Loudmouth: Tales (and Fantasies) of Sports, Sex, and Salvation from Behind the Microphone

by Craig Carton

  One year later, I had established myself as one of the top reporters covering the Eagles. Norman Braman owned the team, and Eagles fans hated him. He wasn’t a Philadelphian, didn’t have the charisma to win anybody over, and had a general apathy for the city. I had gotten a phone call out of the blue from a trusted friend saying that Braman had agreed to sell the franchise to an unnamed person. “Fuck you,” I said, but my friend reiterated that he had seen the deal and it would be announced soon. I could break the story right then and there.

  Up to this point, the stories I had broken were your garden-variety: players being let go or acquired, who would start, and so on. This news was huge. I called Bigby up right away and told him what I had. He told me to talk to Angelo Cataldi off the air, because Cataldi had been a reporter for a long time, and he could help me vet the reporting. I called Cataldi. He didn’t buy my info on face value. He told me I should call Harry Gamble, the Eagles’ general manager, and see what he said.

  I knew Gamble but didn’t have a deep relationship with him at the time, as he was an older man on his last NFL legs. He didn’t have time to get to know a young reporter. I called him anyway and got his secretary. I told her that I needed to speak with Gamble right away. She asked why, and I said it was urgent news and that I needed his time. She told me he wouldn’t be free all day, and right there I had to make a decision whether to tell her why I needed to talk with Gamble now.

  I said, “Ma’am, I am about to announce on WIP Radio that the Eagles have been sold. I can do that with or without talking to Harry. I’d like to be able to do it having talked with him.” Dead silence for about ten seconds, then bam, Harry Gamble is on the phone. “Harry, it’s Craig Carton. I am going to report that the Eagles have been sold. Do you have a comment for me?” “No comment,” he said. And that was it. I had the goods, and now the Eagles knew it. I had to get on the air ASAP and report it before they did, or I would lose my scoop.

  I called Cataldi off-air while he was hosting the morning show and told him what Harry said. He said that was enough for him to go with it. He put me on hold and said, “You’re next.” Sixty seconds later, as the morning show came out of a commercial break, I heard Cataldi say that WIP had a big announcement, and for the details here is Craig Carton.

  I came on the air and said matter-of-factly that Norman Braman had sold the Eagles to a mystery buyer from the Northeast, and that the new owner would be in town that week. Pending formal NFL approval, the Eagles had been sold. Shazam! The biggest sports story to hit Philly since the death of Jerome Brown—and I had it before anyone else.

  I called my contact and pleaded with him to tell me the buyer’s name and background. After an hour of back-and-forth, I got it: Jeff Lurie was the new owner of the Eagles.

  I called back in to the morning show and dropped the second bombshell. Lurie, who had no background in sports, was the NFL’s newest owner. Jeff Lurie tells the story that he was sitting in the back of a cab in Philly on his way to the airport, convinced that there was no way anybody knew that he had just agreed to buy the Eagles. The cabbie had WIP on, and Lurie was listening at the moment I said his name. My report forced the Eagles and Jeffrey Lurie to hold a press conference earlier than they’d wanted to, to acknowledge that the story was accurate.

  Breaking the story catapulted me to being a major presence on WIP, and as a reporter. Tom Bigby floated the idea of me moving from nights to middays to help the sagging ratings of the Jody McDonald and Glen Macnow show. Yet despite the success, I had no idea how I was perceived by the rest of the media in town. And I later found out that you never know who is listening at any given point in time, and how they will react to what you say—especially when you say it about them.

  The ringing woke me up with the volume of a freight train. The phone must have rung no fewer than fifty times before I gave in, rolled over, and squinted at the time on the digital clock. It was 4:33 in the morning, and the phone wouldn’t stop. I grabbed it and muttered, “Who the fuck is this?”

  The voice on the other end came right to the point. “Yo, Craig, get your ass to room 810 right now.”

  “Huh, who is this?”

  “It’s William Smithe, muthafucka. Now get your ass to my room. We got a problem.”

  I had been out all night with William (not his real name) and seven other Eagles players. We were in Seattle on a Friday night in December 1995, a full two days before the Eagles were to play the Seahawks. The Eagles were riding high, having won three straight games. They were expected to beat the Seahawks, who limped into the game with a 5–7 record.

  Ray Rhodes, the head coach of the Eagles, knew better than to let a group of grown men worth millions of dollars hit the town for forty-eight hours before a game. Ray claimed at the time that he did it because he was concerned about traveling across country and then immediately playing a game. He figured—or so he said—that if he got there on Friday and gave the guys a chance to get acclimated, he’d have a better chance of winning.

  The truth is that he’d promised the men a vacation day away from their families if they won the week before. So here I was at 4:33 in the morning, being ordered to go to room 810 in the Doubletree Hotel. Oh, I forgot to mention that there was usually an 11 p.m. curfew the night before the game, but since the game wasn’t until Sunday, there was no curfew at all.

  Genius.

  The night itself was typical for this group of guys, me included: a big dinner with more drinks and shots than anyone should ever drink postcollege, and then right to the clubs. Everywhere we went, our group attracted the best-looking girls, and lots of them. I like to think it was because I was having a really good night, but when you travel with eight recognizable football players making millions, a leper with a rash could have a good night.

  The evening ended about 3 a.m., after we closed down the top strip club in town. Even though the girls at every place were all over the group, we left together on the limo bus we had rented for the evening. No women joined us—on the bus, at least.

  What the women—football groupies to their core—do is ingenious. They find out what hotel the team is at and try to get guys to give up their room keys. Without a key, you can’t access the floor, since it’s secured. Guys can’t be seen bringing women up to their rooms, because it’s a surefire way to get suspended or fined for breaking team rules, and it would fuck it up for everybody else. So they slip a girl the key at the club, tell them to head over, and by the time the player gets back, there’s a naked woman waiting for him.

  Or at least that’s the plan. Apparently when the plan doesn’t work, you call a hooker to come over instead, as I found out at about 4:37 that morning.

  I threw a shirt on and stumbled down to room 810. I knocked and the door flew open. WS was expecting me. There were some players and their friends in the suite, and there was a lot of commotion and noise. I asked WS what was going on. “Look in there,” he said, pointing to the bedroom. Before I even opened the door, I heard the problem. The problem was a shrieking twenty-something hooker with no top on and wearing what amounted to ripped spaghetti for underwear. She was pissed. I asked her what the problem was and she said, “Who the fuck are you?”

  I turned to WS and said, “What’s going on?” Before he could answer, the woman interrupted and said, “I’ll tell you what the fuck is going on! These motherfuckers owe me money, and I ain’t leaving till I get it.”

  “What do they owe you for?” I asked.

  She snapped back at me, “I blew every one of these motherfuckers, and they got to pay me.”

  Before I could process that, she picked up the room phone and dialed 911. That call started the clock. Everyone would have to get to their rooms and pretend to be asleep before the police showed up.

  I asked her what she was owed. To my astonishment, she replied one hundred dollars. A hundred bucks for blowing eleven guys, and these assholes wouldn’t pay her? I turned to the group of men, each one big enough to squash me between his fingers, and sa
id, “A hundred bucks, guys. Are you that stupid? Pay the woman!” And then I heard a line I will never forget:

  “She wasn’t any good. Fuck that bitch, I ain’t paying her.”

  They were collectively worth north of $50 million, but they wouldn’t give her $100. I grabbed WS, who had a new multiyear, multimillion-dollar deal, and said, “Scrape together three hundred dollars, or you are all fucked.” After a lot of resistance, I had a pile of cash with singles, fives, and tens from the group. Cheap fucks, I thought. I gave the hooker the $300 and called hotel security. They escorted her out a back entrance, minutes before the police hit the floor. Thank God, nobody ever got caught.

  Two days later, the Eagles lost by double digits to the Seahawks, and Ray Rhodes announced he would never fly to an away-game city on a Friday ever again.

  After I broke the story about the Eagles being sold to Jeff Lurie, I was the new number-one source for Eagles news, and at the perfect time. Tom Sredenschek, the guy I hosted my first tryout show with, called me a few weeks later. He had become a well-respected sports producer and now was working on a new show on Spectacor that would be called Eagles Magazine or Eagles Insider. He and his team agreed that I would be a great host for the show, as I was now synonymous with the Eagles and would bring them some instant credibility and promotion through WIP.

  I met with Tom and his group at Dirty Frank’s, a downtown bar in Philly. It all went great. They laid out the show for me and their expectations, and we left with a handshake that we had a deal. The show would start two months from that meeting. Assuming we could agree on salary, we were as good as gold.

  Tom Sredenschek called two days later. I assumed he was calling to make the official monetary offer. He was solemn, though, and began by saying he didn’t know how to say it, but we had hit a snag. When he told the executives that I was going to be the host, there was a problem. It wasn’t that I wasn’t qualified or the right guy for the show. They agreed that I was. The problem was that Larry Rosen was an executive with Spectacor now, and was still the main host, too. He hadn’t forgotten what I’d said about him on the Ugly Show. He agreed that I was the best man for the job, but insisted that we’d all have a face-to-face before he would green-light my being the host.

  We all met the next day in the Spectacor offices and waited in a conference room until Larry came in. He was late on purpose, and came in with one thing in mind: making me pay for saying he was ugly. He walked into the room. I knew then that I had no shot at the job.

  I also realized that I was right. He was the ugliest guy I had ever seen.

  “So what’s going on?” he asked with a wry smile. Tom explained that we were all set to go with the show, but we knew there was an issue with Larry and me, and we were hoping to work it out.

  Larry looked right at me and said, “So am I the ugliest person you have ever seen on TV?”

  “Larry, that show was more than a year ago. We were just having fun. You can’t be mad about that still, are you?” I asked.

  “Tell me to my face that I’m the ugliest guy you ever saw on TV.” He wanted to embarrass and belittle me. So I went the other way. Knowing what he wanted, I refused to apologize. I said, “Larry, you gotta get over yourself and have a sense of humor.” I took advantage of the undisputable truth that it’s always good not to need a job when presented with another one. Had I been unemployed, the rest of the meeting might have been different. But as I was making more money than I ever thought I would, and I didn’t need the TV job. I had control.

  “Beg me for the job, Craig. Tell me how sorry you are for what you said, and beg me to let you work on my network.”

  “Not going to happen, Larry.”

  He went on a five-minute tirade about how much pussy he got and what a stud he was. He worked himself up with spit foaming at the corners of his mouth. I couldn’t help but start laughing, which incensed him even more. “What the fuck is so funny? You don’t think I get lots of pussy?”

  “I don’t know or care how much pussy you get; I just know that this is the single funniest thing I have ever seen, and you are still to this day the ugliest guy I’ve ever seen on television. But if you want the best show these guys can make, then I am the host. If not, so be it. I do have a day job. Thank you for your time.” I walked out.

  He chased me into the parking lot. “Carton!” he yelled. I turned around and he shouted, “I’m a pussy maven! I get more pussy than you could ever imagine! Pussy comes to me—I don’t go after it!”

  I didn’t get the job.

  The WIP midday show didn’t do badly because it was a bad sports show. It did badly because it was a straight sports show, and because Glen Macnow was and is the single most boring radio person on the planet. If ever a guy must have had pictures of his boss, it was Macnow. He could fuck up a wet dream without even being in the same zip code.

  Anyhow, I was becoming a bigger star there, and was making $100,000 when I resigned from my one-year deal. Bigby floated middays to me, and even represented it as guaranteed to happen, but he never came through with it.

  At the same time that I had my first real fling with stardom, I acquired a legitimate stalker. Being single and having cash in my pocket, I went out just about every night of the week. When my shift ended at eleven or after a ball game, I went right out to Philadelphia’s South Street, which had the hot bars all year long, or I went to Delaware Avenue outdoor bars in the summertime.

  The summer of 1995 was no exception, and I got around. I was making up for not having any girls at the time of my bar mitzvah, and I made up for it every night that I could. Apparently there was a girl about my age who was a huge sports fan, who’d seen me from a distance and had begun telling her friends that we were dating.

  I had no idea about this until one day I was at a bar and a woman came up to me and suddenly threw a drink on me. “You have some nerve doing what you did to Alyssa,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  She went on to say how rude it was of me to leave Alyssa at a bar earlier that evening, and then to start hitting on girls at this new bar. I had no idea what she was talking about, and after ten minutes, she figured out that I wasn’t lying. She never apologized for the drink in my face but told me she knew where Alyssa was, and that for months she had been telling people we were dating.

  Now, it was possible that I had forgotten a girl I hooked up with, but trust me, I wasn’t dating anybody, and I wasn’t in a relationship. I did, however, want to know what Alyssa looked like, and hoped that she was hot, if nothing else.

  Later that night I was at Rock Lobster, an outdoor bar on the Delaware River, and I saw the group of girls who had accosted me earlier. One of my buddies said hi to them, and he was told that Alyssa was there. I spotted her from about twenty-five yards away, standing by herself, awkwardly looking in my direction but not knowing that I could see her. She was pretty but there was something wrong with her. Not something like she had a cleft palate or a limp, but something in-between-her-ears wrong with her. She had the runaway-bride look. I approached her and introduced myself, and asked her if she was all right. She muttered something, then turned and ran away.

  I didn’t think much of it until a few hours later. When my buddies and I got my back to our apartment, it was about four in the morning and we had a few girls with us. When we walked into the lobby, Alyssa was there waiting for me.

  “Who is that you’re with, and how dare you bring another woman home when you knew I would be waiting here for you?” she demanded.

  Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. “Alyssa, you know we aren’t dating. What are you talking about?” With that she went after the girl standing next to me. The front desk guy called the police, and we restored some order to the lobby. I told her that she had a choice: get arrested and have me press charges, or wake the fuck up and back off. She went home before the cops showed up, and I never thought another thing about her until the summer of 1997, two years later.

  I had been app
roached by a guy named Ross Levinsohn who was running a company called CBS SportsLine down in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He wanted to know if I had any interest in being nationally syndicated and moving to Florida. This same Ross Levinsohn years later would convince Rupert Murdoch to buy Myspace for $580 million, and years after that, would become interim CEO of Yahoo!

  Levinsohn and I talked back and forth about it, and when the day came to make plans for me to come down and visit the company headquarters, he told me to call and set it up with the gal that answered the phone. I called, and a young woman said hello. I said, “My name is Craig Carton. Ross Levinsohn asked me to call to set up a trip down to see you guys.”

  Next I heard the following: “Uh, hi Craig, I’ve been waiting for your call. It’s Alyssa. How have you been? I can’t wait to start working with you!”

  Unreal. It was my stalker, alive and well, about to become my coworker.

  It may be my background, but I start puking whenever I show up for a company softball game and see a guy wearing full Major League Baseball attire. For some reason, it pisses me off.

  I grew up playing ball in blue jeans and a T-shirt. Sadly though, there are men out there who think it is imperative to dress exactly like a professional. The only time it’s ever appropriate for a nonprofessional athlete to dress like a pro is Halloween for the kids’ sake, or when your name is Candy and you’re about to dance to Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” for tips.

  Actually, I’ve always been fascinated by the way women dress. Why, for example, do fat chicks wear spandex pants to the gym with the spandex Speedo shorts on top of the pants? It doesn’t look good. It only accentuates their weight issues. Do they look in the mirror before they leave the house and say, “Oh yeah, I’m killing it today?” I also wonder when I go to a dance club and see hot and not-so-hot girls wearing miniskirts that wouldn’t be long on a five-year-old. How do they think that guys don’t assume they are easy and sex is guaranteed? Your vagina is on display every time you spin around. You had to know that when you left the house.