or you're just thinking something's gonna happen.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Didn't two of the three judges have Tyson ahead at the time of the knockout?

Yeah, I think that's right. Which is like, those people should be.

Removed from the sport.

And my co director went to Japan and interviewed one of them and he's just like, yeah, that's what it looked like to me.

But that speaks to the aura of Tyson, that you could have had Tyson winning one goddamn round besides.

Or the aura. Don King.

Yeah, yeah.

So.

But you're right, it's a total ass kicking. Tyson's eye is swelling shut by the third round, even the eighth round where he knocks Douglas down. I mean, Douglas still dominated that round.

Yeah.

And then the ninth round, he almost takes Tyson's head off.

I mean, that should squint in the corner, you know, and that's the thing we didn't know.

It also speaks to how tough Tyson.

Yeah, we didn't know Mike Tyson had a chin. We had no idea until that fight. Nobody had ever challenged him. And. And I mean, the beating that he took, I think the people who thought Buster were going to win, and there were about four of them, thought that he would win because he would be able to keep his distance, use his jab, and Tyson wouldn't know what to do after four or five rounds, that he would just kind of get frustrated and DQ himself or just fall apart physically from the exhaustion. And instead, Mike Tyson, I mean, he's in there for 40 minutes taking an epic beating, an epic beating from a bigger, stronger, more athletic man. I mean, you know, you could say every. And look, Mike Tyson was a phenomenon. What Mike Tyson did from 1985 up until that moment in Tokyo, it's pretty impressive and it's pretty special. It doesn't look as special now because we know the next chapter of the story. But of course, at that time, you know, for Buster Douglas to, you know, Buster Douglas is a bigger guy. He is a stronger guy. Maybe stronger is not the right word. He was a more focused guy and he was a better athlete, and he used all of his advantages and he marshaled all of his talents. And that's what's so fascinating about the story to me, is that here's a guy who had been considered an underachiever at best and a quitter at worst.

And by the way, I gotta tell you, you guys Made a great point of that. And the thing, I guess I have a different view. He was beating Tucker handily, right? And then he basically fails to answer. A few punches and the ref stops it. I'm not sure I call that quitting. I mean, I'm not sure I do either.

Yeah, I just, I think that was.

Always a very unfair label, Douglas.

Totally unfair. A guy. Look, boxing is a cruel sport. This is another reason why I want to tell this story. Boxing unlike other sports, right? Here's a guy, Buster Douglas, who at that point when he gets into the ring with Mike Tyson, right? You know, he'd fought for the heavyweight title. He'd fought big tough guys. He'd beaten Greg Page, who would be a heavyweight champion. He'd beaten Oliver McCall, who was going to be a heavyweight champion. And yet people thought of him not as just a guy who's not Mike Tyson's peer, but is a bum, you know, only in boxing, right?

No, there's that quote that you guys have in the movie where what did Don King say about him?

He's a dog.

He's a dog.

I mean he's a quitter and he's.

A dog like Don King. If anybody would know a dog.

I mean it is something, but that's the way I think the average sports fan and even boxing fans talk about boxers. I've said this before, like if you're the 15th best left handed pitcher in the National League, you're getting a contract for like 110, $120 million. Maybe, maybe that's a slight exaggeration. 85, $90 million guarant and you're an all star and people want your autograph and people say, oh, he's so effective and he could do this. If you're the third best middleweight in the world, but you're not the best, nobody knows your name and it's like, oh, he lost that fight, he's a bum. You know, you hear that all the time. And Buster Douglas, the reputation fairly or unfairly had been established in that fight against Tony Tucker. When he's winning, he's five rounds away. I think it was a 15 rounder still at that time.

You're right, that would have been the last of the 15 rounders.

I think it was 87. I think that, I think it was still a 15 rounder. I can't.

It was May of 87.

So yeah, I mean, Mills Lane did the right thing. It was time to stop that fight because Buster is standing there.

He just wasn't returning them.

Yeah, Six or seven, massive. I mean, Tony Tucker was a good fighter. Tony Tucker's a big guy. He's pummeling Buster, and Buster's not doing anything, so the fight had to end. But to call him a quitter, you get in the ring and take some of those punches from Tony Tucker.

Yeah. The other thing I remember at the time was when Douglas mother died two weeks before the fight, because I remember that getting, like, small news. Remember, this fight wasn't getting that much news because this was. People are already talking about the Holyfield fight. That was supposed to happen in June. I think it was already a contract, so. And I remember thinking, oh, man, they're gonna have to postpone the fight, and he's never gonna get his shot. And I remember just feeling kind of sorry for Douglas, like, I at least want him to get paid. You know what I mean? Like, at this point, it's like, at least you deserve a couple million bucks because you've been through all of this stuff.

He's only 1.2, but that's 2 million today. So. Yeah, yeah. There were people who thought. I mean, you saw in the film Bruce Trampler, the Hall of Fame promoter and matchmaker, who knew Buster from the time he was a little kid because he was his father's unit. He said, I thought he should pull out. I didn't see how he could possibly have enough focus on after his mother's death to get in the ring. That's how his brother kind of thought. Buster said, no, let's go. Let's do this.

And there's something you did that was really beautiful in the film, which was after one of Buster's fights. He's. I don't remember which fight it was, but he's standing on the. On the left. His mom is in the middle, and the dad is on the right.

Right.

The interview. I forget who it was. It wasn't.

It's Al Bernstein.

That's right. It was. It was a young Albernstein.

Big Albern.

I barely recognize him. Right. So Al Bernstein says to his mom, something to the effect of, are you.

Proud of yourself, Al? That's not because you look old. That's not why Peter said that. It's just you were wearing a strange suit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And your hair was a bit darker. Right. And he says to the mom, are you proud of your boy? And, you know, you. Initially, his mom didn't want him to take. Go down this path because she knew he was just a gentler soul than her husband who was like A hard ass. And then you see in this moment how proud she is of him. And you see his face. It was this beautiful look on Douglas's face as he looks at his mom saying how proud she is of him. And I think at that point, someone basically makes the comment, might have been in the narration, that he was just always closer to his mom. Like he was really his mom's child.

Bruce talking, and he says that he favored his mother. I think those are the exact words. His disposition was more like his mother. Lula Pearls. He was not the stone cold killer that his father, Bill Douglas was in the ring. And that's the contrast, too, of course, you know, Bill Douglas was not a world champion. Bill Douglas was not Mike Tyson. He was a guy who many people thought deserved title shots and didn't get them because he could do so much damage and upset the apple cart. But his approach was Tyson like. And he fought with the same style and the same commitment and the same determination to not just win, but to destroy. And that wasn't Buster on a little.

Segue that I want to come back to the boxers who have fought with that ethos. Sonny Liston, Jack Dempsey, George Foreman, Mike Tyson. There was a really interesting article in Sports Illustrated, and I believe it was March of 88. So it was even before Tyson fot Spinks, if I recall. Larry Bird was on the COVID So it's a very nondescript article and I wish I could find it because I, you know, I used to have every Sports Illustrated ever.

Wow.

And my mom, like, 15 years ago called me. You know where this story is going, don't you? It's just going to break your heart.

I had the first. I had the Eddie Matthews on the.

COVID one that my mom. I mean, I had every newspaper clipping you could ever have on this stuff. And it was boxes upon boxes upon boxes. And my mom calls me, like, 15 years ago, and she's like, look, Peter, do you want to come and get these things? And I don't know, I just was like, no, you can pitch them. And like, it's like, top three shames of my life. But nevertheless, there was this.

Can't blame her. She asked, yeah.

No, no, no, Mom. You. You. It's my fault, not yours. So at least I could have had them digitally archived or something.

Something.

So it's this again, March 7, 1988, throwaway article of Sports Illustrated, just before the Tony Tubbs fight, if I recall. Because, remember, he fought Tubbs in Tokyo in, like, first event at the Tokyo dome. That's right, 3-21-88 or something like that.

You're really good.

Two round knockout. Tony Tubbs looked like. He looked like nothing. The article makes an interesting point and the point was this. Now remember, Mike Tyson is three years into the reign of terror and he looks utterly invincible. And the author says, you know what, the flames that burn this bright burn out really quick. And the author went back and said, look at Dempsey, this is how bright that light shone. And then it was gone. And look at Liston and look at Fraser and look at Foreman and they're like, if you put Tyson in that bucket, this is not a guy who's going to have a long career. He is going to implode. And I remember reading that as a 13 year old going, or 12 year old, whatever the hell I was thinking.

This guy's an idiot. He doesn't know what he's talking about. Tyson's going to be the champion till.

He'S fighting 40 like it again.

Which of course Mike didn't even think he'd be alive till he was 30. You were going out on a limb. So you just sort of think like.

How much does history repeat itself? Whereas when you look at the guys like Lewis and Ali, the ones that have had their really, really long careers, you know, there's something different about it. There's just something different about their ethos. They're a different type of person. They're not killers and it's not to say like they're gentlemen versus killers, but it's just they're artists in a way that I think some of the most destructive and feared fighters were not.

Yeah, well, there's no doubt about that. Because if you fall in love with your right hand and the knockout in particular, you're going to get lazy and you're going to get one dimensional and you're going to get exposed eventually. And there are enough to good fighters out there who can box, who bring other skills to bear. And if you've got some kind of deficiency, they're going to locate it, they're going to find it, they're going to wear you down. It is one of those interesting things though, those guys, those destroyers, you know, the Dempsey's and the listings and, and the Tysons and you know as well as I do there, there are similarities and there are a lot of differences also when we talk about guys like that. But if you are being hailed as the destroyer, as the guy who can do everything and can get it done with one punch, you're not going to be Listening the same way to your trainer, to Kevin Rooney or Teddy Atlas or Aaron Stowell. The way if you've had to box, you've had some challenges. I mean, the interesting thing about. I've been talking about this a lot the last couple of months, and the thing about Tyson, right, is that he's the heavyweight champion. He's considered invincible. He has this aura about him that no one has had since Dempsey.

So I was going to ask you about that because I just. It's hard to extract that from the literature. Do you believe that Tyson's aura was greater than that of Foreman's enliston's at their respective times?

Yeah, I mean, I guess I'd have to go back and look. I mean, after Foreman does what he does to Joe Frazier and all that. But I think so, because, you know.

There was just more of it, too.

And at that point, he had taken on all comers. There was nobody, and there was more of it. The fashion in which he did it to so many different guys, I think it was bigger. I think it was more impressive with Tyson at that time. And it was also his own way of speaking about things. His story, where he came from, the kid from reform school. Anyway. I mean, you know, there's similarities, two with Liston, but I think it's not a parallel, really, with Lewis, because most people would tell you, and. And I'm gonna assume you're one of them, that Joe Lewis is the greatest heavyweight champion of all time.

I was going to ask you what your thought was. It's certainly between Lewis and Ellie, right?

So let's say it's Joe Lewis, right? But Joe Louis, before he becomes champion, as we earlier discussed, has already lost the fight.

Yeah, he was knocked out, knocked out.

Humiliated against an older guy that everybody thought was over the hill. So when he becomes champion, he doesn't have that aura that Tyson has. He builds a different kind of aura and he builds a different kind of championship record with that blemish from the Schmeling fight already behind him. Now, if he doesn't have that moment with Schmeling, right, maybe it's a different story. The fact that he had that moment, that more than a moment of adversity, he had that huge setback to his career.

It was a year before he would fight again, wasn't it?

Before he would get the Braddock fight. And it was no sure thing that Braddock would fight him. I mean, remember, at this point, it's been more than 20. It's been 22 years since an African American has been allowed to fight for the heavyweight championship. And there was no guarantee that in 1937 that the boxing establishments would permit it or the public would demand it. It looked like it was heading that way until he lost to Schmeling. And then it was like, well, we don't have to.

Anyone who has an excuse. Yeah, exactly right.

But Braddock gives him a shot and it's part of a business deal where he gets a percentage of Louis's earnings for 10 years. Great business deal. You wonder, you know, ethically about the deal. But anyway, I don't remember exactly the point I was making, but Louis is different. Dempsey, I think, is similar. Dempsey, he was a destroyer and was this cloak of.

Did your dad ever meet Dempsey? Because Dempsey didn't. I mean, he lived around for a long time, 1983, had a restaurant here.

He lived for a very long time, Jack Dempsey. And apparently, I mean, I'm not sure about the very last years, but up until into his mid-70s, I mean, I know that he was all there and it's remarkable. This isn't a guy who just had all of those knockdown, drag out professional fights. I mean, he fought hundreds of fights as basically a semi pro in mining camps in Colorado. And the toughest possible atmosphere you can imagine. I mean, a lot of it was bare fisted and no holds barred. And I mean, I can't imagine the kinds of. Now he was great, so I don't know how much punishment he was taking, but when you're a young guy coming up there, you're getting hit.

Oh, but to look at the Dempsey fights are some of the most amazing things you can watch.

Remember though, when he becomes champion, right? I mean, he goes three years from 1923, 1926, without defending his title. He is such a big celebrity. He's making so much money just off the championship and its significance that he doesn't have to get into the ring finally, you know, he gets in the ring in 1926 and he loses to Gene Tunney in Sesquicentennial Stadium in Philadelphia. And then they got the rematch a year later, which is still arguably the biggest sports event in the history of the world. Dempsey Tunney 2 at Soldier Field. I'd probably make a case it's the biggest sports event in its moment of all time and he loses again. This one's the long count, long count and all that. But it's funny, the two biggest sports events of all time in my book are Ali Frazier 1, March 8, 1971, and Dempsey Tunney 2, 1927 in Soldier Field. And the guys that we always talk about are the guys who lost those fights, Ali and Dempsey, not the guys who want them, Tunney and Frazier.

There was a beautiful picture I once saw of Ali that morning walking in Central park in the snow. And it's sort of amazing. I mean, that's part of. I think what makes New York such an interesting place is the history. And I think the whole Atlantic city in the 80s and Las Vegas, it's sort of taken away a little bit from how remarkable it is to fight in Madison Square Garden and what that would have meant, like how anticipated that fight was. And of course, when Tyson fought spinks in 88 in Atlantic City, most people who knew enough about the sport said, look, this is the most anticipated fight in the heavyweight division since 1971. I mean, this is a really big deal. And of course, at the time, that was only 16 years earlier, which seems kind of amazing to me, given what an eternity 16 years is when you are 16 years old.

When you're young. Yeah. Oh, my God, that was the dark ages.

Yeah, whatever it was. So one question on the 42 to 1, 30 for 30. Did you guys even try to interview Tyson?

Yeah. So it's interesting because some people felt dissatisfied that we didn't have today's stuff from Mike. We made a decision. I went to talk to Mike. Mike declined to take part in the process. I had interviewed him in 2017 though, and asked him a lot of questions about the fight. And we hadn't used that, I think, anywhere. And at one point we had a cut of the film where we had a lot of it and. Or we had a few bites from it and we made an artistic decision essentially at that point, that we wanted to see Mike only in context from the time of the fight, who he was then. Because seeing him now with the tattoo and the way that he's changed, you know, he's. He can be very quiet and low energy. It's such a stark contrast to what we're showing you of him then that it's almost jarring. And everybody knows the Mike Tyson. So I've done nobody's more Mike Tyson stories than me, literally, you know, on tv anyway. Interviewed him more on TV than I have, I would think, long form stories about him, all that. I just felt, this is Buster's story. People know the Mike story. People hear from Mike all the time. We still hear from Mike all the time. The more you put Mike in it from today.

I see your point. You detract A bit, yeah. And what did Mike talk about in 2017 when you interviewed him about that fight specifically? Because I've never really heard him talk much about that fight. There's so much about him and Holyfield and the men's that's been made and all those other things. But what is his recollection of that?

Probably the best bite we had from that interview is something like where he said, look, was Buster Douglas a better fighter that morning? That afternoon? Yes. Does that mean that he's a better fighter than me? No. That's a fair point. He's certainly entitled to make that point. But in terms of, like, what happened, he said, I was living my life too fast, I was doing crazy stuff. I was this, I was that. You know, it was. And people say, well, that's making excuses. It's like, well, I asked him what happened. I mean, whether it's an excuse or not. I mean, that's the truth. I think in his mind, I think he feels if he'd approached that fight with full commitment, he would have won it. But of course he's going to think that. And that does not diminish what Buster Douglas did. Because, I mean, if we're gonna. If we're gonna say, well, it doesn't count, then. Then, you know, nothing counts. Did the Soviet team really approach the American kids in the Olympics the way they would have approached the Czechs or something like that? No. Or the Canadian All Star team or the, you know, NHL All Star team? No. But if you're going to say, well, then it doesn't count, then nothing counts. It's just silly.

No, in the end, everything counts. That was a great line, by the way, with the bookie in Vegas. I love that part, by the way, of him actually talking about the bets. And, you know, he was like, look, people say that the Miracle on Ice was the biggest upset in sport. It's not even within a country mile that that was the biggest upset in sport. Is there ever been Vegas odds bigger than 42 to one overcome in a.

Heavyweight championship fight in any sport? Oh, I think so. You know, a lot of people say, well, Leicester City's a bigger upset because they were 5,001 or something to win the Premier League?

Oh, yeah, that's, of course. How could I forget? That's a pretty amazing example.

Yeah, but to me, that's totally different. There wasn't a single game that season. I mean, I don't know what. I'd have to go back and look at it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I bet There wasn't a single game that was more than 4 to 1 or 5 to 1. You know what I mean? And a season long.

That's a very good point. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, in every year there's somebody who wins a conference or who wins a professional league or a championship who was. I think the St. Louis Rams were 300 to 1.

That's right.

Beginning of the year.

So. So, So. I mean, look, even the New England Patriots, the first year they won the super bowl.

But all of that stuff is based on teams that. Because we don't know how those teams are constituted. Buster Douglas was Buster Douglas. He was the guy who'd had six fights since Tony Tucker. People still thought he was 42 to 1. Lester City, the St. Louis Rams, whatever you want to say, nobody knew who that team was. That wasn't the team that you had seen the previous season.

So it's in the single event. That's still kind of unusual odds. Well, it was great. You know, the other thing that was nice to see was, for me at least, because I hadn't seen much of Buster Douglas in. In many years, because I remember in 95, when he was almost dead, I mean, five years after that fight, he's in a diabetic coma. 380 pounds bigger than that.

Yeah. Really?

I mean, yeah, it was kind of nice to see him.

I like Buster very much. I've spent a lot of time with Buster over the years. You know, I'm always cautious about saying this, he's this or he's that when by the standards of my profession, I've spent a lot of time with him. You know, three days here, two days here, a dinner here, a dinner there. Is he somebody that I've spent like a work colleague where you spend years around them? I don't know. But I like Buster. I think he's a good guy, he's a good person. He has not been a self promoter, which I think has hurt him financially over the years. I think his feelings have been hurt because people for so long have tried to diminish this victory. And there's so many avid Mike Tyson fans who always want to make excuses for him, who always want to discredit Buster for whatever reason it is. I felt like he had not been fully appreciated for the magnitude of this.

What do you think went wrong after Tyson? Why do you think he didn't show up in shape for Holyfield? Because on paper, he should have given Holyfield a hell of a fight. I think Douglas was a better fighter than Riddick.

Bowe, I mean, you could certainly make that case. I mean, Riddick had some great moments, most of them against Evander Holyfield. But he was. Buster was a very skilled boxer, and he was a very good athlete, and he was schooled in the sport. And when he was fully dedicated and committed, which we saw only on a few occasions, he was very tough to beat. I don't think anybody. I don't care if it's Jack Dempsey or Gene Tunney or John L. Sullivan himself, would have beaten him in Tokyo that day. I really don't think so. But after he defeats Tyson, everything is just so chaotic. It's the typical story we hear, you know, too much, too fast, too many people pulling at. He's in court with Don King. He's in court over the long count in the eighth round. All of this, as we would say, mishigas, is, you know, driving him crazy. He's getting rid of the people in his camp who had made it possible for him to achieve these great heights. He's got a new team in there, and he signs at the time for $24 million to fight Holyfield. The largest.

Largest purse. Yeah.

In the history of sports. Nobody had ever gotten a check like that in the history of sports, which is like 48 million now. And even after the taxes and paying out Don King and paying off his team, he still got, like $9 million in cash. Like $18 million today, something like that. And I think his motivation was gone. And I think the reality of his mother's death sunk in. When she died, he had the fight to focus on. And now he's got this complicated, weird relationship at times with his father, who's now, like, going to Don King's party. When I think Buster is still suing Don King. I mean, there's all kinds of crazy stuff going on. He doesn't. I think Buster be the first. To me, he doesn't show up for that fight.

Yeah.

Physically, mentally, motivationally, didn't care.

There's something about boxing that, I guess this is part of what attracted me to it as a participant and then eventually, always just as a fan. And maybe I have a slightly different insight into it because I've done it, but the ring is a really lonely place. It's hard to put in words what the fear is like when you get in the ring. And. And again, maybe it's just that that was just who I was. And maybe there are some people who get in the ring and they're not afraid. But even Tyson, I remember, once said anybody who Gets in a boxing ring and who is not scared senseless is lying or crazy.

Yeah. My thought was, now I don't think he was scared by the time he got in the ring against Buster. I don't think Mike was. But you have to have a relationship with fear.

And even if you feel like you're going to win, like, I mean, I think anytime I stepped into a ring, I felt like I was going to win. I mean, there are no words to describe that anxiety. There's nothing I've ever experienced since no professional thing I've ever done that has put that much adrenaline into my body that borders on the point of being like, you're on the verge of it being unproductive.

And the audience can sense that. I mean, for me, I said, you know, I've seen a lot of great things in person. By the time they fight in 2002, Lennox and Mike are both over the hill. They're 36 years old, 37 years old, something like that. And yet people have called it, you know, the last great fight, the last big fight. I was covering that fight. I was. Wasn't far from.

Did you see that beating being that bad?

That's what I thought. I really did think so. And I was working with a lot of people who thought I was crazy, who thought that Mike was gonna win. I think Mike was the favorite in a lot of times.

Oh, my God. I thought he was going to lose, no question. But I didn't expect to see him beat up that badly.

I'd seen Mike fight a lot over the previous seven years. I'd seen Lennox fight more, and, yeah, I didn't see how he would beat Lennox.

Lennox Lewis, top 10 heavyweights of all time.

You know, off the top of my head, without going back and looking at those two losses to McCall and Rahman, which they count. Yeah, I guess he's probably somewhere right around there in the. Right around the 10, 11, 12, something like that.

So, asked another way, from Muhammad Ali until today, who are the three best? Larry Holmes. Let's give you Larry Holmes. Right.

Okay.

He's got to be in there.

Yep. Larry Holmes has got to be in there. Lennox has got to be in there.

Put Klitschko in there.

I think. Yeah. The question is, which one or both? You know, I mean, two pretty impressive guys who did impressive things. After Lennox fights Vitali in 2003, and Vitali performs well, but he doesn't win the fight and he gets a cut, and, you know, all that after that, I kind of stopped paying as much attention to the heavyweights, and they, you know, they took the belts off to Germany, and we never really saw much of those fights. And there were a lot of guys they were fighting who were kind of unknown entities. So I'm a little reluctant to talk too much about the careers of either Klitschko brother. I don't know quite how to measure them.

But there was a sea change, Right. I mean, I think there was an introduction of athleticism to the heavyweight division that I don't think you saw before. And I think that the prototype of the Lewis, the Riddick bow, the Razor Ruddocks, the Klitschkos, I mean, there's just a different level of athleticism, size. And they are so big. So they are so freaking big, which.

Is why it was so amazing to me to see a guy like Deontay Wilder, who is still undefeated at this point after the Fury fight. And, you know, maybe he's the guy who fights Joshua. Maybe it's Fury. Who knows? Whatever it is, there's a guy who's 212, fighting at 212 pounds, who's arguably the best heavyweight in the world. Arguably. Because we saw these guys getting 240. 250. 250. And they're gigantic. They're mountains. They're primo Carnera sized, these guys.

Yeah. But with skill. Right. I mean, was just a clown.

Just size.

Yeah.

So you don't think you're ever gonna go backwards from that. They were a very tough, very tough guys. Klitschko brothers.

I could sit here and talk about boxing forever, because it's not. There's not often I get to talk to somebody who sort of thinks about it the way I do. But I. There are a few of the things I want to talk about, and sort of one of them is your most famous interview. Right. With Bobby Knight. So you don't have to say anything good or bad about him, but having never met him, he just strikes me as just a deplorable human being. I don't know what it is about him. Maybe, truthfully, maybe there's a part of myself I see like, you know, I have a really bad temper, and I look at him and I think, God, I hope I've never done 1/100th of what that guy has done. I hope I've never hurt anybody the way he's hurt somebody.

Did you see the 30 for 30?

I did, and it only solidified in my mind how much I despise him.

Yeah. My friend Robert Abbott.

Oh, it's one of the Saddest ones I've ever seen. It is so goddamn sad to me how many people's lives have been destroyed by him.

Here's the thing. I knew Bob Knight. I mean, again, you know, I say know somebody. You know how? Well, I. My father was a friend of Bob Knight's. I had spent time with Bob Knight before that interview. I was one of those people who appreciated his talents. And he had this.

His quote, unquote genius, quote, unquote genius.

And his sense of history, his sense of loyalty. Look, there are good qualities there. There are other people who can, you know, talk. You can watch the film, talk about the dark side of Bob Knight. The interview was a challenge.

How many days after he was fired was the interview?

I want to say it was 72 hours later. It might have been 48. It was. I can't remember exactly.

Why did he give you that interview?

Well, I think he gave me that interview because he thought he could steamroll me. And he'd known me and so what year was this? This was 2000.

2000. So your dad was still alive?

My dad was still alive.

What did your dad tell you going into that interview?

You know, I spoke to a lot of people the night before the interview and the day of the interview because it's one of those. Those situations. And I was young. I just turned 31. And this is the biggest thing that's going on, not just in sports, but in America, period. At this moment in time, it really was. And I knew I had to get it right. I knew the stakes were high for me. And so I spoke to a lot of people. And I'm trying to remember what my dad told me. I really don't remember what his advice was about the questions or this or that. I spoke to a lot of people who told me, you know, it was important, of course, to ask him the tough questions and not back down. And I think that's what I did. And that's what people said at the time. They said, you know, sha stood up tonight. He didn't let the bully bully him. I asked the right questions. I got to the important points. And I think perhaps most important, because there was a moment of peak when I think he revealed himself in a way that he wouldn't often in a live television interview that. That really kind of said who he was more than anything else. And so people still remember that interview. It was kind of interesting.

What do you think is the most memorable exchange of that interview?

Well, that's indisputable because people remember it very well, we're having a discussion, we're having a talk about the zero tolerance.

Policy, which is ultimately what led to.

To his termination, ultimately what led to his termination. And he's explaining, telling me how he doesn't know what zero tolerance meant and nobody ever defined it for him. And he was put in a lose, lose situation, whatever the exact words were. And he says, and the real victim here is Pat, his son, who was one of the assistant coaches. The real victim here is Pat, because Pat is going to lose his job. And I feel it's my obligation at this point to point out and say, bob, but Pat wouldn't be losing his job if you had behaved yourself, if you had done what you were told to do. And that's when he got angry, very angry. And he looked at me and he said. And he glared at me and he said, be careful here. You've got a long way to go until you're as good as your dad.

Yeah.

And I said, I appreciate that, and moved on. But that's the exchange that everybody remembers. And my friend Willie Weinbaum, producer, I work with a lot, he's one of the guys I talked to before the interview. Great journalist, great interviewer. And he said, you know, just remember he's probably gonna, you know, invoke your dad at some point or compare you unfavorably, use that as a weapon in his arsenal. And I don't really remember if it register. It didn't register, but I remember Willie did say that. And of course, that's what people remember. But at the time, for me, it was like a kind of a career defining moment. All of a sudden it was like, welcome to the big leagues.

So what is it like then with a father who's a legend? And it's not like you decided to become a dentist or an anesthesiologist. You decided to do what your dad did. And that means subject yourself to constantly being compared to him and living in his shadow. What did your mom say about that?

You know, maybe I'm just getting old. I don't remember. I don't remember us ever having really a conversation about it. Not only not with my mother, but not really with my father. I mean, I grew up, especially when I was very young, before my parents divorced, like at his side. I mean, going to sports events with him, going to the. I remember on the weekends, you know, what I did was I went to the office with my father in the morning while he prepared sports stories, sports reports on NBC back then. And I hung around the office and I read sports books. It was almost like my entire life had been an apprenticeship in the business, so.

And you weren't worried about the shadow?

Maybe I should have been. I don't think I ever gave it a second thought. I know that sounds ridiculous.

No, no, it doesn't. Actually, it's remarkable. I mean, I don't do anything that my dad does. My dad, you know, he runs quarries. So I couldn't be further from what my dad does. But yet, in many ways, I do compare myself to his work ethic. Right? I mean, like, even a few weeks ago, I was sort of complaining to my therapist. I was like, God, you know, I don't think I can work as hard as my dad. And it's. Deep down it makes me feel a little bit ashamed that, you know, my father's never been in a bad mood. He's like the most upbeat, positive, optimistic immigrant that ever lived. Tomorrow's always going to be a better day, and he can win.

Where did he come from?

From Egypt. And he can will his way into the world. Like what he wants to happen will happen. And you know, as a kid, I never once saw my dad even in bed. You know, he was coming home after I was asleep and he'd be up and gone in the morning like he never slept in on a Saturday or anything like that. So you just had this view of like, this is like a superman. And of course, me, you know, I'm different. I can be lazy at times and I can get into, you know, you're.

Still a very productive person. You're just measuring yourself against an impossible standard.

Right, but don't we all do that? I mean, I compare ourselves to. That's what I'm saying is, at least for me, I can keep the distance between what we've done professionally. So. So I really can only compare myself to my father in terms of work ethic, sacrifice, and just general disposition. But now you have all of those things to compare yourself to. Plus, you know, being in the son of one of the most legendary sportscasters of all time.

Well, I think I'm just going to go lie down on the couch.

Tell me. Tell me how you really feel.

Yeah, now you're right. I gotta say, though, it really is a testament, I guess, to my naivete or just stupidity that I got into this business without really thinking about that. And I just knew that I wanted to be in the media. I wanted to work in tv. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to work. I wasn't sure if I Wanted initially to be in sports or news. I started out working in news at a local TV station here in New York and transitioned into sports. But I'd been in sports, so that was kind of the tension. Wasn't, was I going to be in the media? It was like, what exactly am I going to do? For me, that was the question. And of course, when I made the decision to do sports and not to do news, not to do something else, then, of course, you know, I was walking right into my father's field. And I grew up around a guy who I really think was the best at what he did. He was a great writer, he was a great journalist. He was. He was a great TV storyteller. And I figured, well, if he could do it, I could do it.

That's amazing. You know, I do remember reading an interview, very recent, actually. Maybe it was. Maybe. Maybe it was a year ago, but someone once asked you about, you know, lessons you learned from your father. And I would. I remember you saying, I'm going to have to paraphrase it. The gist of it was what it means to be fair as a reporter, what fair journalism means, which means you do have to ask hard questions and you do have to probe in areas that are uncomfortable, but you've got to have a bit of empathy. You have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the person you're speaking with. And I don't know, I feel like that doesn't exist all that much in journalism anymore, does it? I mean, maybe it does, and I'm just not aware of it, and we see so many exceptions. But anyway, the way you described it, I thought was very beautiful. And you really attributed it all to your father.

Yeah, and I think he did operate in that manner. It wasn't just idle talk. It was what informed his. His body of work. And I work in a business where there are people who are all about access and they never ask the tough questions. And then I work, you know, with people, too, who work with. Or there are people in the business. I don't really. I can't think of any colleagues who are like this, but you see it happen. It's like they're tough for the sake of being tough.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. They're antagonistic just to be antagonist.

And I think I built a reputation, 30 years of the business of being the guy who does ask the tough questions and doesn't shy away and is willing to sacrifice relationships for the truth. And that's important. But fairness is the underpinning of everything. Right. You know, it's not just about being fair to the subject. It's about being fair to the audience. It's about being fair to the story and fair to the truth. And it seems like it's a pretty simple principle, really, to. I think. It's not like I'm a Scotty Restin here or. But I mean, you know, I work at the World of Sports or the toy department, but it's a pretty simple principle, but I can't say that it's always applied.

We were talking about this a while ago, but it's sort of hard to believe your father died in 2001, because it feels a lot more recent to me. And maybe that's just a sign that we're all getting a little older. Time starts to travel faster, because 2001 on paper is a long time ago. But it's interesting because I believe his last broadcast was the Sunday after 9 11. And he actually talked about the insignificance of sport in the context of what had happened, what, five days earlier. He would go on to have an elective hip operation a couple weeks later, and one complication, slash medical error after another, and ultimately he died. You're young. You're 30 at the time.

32.

32. How hard was that? Oh, it was on two levels, right. I mean, I'm asking. It sounds like an idiotic question, right? It's. No, it's not hard to lose. But it's one thing to lose somebody when they're old enough that you just expect to lose them. It's another thing when someone goes into the hospital to have a procedure done and mistakes get made and they don't come out of the hospital.

It was devastating. I was extremely close with my father, and we had been, you know, for a long time at that point. There had been a period, you know, in my teens and my parents divorced, where the relationship had frayed. I mean, it felt like a million years at the point when it was happening, but it's probably 18 months or something like that. And then, you know, I went off to college and then I went into the business and we were doing radio shows. I mean, we probably spoke once or twice a day and saw each other frequently and lived in the same place and connected by the business, work for the same company. I mean, you know, so there's the personal anguish seeing your father go through something like this and he's in a coma most of the time, you know, you can't communicate with him. There's nothing when he goes under, they Put him in, you know, an induced coma to let him heal. You never get a chance to say goodbye. And 13 weeks in ICU, you know what that takes out of family and the guilt, like, are you there every day? Are you not there? I mean, all of that stuff and then for it to also be playing out as a public story as well, people, what happened to Dick Schapp, what's going on, how sick is he? Is he going to recover? That doesn't make it any easier. And this is all against the backdrop of this national calamity which had taken place a few miles south of the hospital in which he was in the intensive care unit. So there is that surreal grief stricken moment as well in the history of this city, in that country. So it all feels like a bad dream. Everything that was going on in the fall of 2001 for me, you know, and then, you know, there were moments also. It's all, it's made even more painful by the moments where you think they're telling you, oh, well, he's made a turn for the better. He's gonna be, I mean, literally, I think within two or three days before he died, it seemed like he had suddenly recovered and they were making plans to take him out of the coma and slowly wake him up again. And, you know, but you gotta remember, you know, I remember having a talk with one of the doctors. Like, you gotta understand, your father's gonna be. He's recovering, but he's not gonna be the same guy. He's gonna have to go to rehab facility for a while to get his strength back and this and that, but he's gonna be back. I mean, and then all of a sudden it was like. And I don't even, you know, honestly, I don't remember what happened in those two or three days after that. I mean, I remember what happened. I remember being there when he died, but I don't remember how it went from so hopeful and optimistic to over very quickly. So it was very hard on several levels.

Was there anything about that collective experience, meaning the loss of your father, which is, I mean, literally superimposed on 9, 11, that made you revisit your connection to sports? Did you ever go through the phase of, oh my God, I'm devoting my life to a game versus no, wait a minute. Sports is an amazing substrate for metaphor for life. Like, how did you go through that thought process?

Well, I mean, I remember very vividly having a discussion. I don't know if he remembers, but having a discussion with Keith Olbermann. During the baseball playoffs that year. And we were so. This is a few weeks after 911 with my father in a coma in the hospital. And we weren't talking about that. We were talking about 911 and Keith, who at that time was still working in sports, I think, at Fox Sports at that time. Keith's a very smart guy, friend of mine, smart guy. He was telling me, like, we can't be in sports anymore. Everything is over. Everything we've known has changed, everything. Nothing will ever be the same. The country's going to be under constant attack. I mean, there was all, you know, he's saying, you know, get out of sports now because nobody's going to care about sports anymore. And I remember not being able really to, even in that moment, process what he was saying. But it certainly made sense. It's how we felt at the time as a country. Like everything was discombobulated. We didn't know where we stood anymore in some regards. But for me personally, I remember having that discussion, but I don't remember that being a moment where I was saying to myself, I want to get out of sports. I want to do something different. I'd had those discussions a few years before that, people at ABC News about maybe transition. I remember I wanted to go. I had a meeting up there at one point where I said, you know, I don't want to work in sports anymore. I want to transition. I want to go cover the war in the Balkans or something like that. And like, no, we don't want you to get killed over there, something like that. And I wasn't qualified. But no, I. I don't remember reassessing my relationship with sports in that moment, except I did have an immediate reaction to the whole idea that sports was going to make everything better. And if the Yankees won the World Series, which they went, ended up losing, that it was this. That it would be this incredible moment of catharsis or something like that. I thought it would be a few minutes of catharsis.

What do you think today, many years later, right? We're already. We're back in the swing of things. What do you think is the most important thing that following sports as a spectator, as a fan, does for us? Because in many ways, what people like you do is you provide a narrative that gives us who don't know as much a nuanced understanding. Again, just even to me, like, you probably won't find a bigger ESPN 30 for 30 fan than me. There might be two I haven't seen, but I love that type of Deep exploration, the story behind the story. Behind the story. What do you think that does for people outside of the obvious, which teaches you about a sporting event?

Well, I think that there's a greater appreciation now for sports as something more than the toys or the toy department when we cover it, that, you know, it's not just tribal, it brings us all together. Right. I mean, I travel all over the country, I travel internationally a lot. You can have discussions with sports, with people anywhere. And it's, you know, in a lot of ways it's gotten harder to have discussions about other things as we know. And, and sports can be divisive as well. So. So there is the sense that it is this lingua franca. Right. Some guy I don't know I'm sitting next to on a plane, we could have a four hour discussion because you.

Can'T, you don't want to talk about religion or politics and yeah, there are too many things you can't talk about anymore.

There's that. And we just like talking about sports too. We like sports and sometimes we overlook, like the physicality of it, how much watching, just the remarkable way that athletes use their bodies and their minds, we sometimes lose appreciation for that. There's so many things about sports that can be edifying. And also for me, I've used sports as a platform to tell stories about other things going on in the world that transcend sports, about societal issues, about cultural issues, about crises of sexual abuse, homophobia, whatever they are. I mean, a lot of the stories that I've done over the years, sports is a starting point, it's a hook, and then it's about something bigger. And sports does that in a way. Right. That other things don't. Because so much of us are interested in sports. You know, there's a reason why Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in 1980, 1947 is one of the most important moments in the annals of the civil rights struggle. Why that's a watershed moment. There's a reason why Muhammad Ali refusing induction is a watershed moment. Whether you agree or disagree with him. Sports touches us in a different way, and it touches society in a different way. And Title ix, which wasn't just about sports, we see mostly through the prism of sports when we talk about equality for women. And the way in my father's lifetime that the emergence of the African American athlete was, I think, the big story, you know, in a lot of ways, for the last 40 years, the emergence of the female athlete, the empowerment of the female athlete has been the big story. And Sports is usually, I'm not going to say always, but seems usually to be in the vanguard. You know, where society is going. You see it first happening in sports. Now, in some ways, sports is old fashioned and resistant to change, and there are plenty of examples of that as well. I mean, we could talk about golf clubs and that kind of stuff, but sports has sparked change and it's drawn our attention to issues. And I did a story about Al Campanis on the 30th. I guess it was the 25th anniversary at the time of his infamous Nightline interview where he said blacks lack the necessities to be coaches and general managers. And I interviewed Ted Koppel, and Ted Koppel told me, I mean, Ted Koppel, the greatest television newsman, I would argue, of the last 50 years, the guy, you know, he said the one episode of Nightline, the one edition of Nightline he gets asked about the most is the Al Campanis episode where he was so great in that moment and he was so fair, but persistent and tough. And, you know, but my point is that that moment, it sparked a discussion about a lot more than coaches in.

The NFL or whatever. Yeah, yeah. So, Jeremy, you've reported on a ton of stories in sports, and again, I'm a fan of many of them. But has there ever been one that you've done where, in retrospect, you look back and you feel you made a mistake?

Yeah, you know, I'm not sure if I would characterize it as a mistake, and it's complicated, but I was the guy covering the home run chase in 1998 for ESPN with Mark McGwire.

Wow.

You know, so I was there. I saw, I think, 20 of the 70 home runs he hit in person. And I dipped in a couple times early in the season to do stuff when he was on a great pace, I think. But I really picked it up in September, I think, when he had that crazy September.

So does that mean you interacted with Maris family as well?

I never interacted with Roger Maris family, no. But I was there when he broke the record when he hit 62. I mean, I was there, I think, for every home run from 52 to 70.

Wow.

And there had been the story that summer about the andro in the locker, which now seems like. I don't know if it was a red herring that he was planting or, oh, you know, if that's been the right way to put whatever it was. But. But looking back now, of course, 20 years later or even five years afterwards, I wish I approached that Story with more skepticism.

Do you think you were just so caught up in the moment, like, you couldn't believe this was happening?

You know, it was funny because, of course, it wasn't as if it wasn't out there in the ether. People were talking about steroids. People had talked about them with him going back years before, but the subject was kind of taboo. The andro story seemed to put everything to rest. Like, oh, he's not doing steroids that are.

Yeah, it's androstenedione, which at the time was a supplement that was basically legal, Right.

And question became, well, maybe it is legal, but he shouldn't be using it. And the guy was prying. And I certainly didn't say vouch for him and say he's clean or anything like that. But in the absence of evidence that he was cheating, we just kind of bought the story. And I wish I had been more skeptical because I don't know what I could have expressed at the time. And I'm not letting myself off the hook. It was the entire national media. There was nobody expressing any skepticism. Everybody was celebrating this. Everybody was so excited about the home run chase and Sammy and Mark and all that. I was around Sammy, too, but not the way that I was around Mark. I was covering Mark every day for, like a month. Plus, I wish I had been more skeptical now because everything I saw was fake. It was all fake. It doesn't mean anything anymore. You know, I saved the newspaper when Mark hit 62. I'm like, wow, I saw something really historic, and the whole country was. I mean, you would have thought that, you know, he'd landed on the moon. So I wish I approached that with more skepticism later when I covered cycling and I covered the Tour de France, and I covered Lance Armstrong's last two Tour de France victories, and then I covered his comeback as well. I did ask the questions, as I recall. You know, I asked them, lance, how does anybody do this without being on EPO or whatever? I mean, I asked the questions. But again, after he denies it, there was great reporting. There was some great reporting being done by David Walsh at the London Times. He got sued. The London Times. Lost a million pounds, I believe, which.

I'm sure they've got back more in.

Space, right, going after him. So I asked the questions, but it was kind of like everybody else asking the questions, but not digging deep enough to get to the truth, which was that Lance was cheating, too.

In some ways, it's a bit sad. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Roger Maris because he's sort of a footnote to this story. But in some ways, you could make the case he's still the home run king. And in that sense, that to me is where. And I'm probably biased, but I find the cycling quote unquote scandal to be less upsetting because it really was a uniform playing field.

It was everybody doing it.

I mean, you couldn't be a GC contender between 91 and 2010 without being on.

The protocols were too good. They were too effective.

Yeah. Whereas we do tend to forget what Mickey Mantle did. And what. I mean, Mickey Mantle, he's in a different league because he's so loved, but Maris sort of gets forgotten in a way. And when you think of that season when he hit 61 and how hated he was trying to do it and chase down Babe Ruth's record, like, I don't know. I just have this softest spot in my heart for this guy.

Oh. You know, and then that phony stuff with Maguire and Sosa paying tribute to Maris family at the time. I mean, that now we look at. And it's upsetting. This was Roger Maris legacy, that record, the 61, and it was stolen from him. And I think that's a fair way to characterize it. Look, a lot of guys were doing it.

Now, the counterargument, which again, I think the counterargument's a reasonable one, is, hey, the pitches were also doing it and the pitchers were harder to hit off. And does that normalize it? Does that equalize it?

Well, the evidence, of course, is that it didn't normalize it enough because the.

Offense is what exploded by which. Yeah.

And it's not just. It's the magnitude. You're the doctor. You understand this stuff. Just because they're both. Both using it doesn't mean that it's as beneficial to the pitchers as it is to the hitters. And we saw that.

Well, that's interesting, because when you think of it that way, and I can see why in hindsight, you know, and I've actually had this discussion with Lance, which was I actually believed Lance was clean until. And this might make me sound like a dope Alpe d'.

Wez.

Nope. Because this is so silly. You can do the math and justify on a Watts per kilo. So you could say, look, given what he did in 93 as a world champion in Oslo, like the stuff that.

He would say back then, I was a world champion before.

But even doing the numbers, like you look at the Watts per Kilo, then. And the watts per kilo on the climb, when it became clear to me that he absolutely had to be doing this, was when Tyler Hamilton came out. Because Tyler Hamilton was the first guy that came out that I thought was truly believable. I don't know. I don't know Tyler, I've never met him, but he just struck me as so credible. And when Tyler basically spilled his beans, and that's when you realized how ubiquitous it was. Because prior to Tyler, like, you could make the case, man, not everybody's doing it. But when Tyler came out and said, oh, no, no, no, no, we're all doing this.

Also, the stuff with the Andreus, it was, frankly, I remember thinking at the time, well, why would they be lying? I mean, the position, as I remember it, was they were compelled to testify, to tell what happened in that hospital room. They didn't volunteer, they weren't selling books. They weren't doing anything like that. They were asked under oath what happened, what was the conversation? Because Lance was getting sued and they said he had done steroids. And so it was easier for me.

To dismiss that because I always thought Betsy had a little bit of a different agenda. I thought deep down Betsy was more pissed that Frankie had done these drugs behind her. Her back. I always thought there was something going on there.

Right. I just didn't see why they would.

Lie under O. I always thought Betsy kind of wanted to be in the limelight more. But to me, Tyler was the most credible cyclist to come forward.

And everybody who was covering it, and I was there for three summers. If you'd asked them, your life's at stake, what's the right answer here? You know, the lady or the tire, like, so, yeah.

Yeah.

Who would have said, he's doing it. Yeah, they're all doing it.

It.

He's doing it. But we didn't have the proof.

Yeah.

I mean, water couldn't bust them, the cycling federation couldn't bust them, the French couldn't bust them, the Spanish couldn't bust them. They had a very sophisticated. I mean, in some ways, very sophisticated, almost clownishly. Also brazen in some ways. You know, they were so good at concealing it, and they were so aggressive about going after anybody who questioned them. But we all thought.

And I will say this, though, Jeremy, it really chaps my ass that those seven years have no champion, and yet you look in the years before and the years after and there's a champion. I mean, to me, that is ridiculous. And I. This will be.

There's a lot that's ridiculous.

This will be the single most unpopular thing I'll ever say, I'm sure. I absolutely believe Lance Armstrong deserves his yellow jerseys back. Because if you're going to take his away, you better take away Pantanis, you better take away Ulrich, and you better take away Bjorn Reese and probably Miguel Induran. And, you know, I mean, they did.

Take away some of those. Did that.

Am I wrong? No, none. It is ridiculous.

You're right. That doesn't make any sense.

It's totally crazy.

Well, and they certainly took away Floyd's.

Yes. But then they gave it to the guy right behind me. I mean, it's so ridiculous. Yeah. So. Well, anyway, no, that's. I can, I can see how now with the benefits of hindsight, and you feel foolish for having been swept up into it. We all do. Right? I mean, we feel like.

Yeah. And at the same time, it's like, well, you ask the question, you get your kind of same response from Lance. You know, why would I do that? Why would I put that in my body? You know? And everybody was so swept up in the story, the redemption story, the comeback story, the survivor story. It was tough.

I think it's interesting today to look at cycling because, to be honest with you, I'm too far away from the sport and the numbers and they're still very concealed in what they do. But I still think there's something going on. I just don't know what it is.

Me neither.

What's the most interesting story you think that's out there that isn't being told yet in sports?

There's so many stories that I think we don't pay attention to. I mean, they're big issue stories. Obviously. The head trauma story is the biggest.

I think, the biggest story of the.

Last 20 years in sports. That's a story that's still obviously in the news all the time that is being covered.

Are you surprised it hasn't had a bigger impact? I mean, or maybe it hasn't. I just, I'm not aware of the metrics.

But I would say it's had a big impact. I mean, youth participation, tackle football in certain parts of the country plummeting.

And if that happens, it's a time question until college football starts to decline. And if college football declines, then what does the NFL look like in 20 years?

And that's the million dollar question, right? Like, does football have an existential problem? Does it find a way to change the nature of what it's been for so long in a way that will Alleviate concerns about the long term effects of head trauma? Does it become more regionalized where we see it in certain parts of the country where people say this is part of what we do, this is part of our culture, and we reject the narrative that it's going to destroy the brains of those who play? We don't know. We don't know. I mean, of course, what we do know is that everything changes. When you're in the moment, it seems like nothing will change. The NFL will always be number one. Football will always be the most popular sport. You know, that's probably how it felt to fans of baseball 60 years ago.

Or to fans of boxing in the.

1930S, in the 1930s, or fans of harness racing in the first decade of the 20th century. But what we do know is everything changes. Is head trauma going to be what changes the way we consume football, or is it only going to change the way that we participate in football? Does a decline in participation necessarily lead to a decline in fan interest and viewership? The other thing I have learned is not only does nothing stay number one and everything changes, but no one can see the future. I mean, nobody is good at seeing the future with anything. Those who can, many just get lucky and they don't do it a lot, or they'd be in Vegas or now New Jersey, I guess.

I'd love to know what you think is the story that's not being told yet. Because I think about it a little bit from my lens, and one of the things that I find interesting is why drugs will always exist in some sports and why some sports seem relatively free of drugs. Because I think drugs would help any athlete in any sport. I mean, I can't think of a sport in which a drug, a performance enhancing drug, won't make a difference. And yet there are some sports that are relatively clean, like swimming. If you look at the United States and Australia, the two most dominant. Now, there are certainly countries that have had lots of cheating, but I do believe, and I don't think history will prove me wrong, but it could. I don't think that Australia and the United States have a doping program in swimming, and yet they're the two most dominant countries. But yet, if you look at other Olympic sports, I mean, I mean, I am convinced the track and field is always going to be full of growth hormone because, you know, it's undetectable. Right?

That's the story I was gonna say is the biggest story once you brought up drugs, is that human growth hormone is undetectable. So when we talk about guys who are clean. We talk about female athletes who are clean. We really don't know what we're talking about. Yeah, because HGH is effective. It does work. It makes a huge difference. And they say they're tests that you detect it, but they really don't. Right.

You can test for its byproducts, but it's not like testosterone. If a person takes exogenous testosterone, you can look for pair molecules, you can look for epitestosterone, and if that's not rising at the levels of testosterone, you know, they're taking it exogenously. And you can look at other hormones that get suppressed when you take testosterone. So if you're taking testosterone exogenously from outside the body, the pituitary hormones that tell the body to make it luteinizing hormone, follicle stimulating hormone, they go down. Yeah, there's lots of ways. But no, I think human growth hormone, I don't have a lot of experience with it even clinically to know how effective it is, but I think it's used pretty rampantly. My intuition is that that is certainly in most sports, got to be the drug of choice right now. And I think from my standpoint, the interest is, do we have any sense of what the long term harm is, which I don't pretend to know?

Yeah, I don't either, obviously.

Well, we've got to get to this thing tonight, don't we?

We do.

We do.

We have to get there. We got about a mile and a quarter to cover. So it's rush hour in New York.

We're gonna walk there faster than we're gonna go. Last question. What is your favorite 30 for 30 that you weren't involved in making? Wow.

If I'm not involved, give me three.

Without even ranking them. If you want. Just give me a few of your 30. 30 for 30s that you love.

It's an answer I think a lot of people give. I thought the Escobars, the two Escobars was great.

I thought that was so heartbreaking.

Yeah. I was at that game at the Rose Bowl.

You were?

I was at that game.

I was 90. 94.

94. I remember that vividly.

Do you buy that if Pablo Escobar was still alive, Escobar would not have been killed?

You know, it's been about nine years since that came out. I don't remember my feelings. I don't even remember. Was that the conclusion that was drawn based on.

I don't even remember if that was the conclusion drawn from the 30 for 30 or if it was just my conclusion post hoc, and maybe it was, like, rejuvenated when I watched Narcos a few years ago, and I got all reminded of everything in Escobar's life and sort of the weird sense of loyalty that he had. Like, he was sort of this evil guy with a. With like, a good streak in him. And would he have. You know, I don't know, but I wondered.

Yeah, I thought that was really powerful and well done. I thought the Night show was really, really well done as well. That's a very recent one. There have been so many. Last year alone. There was the two Bills thing.

Oh, the two Bills was pretty darn good.

That's interesting. Yeah. Those guys.

Well, you know, one of the ones that I loved watching, even when it came out, because it came out so Bo Jackson, when I was a kid, like, that was my prime of.

I couldn't say that when I was in that one.

That's right.

I'm disqualified from mentioning that one when.

I go back and watch that. And my wife and I were talking about this because we watched it for, like, a third time a year ago. Maybe we had that moment of, are you freaking kidding me? Like, I almost forgot how athletic that guy was. Like, you could make the case he's the greatest athlete ever.

Well, my father said he was. My father voted for him as the greatest athlete of the 20th century and the sports century polling. And. And I think he had a great case. It's interesting, though. Recently, I was with somebody who had played. I was interviewing Matt Millen, who was waiting for a new heart. Just got a heart on Christmas Eve. He's doing well at this point. I'm going to see him again next week. And Matt was telling me, you know, the teammate in Oakland, he said, the funny thing is. And he had teammates who said this. Like, Bo was obviously in. Incredible track athlete, incredible football player, incredible baseball player, but he couldn't dribble basketball.

Interesting.

And he couldn't. This is what matters. He couldn't catch the football, which, you know, because he was a pretty good defensive player in the outfield. Like, he was not a good pass catcher. I mean, he didn't know the right technique to catch a football. As a running back coming out of the backfield, it was all hands, and he didn't know how to use his body to catch a ball. And he said. I think he said, you know, there were guys they tried to teach me, and I say, so it's an interesting dichotomy, right? Because he's this incredible athlete with incredible hand eye coordination, incredible strength, incredible speed, could have won the Olympic decathlon, I think, honestly, if he dedicated himself to that. But there are also these kind of little gaps.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which reminds, when we talk about him, of course, then I also think about, you know, what story hasn't been done yet. Because it's been done, but it hasn't been closed. I'm kind of waiting for Barry Bonds to just acknowledge the steroid use. Like, I feel like, aren't we past the point where this matters? Can't we just have an open and honest discussion about it and close the chapter?

Well, Sammy Sosa would tell you, no, I did something with Sammy this year. He certainly wasn't prepared to go that far. I think, from Barry's perspective, what does he have to gain? And Barry's always had. How do I put this? A complicated relationship with the media.

Yeah, yeah. I think that's putting it mildly.

And I don't. I don't think he cares. I don't think he has any interest in creating closure for us.

I'm gonna create a lot of enemies by saying this, but I wish that Barry Bonds could just acknowledge what he did and get into the hall of Fame and be done with it, and we could acknowledge that that was the era that we were in. A lot of people would find that a very controversial view, but.

Well, I don't think it's necessarily gonna work either, because Mark McGuire's admitted it and he's not in the hall of Fame.

Yeah.

Truthfully, they're different.

But, Barry, you could make a much better case for Barry bonds than Mark McGuire.

Yeah, you could. Could. You know, it's an interesting thing, though, right? Like, I've thought about this a lot, probably way too much over the years, the hall of Fame and steroids and all that. And I've heard the argument many times. Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds are different because they were hall of Fame players before they started taking steroids. Although, of course, we don't know when they started taking steroids. And this is based on the assumption that they did take steroids. And it's hard to state that as just a fact. It's more complicated than that. But let's assume they did take steroids and they should be in the hall of Fame because they were these kinds of once in a lifetime, once in a generation players before I said, okay, I get that, but they're being kept out because they desecrated the record book in the minds of the voters by cheating. They broke faith with the history of the game and the record book and all that. They made a mockery of these hallowed numbers, which means so much in baseball, not other sports. Any. Nobody says, well, Joe Jackson, I guess a few people, Joe Jackson's not in the hall of Fame. Nobody would dispute the fact that he was a Hall of Fame player before the 1919 World Series. You know, it's like, well, he should be in the hall of Fame because up until the point that he participated in the fix or did not do anything to stand in its way, he was a Hall of fame player. Yeah.356 career hitter. He's one of the greatest hitters of all time. Babe Ruth, I think, called him the greatest hitter of all time. He'd been around long enough. He's got the, the career numbers and all that. But you don't make the argument, well, okay, but let's put him in the hall of Fame because of what he did. It's what you did at that moment that disqualifies you.

Yeah. These are such tough questions. And for the sake of time, I'm not going to take us down the path of cycling, which is another sport where I think you can't do Grand Tours without drugs. And we've had a period. There was a 20 year period from, call it 91 to 2011, 2010, I would say when. And the drug use was simply comical. And what do we do with those years? But anyway, all that said, Jeremy, this has been. I think it will be the shortest podcast I've ever done. But that's only because we have this time constraint. I apologize, we're gonna have to do it again then. I'm in. We'll do around two.

I'm all in.

But no, this has been super interesting. And I just think that I have a complicated relationship with sports. Sometimes I feel guilty for caring. Sometimes I feel like, why do I care so much about this? Why am I not caring more about something else that quote, unquote matters more? But in the end, I think why I care about sports is they are basically the substrate for some of the greatest metaphors we have in life. And I think when I think about why do I want my kids to play sports, it's not because I think any one of them will ever be a professional athlete. It's because of what they learn about themselves in this quest.

There's no doubt about that. And the other thing is, I mean, sometimes I think most people are over this, but kind of the snobbish wave, you know, sports is one thing, but the fine arts are something else. Or you know, ballet or opera or theater are on some plane that's above sports. Look, I'll say this, there is nothing else. I mean I'm a Giants fan. I was at the super bowl, Super Bowl 25 when they won that game against the Bills in last second when Scott Norwood missed that kick. That kind of joy you feel, by.

The way, that's another amazing that might have been.

That was good.

The Four Falls of Buffalo is there's nothing else.

I am a fan of the theater. I'm a fan of the arts. I'm a fan of music. You don't go to a concert or you don't go to a Broadway show or anything like that and the end of it go completely nuts. The way that say for instance at Super Bowl 25 I was going nuts. Or all those hundreds of thousands of other fans are going I was at the World cup final in 19. I've been to three World cup final games. I was only one. The one in France in 98 where the home team won. France wins its first World cup at home in that stadium in St. Denis with 100,000 people. There's nothing else that gives us that kind of moment and that's universal. I mean that's around the whole world. So there's something special about sports that we've got to acknowledge.

I think your point about it being the linga Frank is actually I'd never thought of it that way, but I think you're right. It may be the greatest lingua frank of them all.

Or as I said it incorrectly, lingua frank.

Maybe I'm saying it incorrectly.

I think you're right. I think you're right.

Well Jeremy, this is awesome man. Thank you so much for your time and let's go watch 42 to 1.

For me it's only the 42nd time.

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