Another reason I don’t listen to sports talk radio

Came across this “he said/he said” item on the Bob’s Blitz blog.

I never could stand WFAN’s Mike and the Mad Dog program. For one thing, the intro was terribly obnoxious, with Chris “Mad Dog” Russo (or as Steve Somers, another WFAN host called him, “the angry puppy”) screaming his greetings. They would constantly repeat their comments. Francesa, in particular, would berate the listener; Russo’s job seemed to be agreeing with everything Mike said.

Anyway…

A renewed feud between Francesa, who now works solo, and Phil Mushnick, the NY Post sports media critic, regarding something the former apparently said on-air and subsequently denied about Phillies’ second baseman Chase Utley? I can’t keep up, but it gave Mushnick the opportunity to bring up an eight-year-old column as proof of Francesa’s past history of misstatement followed by denial, in which he criticized the then-partners for comments made following 9/11. In his column of Nov. 2 titled “You’re on, Francesa,” Mushnick writes

Days after the 9/11 attacks, Francesa, global affairs expert (it’s a gift), launched two bigoted, backwoods and facts-depraving commentaries blaming both Israel and American Jews for America’s peril at the hands of terrorists.

Francesa also said the Jews he knows are disloyal Americans in that they would go to war to defend Israel but not the United States.

In the wake of an attack on the U.S. by Islamic lunatics, Francesa even called upon American Jews to prove their virtue as Americans, to choose between Israel, which he called “a failed experiment,” and the U.S.

As a third-generation American Jew, whose great-uncle was a WWI doughboy, and whose father was a WWII Naval Lt., then commander of the Staten Island chapter of the Jewish War Veterans, I was, shall we say, displeased by Francesa’s determination that the time had come for me to swear allegiance to the United States.

On Sept. 23, 2001, the above appeared in this column. In WFAN’s response, on behalf of Francesa, station boss Mark Chernoff denied that Francesa said any of that — despite thousands, including WFAN staff, having heard what I’d heard. My challenge to produce those tapes was ignored.

“Bob” helpfully reprints a letter from the ADL’s national director Abe Foxman to Chernoff in the wake of the incident. But rather than reinvent the wheel, I refer you directly to Bob’s Blizt’s blog, which includes a YouTube clip of Francesa in which he blubbers, in effect, that some of his best friends are Jews, that he never said what Mushnick said he said, and that he couldn’t be “that way” because he grew up in a “great melting pot” as a child.

As I always used to say on the ball field when intervening in a brewing fight “Boys, boys, boys.”

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Kaplan’s Korner on Jews and Sports © 2009 New Jersey Jewish News

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