by Craig Carton
Even better, I have realized that women dress in packs, the way wolves hunt. So every girl that leaves the house to party has had her outfit analyzed and approved by a minimum of three other girls. “Oh yeah, sister, you look awesome; how do I look?” It’s even funnier to me when the boyfriends of these tramps get pissed when other guys eye-fuck their women. It ain’t our fault that your girl basically has a neon sign on that says, “I wanna have sex!” It’s your fault for letting her out of the house like that.
But back to sportswear. Every time I see a guy with wristbands, stirrups, and baseball pants getting ready to play in a Central Park softball league game, I want to punch him right in the face. It’s softball! I show up barefoot in cargo pants and a tank top, hoping someone remembered to bring beer.
And it’s not just softball games with these guys. It’s the batting cages, their kids’ Little League games, Wiffle ball outings. It’s like they’re desperate for attention, or desperate for someone to think because they dress like they can play, they must be able to play.
We’ve all seen these guys, and we all react the same way. At first we try to figure out who he is, then we watch him practice, and then we just laugh our asses off and mock him with our buddies. The best is when the guy has an actual player’s name on the back of the jersey. Then we can refer to him by name: “Jeter’s up . . . Wow, I can’t believe Derek Jeter is playing softball with us . . . Hey, I struck out Derek Jeter in softball . . . Wow, look at Jeter run . . . Hey Jeter, where’s A-Rod?” and so on.
There’s nothing worse than striking out in softball. I don’t care if it’s arc, modified, or fast-pitch, you’ve got to make contact. There’s a difference between swinging for strike three and watching it fly right past you into the catcher’s glove for the third strike. But either way, if you ever strike out in softball, it’s time to retire your sneakers. If you lined a bunch of guys up in a police lineup, and you had a guy who peed his pants, a guy who was a premature ejaculator, a guy who likes to watch Glee, a guy in his thirties who still lives with his parents, a forty-year-old virgin, and a guy who struck out in softball—the guy who struck out would be the most embarrassing dude there.
I’ve tried a million times to understand these numbskulls who wear pro uniforms, and I just can’t. Are they wearing the outfit to attract girls? Can’t be, because there isn’t a girl on the planet who would fall for a guy wearing eye black, stirrup socks, and a sweatband around his forearm, while lugging his gear in an Easton bat bag, along with whatever other stuff the pros seem to use. It can’t be because he thinks that’s the required outfit. Go to a softball game anywhere, and he’ll be the only guy dressed that way.
So what is it that makes these douchebags think it’s appropriate to dress up to play softball? And it isn’t just softball. It’s every sport.
I was once playing hoops at a sporting club in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, with some friends. A few other guys showed up and asked us to play full court. We were happy to oblige. One of them turned out to be a member of the group Boyz II Men (the tall one; not the chubby one, and not the really skinny one). When he took off his jacket and sweats, he was wearing an authentic Chicago Bulls Michael Jordan jersey and shorts. He had the socks and Air Jordans on, too. It was like he robbed the in-store mannequin that they dressed in Jordan’s authentic gear to show you how cool MJ looked in it.
We couldn’t stop laughing, but then we thought, There is no way some guy, and in this case he’s a semi-famous guy, is going to go to a gym to run some ball and dress that way, unless he can play his ass off. Turns out, like most tools who dress up like professionals to play pickup sports, he couldn’t play dead. He couldn’t dribble, he shot the ball like he was from Mars, and he called a foul on every play. What a clown.
Some of you might be booshie and belong to a country club and have no idea what I mean, so next time you go to the club, spot the first guy dressed like Roger Federer with a tennis racket bag, tight white European shorts, and whatever else tennis players wear. It’s the same exact guy we see playing softball dressed like Derek Jeter.
So we know it doesn’t turn the ladies on, we know it doesn’t indicate that they can play—what is it then? Well, I minored in psychology and learned all that Freud shit and Piaget garbage, and I’ve figured it out. After several shots of Reserva de la Familia tequila one night, the answer came to me. Why would any adult dress up like John McEnroe to play tennis, or like Albert Pujols to play softball, or like MJ to play hoops?
They’re losers. End of story.
Don’t be that guy. Nobody likes that guy; women won’t fuck that guy; and nobody will give that guy a ride home after the game.
The negotiations with Ross Levinsohn of SportsLine were taking forever. I insisted that he fly me into Fort Lauderdale, figuring I could close the deal face-to-face a lot quicker than on the phone. It was June 1997. I was fresh off a major scandal in Philadelphia regarding my report that Eric Lindros missed a game because he was hungover.
The story, which followed me my entire radio career, went like this:
On February 11, 1997, the Flyers played Ottawa and won the game; nothing newsworthy.
On February 13 and 15, they were set to have a home-and-home with the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Lindros missed the game on the 13th for what the team called “back issues,” and then he missed the home game on the 15th, for the same reason. Problem was, they lied about why he missed the game on the 15th. As big as this story became, my “report” of it was as innocuous as possible and garnered no attention whatsoever for three full days.
Two weeks later, on February 28, I was filling in for Steve Fredericks and cohosting the afternoon show on WIP with Mike Missanelli. We were live from a Slack’s Hoagie Shack in New Jersey.
At one point during the show, the Flyers were being discussed, and a caller phoned in to say how upset he was. He could only afford to take his kid to one game a year, and he chose February 15. They felt let down that Lindros wasn’t on the ice. Lindros was his son’s favorite player. I commented, “And it’s a real shame that he missed the game because he was hungover.” We said goodbye to the caller, and then Mike asked me what I meant. “He missed the game because he was hungover from Valentine’s Day celebrating, and frankly if I were him, I would be doing the same thing, but I would have made it in to work the next day,” I said. End of conversation.
For the next two hours of the show, we did not take a single call about it. We never brought it up again. It was a nonissue. Saturday, nothing said or written about it anywhere.
Sunday, not a single article or column or call to the radio station. I hadn’t even thought about it again.
Monday morning, Mr. Boring, Glen Macnow, joined Angelo Cataldi and Al Morganti on the WIP morning show. Macnow brought up the story to Morganti, saying how irresponsible I was on Friday. The three of them proceeded to do a whole segment on it without ever calling me or checking to see why I said what I said. Two hours later, Eric Lindros missing the game was the single biggest sports story in America. I was smack-dab in the middle of it.
I was an established reporter by then, and I felt that I had the story buttoned down from multiple sources. I had also spent a good portion of Valentine’s Day evening within twenty feet of Lindros, so I knew firsthand how much he was drinking.
My phone starting blowing up from reporters and TV stations and magazines around the country, and then Bigby called and demanded that I come in to the station to talk.
“Nothing to talk about, Tom.”
“Get your ass in here now.”
My meeting with Tom was frustrating. He kept demanding to know my sources, which I refused to give up. He wanted to know because the station was in the middle of negotiating a new deal to carry Flyers games. I was sure that he was going to turn my sources over to the team, and I was not going to let that happen.
I never claimed I was Woodward or Bernstein, but I would never dick over a source, either, so Tom and I went round and round for a
n hour. At no point did I ever reveal to him the numerous sources I had.
I couldn’t figure out why this became such a big story, but it did. I was the front-page story of Hockey News, and I was the entire back-page column of Sports Illustrated. Front page on both Philly newspapers. Every major news organization was waiting outside my apartment so they could get a comment. I was Kim Kardashian, but without the hot sisters, and not nearly as nice an ass. I decided to allow Vai Sikahema to come into my building with a cameraman and hang with me in my apartment. Vai, a former Eagle, was the main sports anchor for the NBC affiliate in Philly, Channel 10. He had become a close friend, and I figured that while I wouldn’t talk on camera, the least I could do for a friend was allow him access to me and let his cameraman take some video of the two of us talking on my couch.
This type of TMZ drama went on for days and weeks as the team announced that it was going to sue the radio station and me. The station covered me for any costs involved, but this meant that I would have to talk with lawyers every day for nearly a month. I told anyone who would listen to ask the Flyers why he missed the games, and what he was doing during them. The first excuse they had was that Eric had been hit hard in the game against Ottawa and couldn’t play at his expected level. Regarding his whereabouts on February 14, they first claimed that he was home alone watching movies he had rented from Blockbuster.
I went on the air that night and said that would be easy to prove, and if they could prove it, then I would admit that I was wrong and take any punishment from the station. They never produced the proof. The next night they claimed that he was in a hyperbaric chamber all of the evening of the 14th, and couldn’t have been out drinking. I asked where the hyperbaric chamber was, and how he came to use it, but they never produced any evidence of him being in one.
Ed Snider, the owner of the team, came after me. He hired one of the most prominent attorneys in Philly to sue me. The Flyers saw this dustup as an opportunity to fight back against a station that had been critical of them over the years for their lack of playoff success. My story, if that’s what you want to call it, came on the heels of a story Mike Missanelli reported that Eric had given his personal Flyers tickets to Joey Merlino, the acting underboss of the Philadelphia mob. That story sent the Flyers through the roof, and they denied it until a picture of Merlino sitting in Eric’s seats popped up in the Philadelphia Daily News. (Lindros never denied giving him his tickets.) The Flyers were looking for something, anything, to attack the credibility and success of the radio station. I was their man.
The Lindros family was incensed, as well. As overprotective parents, they ran the Flyers in those days, and Bonnie Lindros, Eric’s overbearing mother, who once cost Eric the Campbell’s Soup deal and a guaranteed Flyers contract of nearly $75 million, went ballistic. She knew the story was accurate, and interestingly enough, she wasn’t mad at me. She went after the Flyers because she wanted to know who told me the story. The Lindros family, Eric included, have never once said a bad word about me, but they unleashed a holy war inside the walls of the Spectrum, where the Flyers played.
Bonnie had executives checking phone records to try to figure out who the snitch was. Sadly, they all settled on a young woman I had known for a few years. She and I would chat from time to time. Phone records showed that we talked the week of the report. That’s all they needed to pounce. They had their Deep Throat.
The public rhetoric went on for weeks, as did the on-air banter, until the lawyers representing me told me that with WIP and me in the middle of litigation with the Flyers, I shouldn’t talk about it in public.
Fellow hosts went after me like I was a demon. They were relentless. I never revealed my sources. I never once played the voice mails left for me from prominent players saying how sorry they were that they couldn’t back me up. I never told half of what I knew.
I kept my mouth shut, as directed by my attorneys. The station ultimately came to an agreement with the Flyers and came up with the following: The station would say that the story was false, but say that I still thought it to be true, which I did, and thus there was no actual slander of Eric or the team. In return, they would make a donation to Eric’s charity, and the case would be closed.
I was incensed that I couldn’t speak about the story publicly but grateful to CBS for having my back through the entire ordeal. Not only did they defend me but they also never threatened me with being fired and could not have been more supportive.
I had been punked.
For the next five years, no matter where I went and no matter who showed an interest in hiring me, someone asked about the Lindros case. Three years later, I was doing mornings in New York City at WNEW Radio and got wind of a newspaper report in which Bobby Clarke said, and I quote: “The kid from WIP was right; Eric was drunk.”
Ed Snider even got into the act at a press conference when the relationship between Eric and the team had soured. He hinted that reporters should follow up on the story, and another story about Eric that had never been published in which he almost bled to death after being in a single-car accident.
My story first broke in February 1997. I left WIP in the late summer of that year. The case wrapped up in the spring of 1998. I was never fired, and I was never punished for the story, but there are people who would swear that both happened.
When Bigby didn’t live up to his pledge to make me the new midday guy, I wanted out. I was miserable doing nights and Eagles. Ross Levinsohn provided me the opportunity to leave. Since negotiations were dragging on the phone, I told Ross that my sister had just been accepted to a college in Florida and that I would be in town for twenty-four hours to help her move into her dorm. As long as I was there, I might as well come in to the office and knock the deal out face-to-face.
Ross and I had only met once, and that was at the CBS March Madness kickoff party. That’s when he first asked me if I wanted to work for SportsLine. It had been about four months, and I was trying to set myself up for the next chapter of my life. He agreed that seeing each other in person was a great idea. I flew down first thing in the morning, rented a car, and drove to the Fort Lauderdale office of SportsLine.
I walked in, and the first person I saw was Alyssa, my Philly stalker. She was pleasant, and told me how excited she was that she’d be working alongside me. She was producing an Internet-only radio show hosted by Scott Kaplan and Sid Rosenberg. They had been doing this show that nobody could hear for about six months.
I was brought into Ross’s office, and he jumped up from his desk, gave me a huge hug, and said, “Welcome, let’s get a deal done.” The deal was complicated. They didn’t have tons of cash, because they were not yet public, but they did have a shitload of stock options.
Ross offered me $65,000, all moving expenses, the first two months’ rent, and 30,000 options of stock with the purchase price of $4. I would also be allowed to invest another 50 percent of my yearly salary into the stock, and I was allowed a onetime purchase equal to another 50 percent of my yearly salary. All in all, I was looking at 70,000 options of SportsLine stock at a purchase price of $4. I would be vested in one year. There was no state income tax in Florida, I was young and single, and I figured that to get out of Philly and move to South Florida was worth a few less bucks when the potential windfall could be huge. We were right in the middle of the dot-com stock boom, and guys all over the world were becoming instant millionaires. The other great aspect of the deal was that Ross guaranteed me instant syndication on a minimum of forty stations. We shook hands and I agreed to the deal. I flew back to Philly the same day and prepared to give WIP notice that I was leaving.
Bigby was great, and wished me well, as did only one host on the radio station. They were still all so full of themselves months after the Lindros nonsense that none of them had the class to say good luck or goodbye except for Howard Eskin. I never forgot Eskin’s gesture, and never will.
When I had gotten to Philly in 1993, I was raw. I was leaving as a seasoned reporter and talk
show host who knew what he wanted and how to deliver a great show daily. Being on the air at WIP Radio from 1993 to 1997 made me. The next three jobs I got were a direct result of my working at WIP, because every programmer in the country wanted to replicate the WIP success. I wound up hating Tom Bigby, but I never would have gotten good at radio if I hadn’t worked for him. I still hate him and respect him just as much today as I did when I left WIP.
During my four-plus years in Philly, I also opened and operated a successful tavern known as Labradors Pub, which has enough stories for a whole other book. There I met the love of my life and future wife, Kim—but more on that in a later chapter.
I arrived in Florida on Labor Day weekend of 1997. The first order of business was to find a place to live, and the second was to decide if I would do a solo show, or bring in a partner. I had decided to bring my own producer with me from WIP. His name was Bill Matoney, and he was already on his way down to Florida.
Bill wasn’t a real producer. He was a kid who ran the board at WIP. All that meant was that Bill was in charge of pushing a button with any finger he chose to start the automated commercial break. He also had to answer the phone when people called in to be on the air with me. We got along, and he would do anything for me. I thought it was important to have someone I knew I could trust 100 percent watching my back. I didn’t know anything about the people who worked at SportsLine, other than the girl who’d stalked me. Matoney was an insurance policy. Hiring him proved to be shrewd a year later.
Sixty-five grand ain’t a shitload to live off, and you can’t buy a huge house, but I found a two-bedroom bottom-floor town house with amazing pools, a rec center, basketball courts, and every other amenity you would want a development to have, for seven hundred dollars a month.