AND A PARTIAL SCORE: HAKEEM JEFFRIES 1, G.O.P. NOTHING 12.4.22

Published Jan 4, 2023, 5:01 AM

EPISODE 105: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN

A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: The Taliban Caucus lights the Republican Party and the House of Representatives on fire, while on his first day, the New Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries perfectly whips his members to do literally do nothing more than bring their popcorn and watch everybody from Gaetz to McCarthy burn, baby, burn. It was a beautiful thing, and it left the full range of fascists from Tucker Carlson to Rep. Byron Donalds having to cobble together the nonsensical sophistry that their self-defenestration was actually democracy in action. If Jeffries can manage to keep the Democrats from reverting to their natural desire to do ill-timed good on behalf of the institution rather than let the Republicans shoot themselves again today, he will have won the 118th Congress no matter which Liz Truss the GOP eventually settles on in place of the wounded McCarthy.

B-Block (15:15) SPECIAL COMMENT No. 2: There is the tragedy of Damar Hamlin of the Buffalo Bills, and then there is the disgusting reality that the National Football League is now trying to gaslight us. OF COURSE the league intended to resume Monday night's game even after the stricken player fell. And now the NFL has lied about it and sleazily blamed Joe Buck, Suzy Kolber and all of ESPN, to cover up its own insensitivity and callousness. This is, of course, the history of the NFL, which did the wrong thing after JFK was assassinated, and after Mayor George Moscone and Councilman Harvey Milk were assassinated hours before a Monday Night Football game in San Francisco, and after it was told flights could not be guaranteed to get its players and media to games the weekend after 9/11. But this lie makes the Hamlin nightmare even worse - as does the rank exploitation of it by the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, who spit on the memories of Chuck Hughes and J.V. Cain and Hank Gathers and so many athletes who died on the field, from cardiac distress. (30:54) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Trump and Michael Flynn are no match for Congressman-Elect George Santos.

C-Block (36:09) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: In 1973, Charles Crawford was interviewing me for his TV news story from one of the earliest baseball card shows. In 1983, he was sitting next to me on the anchor desk at CNN. He introduced himself and I said "we've met before." His reaction when I told him how and when is worth your time.

Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of I Heart Radio. It is early still, but thus far it is the tweets of a year from Ryan Nanny quote, GOP, give Liz Trusts a shot. I mean that's it, isn't it. Whatever Kevin McCarthy thinks he is doing, whatever, the twenty American Taliban holdouts think they are doing. Whomever they all think they are talking to. The Republicans, who forced the balloting for speaker to a second day for the first time in a century, have made themselves look like fools of biblical proportions. They have in fact supplanted Liz Trusts as the most obvious political punchline in the world. And more importantly, twenty of them went to bed last night dreaming of how to make it even worse today on day one of his presumed speakership, someday Kevin McCarthy or somebody was outmaneuvered, out, generaled, out, dignified by the new leader of the Democrats in the House, Akeem Jeffreys. The liberal inclination to avoid the fight, to put out the dumpster fire, to self importantly get on with it for the good of a nation, and then go get a drink was suppressed and mastered by Leader Jefferies. Moderate Republicans and even some Democrats expected that at least a few Democrats would eventually leave the House during the day, and by the second vote or at least the third vote, their absences would reduce the margin McCarthy would need to finally get over his hurdle, and Hakim Jeffreys said, stay here and let them burn. As Don Buyer of the Virginia Eighth put it, I'll be here voting on every ballot for as long as it takes, and I haven't heard any Dems talk about leaving. We are proud of our unity and determined to fight. Others went more whimsical. Janshakovsky of Illinois brought what appeared to be an oil barrel sized container full of three different flavors of popcorn to share with our Democratic colleagues. Her Illinois colleague, Robin Kelly, brought a smaller and thus easier to transport tin of popcorn. Grace Magne of New York and Ted Loeu of California had personal serving sized bags of popcorn. Major league trolling by Democrats who in other years would instead have been handwringing and tut tutting and mulling, compromise on my health of the grateful nation and the partial score keeen Jeffreys, one Speaker of the House. If any nothing, the Geo peace self defenestration yesterday underscores the reality that Trump with a Republican Senate at a Republican Congress proved in two thousand seventeen and two thousand eighteen, just as George W. Bush proved, just as George H. W. Bush proved, just as Ronald Reagan proved, the modern GOP can destroy almost everything, but it has no idea how to put together almost anything. It is a party more adept at political machination and manipulation than are the Democrats. But when something actually, finally, actually actually actually has to be done, there is no skill, no forethought, no plan. At the stroke of eight o'clock last night, right wingers running the gamut from the Trump sickophants who garrotted McCarthy to Tucker Carlson to Byron Donald's the knitwit who changed his vote from for McCarthy to against McCarthy in the third ballot, they all hid behind the only thing they actually did yesterday come up with a plausible bit of sophistry that sounds good to their own idiot side, which they are now pretending was the idea all along. A little disagreement among great leaders is fine and noble, because Republicans are the true democrats, and Democrats are the real fascists. And this is how much democratic Republicans love democracy. We didn't just have one democratic vote. We had three democratic votes. And that was our democratic plan. And you know what our next democratic plan is, Republicans, right, if we break the all time record of a hundred and thirty three ballots for a speaker, that'll mean we're a hundred and thirty three times as democratic as the Democrats. Democracy Democracy USA USA. They don't have a plan. I mean Bobert and Gates and Bob Good and Chip Roy and Scott Perry and the others had a scheme. The nineteen of them, the nineteen what would you call them, the Anti McCarthy is m Caucus, the chaos Caucus, the insurrection Caucus, No, no, no, I last one they already used two years ago Friday. They would create chaos and havoc and drama and earn themselves what they really wanted from serving in the House. What they really understood about serving in the House, serving in the government, serving the people of this country. A bunch of sound bites, a bunch of sound bites they personally can use in fundraising and election campaigns. That is what government means to them. I mean, Congressman elect Don Bacon called them the Taliban twenty and the Taliban Caucus, and Matt Gates took that as a compliment, literally took it as a compliment, because who will or will not return Matt Gates to the House in two years if he's not in prison, the Florida equivalent of the Taliban. Anything beyond cool sound bites will be accidental. I mean, I suppose there is some magical thinking that if they could talk this idiot Donald's out of the McCarthy camp and go from nineteen votes against him to twenty, they might be able to start a run on the bank thing on ballot number I don't know, twenty seven or something. That presumably is when McCarthy's biggest backers or his most terrified backers like Marjorie Trailer Park Green, start looking for an alternative who does not even have to be part of the Taliban, And that, of course, is how every presidential favorite whoever walked into a Democratic or Republican convention and wound up not getting it, wound up not getting it. It was ninety nine years ago this summer that the Democrats headed to Madison Square Garden with two outstanding presidential candidates, Woodrow Wilson's son in law, William McAdoo and New York Governor Al Smith, and they left it one hundred and three presidential nomination ballot its later with the ultimate compromise candidate of all ultimate compromise candidates, John Davis, unknown, former ambassador to England, and John Davis in the election wound up getting twenty nine of the popular vote and losing nearly two to one to Calvin Coolidge, who didn't even campaign. And at the end of his life, John Davis was one of the lawyers who defended the segregationists in the suite of Supreme Court cases now collectively known as Brown v. Board of Education. Nice work, John. It is terrifying to say this, but Kevin McCarthy might just be the most qualified candidate for Speaker that the Republicans have. I mean, on a scale of one to a hundred. He's a five or a six or six point two and a good day. But that really might be the best they have. And obviously truth about that is, if you cause terrified Republican lemmings to abandon Kevin McCarthy, they will inevitably wind up with somebody less capable of making the house function. They will find their own John Davis. Hell. Knowing these morons, they might even find the John Davis, and John Davis has been dead since ninety and an updated partial score a caim Jeffreys to Speaker of the House if any Nothing Like all insurrectionists, the Taliban twenty are the proverbial dogs chasing the car. Their skill, their joy is that chase. What to do if they catch the car is an entirely different thing. The jiminy Glick of Fox News. Carlson, who has as much claim to being the intellectual leader of the Republican Taliban as any of the other morons, demanded two things last night, that McCarthy re ease all the January six video and files online, implying that McCarthy is part of some cover up of the supposed truth about January six, which to them is as any good Republican knows that the real victim that day was Donald Trump. Carlson also demanded that McCarthy created a new committee under Kentucky fascist Thomas Massey to investigate CIA and FBI interference in domestic politics. Translation Twitter Gazi with star hearing witnesses Matt Taiebie and Elon Musk. Whenever the big giant part of reality, the Gates and Good and Tucker, Carlson and the others have not seen, do not see, and will never see, is the same big giant part of reality that Trump has never seen, and that frankly, a lot of us, myself in did a lot of us often forget to focus on most of America. Most of America's voters spend less time analyzing the events of American politics than I have just reading this commentary right now, and that you have just listening to this commentary right now. America is the way it is today because we have become the society that only reads the headlines, and in this case the headlines are Republicans head back to house for second day of laugh out loud disarray, Democrats restock their supply of popcorn, and one more look at the scoreboard. A Keem Jeffreys three, Speaker of the House. If any nothing still ahead, Oh my god, the Republican Taliban the twenty Liz Trusses somehow actually managed to overshadow even poor George Santos walking sadly through the halls of Congress, his goofball backpack, making him look like a lost transfer student. Worst persons ahead, and next the tragedy of Damar Hamlin of the Buffalo Bills. You know about, But in the grief and shock, the history of similar nightmares in the National Football League and in other sports seems to have been entirely and perhaps deliberately forgotten, And that history is being exploited by the anti Baxers, and I don't forget. And more important still in the grief and shock, the National Football League's willingness to throw its own broadcasters like Joe Buck and its networks like ESPN under the bus to gaslight you comes to the fore yet again. The NFL one flying that they never tried to play the Sunday after nine eleven. Now they are lying that they never intended to resume Monday night's game after Hamlin was stricken. The NFL is lying, and I will call them out on it. And that is next. This is countdown. This is countdown with Keith Olberman. Apart from the human tragedy of Damar Hamlin of the Buffalo Bills at his cardiac arrest, at his intubation, the inevitable, infuriating side stories are multiplying, and first among them, the National Football League is gaslighting you. After Hamlin collapsed Monday night and was given CPR on the field and taken off by a mulence and play was stopped and the Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati players went to their locker rooms, the game was quote temporarily suspended. It was not postponed, It was not canceled, and that was made clear by the play by play man for ESPN Joe Buck and the studio hosts Susie Calbert on the ESPN broadcast, and ESPN even made a graphic temporarily suspended. And then the NFL said it would give the teams a five minute warning to get the players ready to resume the first quarter, and ESPN put that on its graphic, and in those five minutes, the world came down on the NFL for its callousness and its hesitation to call the game off, while a young and popular Bills player was fighting for his life, and his teammates and his rivals, and the broadcasters and the viewers tried to fight through the trauma of what they had all been witnessed to, either in person or via TV. Within hours of this, the National Football League was claiming none of that had happened. The league's executive vice president of football Operations, a former player named Troy Vincent, insisted on a conference call, quote, Frankly, it never crossed our mind to talk about warming up to resume play. That's ridiculous, that's insensitive, and that's not a place that we should ever be in. How do you resume playing when such a traumatic event occurs in front of you in real time? And that's the way we were thinking about it. The commissioner and I bull crap I worked at ESPN for a total of ten years. I worked on NBC's football coverage for three years. I co hosted the Super Bowl pregame show for NBC. I hosted the Internet Super Bowl halftime show for Fox. I worked for two years at Fox with Joe Buck. I worked for seven years at ESPN with Suzie Calbert. I worked with all the ESPN game producers and all the studio producers, and all the executives, and I can tell you without fear of contradiction, I have had many problems with all of the people I have just mentioned, from Joe to Susie to the executives. But if Joe Buck and Susie Calbert reported that the players were going to be given some time to compose themselves and then a five minute warm up because the game was to resume, Joe and Susie had been told that by the bosses at the highest level of their organization, and those bosses had been told that directly by the National Football League Yesterday. Joe Buck said he was quoting ESPN's own rules expert, John Perry, who had been in direct contact with the NFL office in New York, and ESPN issued a carefully phrased but strong self defense quoting it. There was constant communication in real time between ESPN and league and game officials. As a result of that, we reported what we were told in the moment and immediately updated fans as new information was learned. This was an unprecedented, rapidly evolving circumstance. All night long, we refrained from speculation. They did not say this. I will say it again. The National Football League is lying. Of course it is. It is expert at lying. And of course the NFL is trying to revise the history of Damar Hamlin and what it wanted to do that night because it made the wrong call and because of the additional reporting that the players and the coaches made it clear that they were not going to resume the game, no matter what the NFL said, and no matter what news did or did not come from Damar Hamlin's bedside, And those are the only reasons the game was finally postponed Monday night. The NFL would have played. The National Football League has made callous mistakes before, like how it wanted proceed after tomorrow Hamlin's cardiac arrest. It will make them again. And this is also not the first time it has flat outlied to the public about what it did or did not do, or when it was or was not callous. Right after nine eleven, then NFL Commissioner Paul Taglabou made a huge chest thumping deal over canceling the game's scheduled for Sunday, September six and Monday September There were pious comments about the grieving nation and the wounds, and inappropriate this and respectful that when, in fact, on a conference call with the f a A and security officials and the heads of the major airlines on either the Thursday or Friday after the attacks, the league said it intended to play those games as scheduled on the sixteenth and seventeen, and the authorities replied that that was nice, but there could be no guarantee that NFL teams or officials, or broadcast crews or fans would be able to fly from city to city just to play or watch football games, and that there would be no priority given to those flights, even if air travel suspended after the attacks was largely up and running by Saturday. The NFL complained, it got the same answer, and so Paul tag b A Boo went public with a loud, unseemly self congratulatory cancelation announcement, and unthinking reporters applauded, without once considering the reality of the logistics that had given the NFL no choice but to cancel, and then boast as if it had been its own idea much earlier. On the morning of Monday, November mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated by an ex city councilman in San Francisco's City Hall. San Francisco were to host the Pittsburgh Steelers literally just hours later in the Monday night football game at Candle's Dick Park. Mayor Mosconi had been an arch advocate for the forty Niners and for the importance of sports in his community, and despite calls to cancel or or just postpone the game for a day, the NFL never seriously considered doing that. It was the height of insensitivity and disrespect. Of course, it was that is NFL policy. On November sixty three, the National Football League played anyway. Two days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the American Football League canceled its entire schedule. I have mentioned it here before that the then commissioner of the NFL, Pete Rosel, openly regretted that decision for the rest of his life, and he also understood firsthand just how unpopular it was. I've never found a second source for this report, but I can't imagine my source made it up or got it wrong. He was Bill McPhail and he was the president of CBS Sports, which in three carried NFL games exclusively. It did not televise any games that horrible Sunday. Bill mcphil was also Pete Rosell's close friend, and the two of them pretty much designed the way they televise NFL games then and now, which built pro football in this country. Bill McPhail would become the vice president of the new cable news network CNN. In night he was the vice president in charge of sports. He designed CNN's original robust sports department and started the TV careers of people like Dan Patrick and Gary Miller and me. And one day Bill told me that with all the CBS NFL telecasts canceled on Sunday, November, he had nothing to do, so he joined his friend Pete Rosel, the NFL commissioner, at Yankee Stadium to watch the Giants play the St. Louis Cardinals. It would be within weeks that Rosel would say he was mistaken to not cancel that schedule, and twenty years he was still telling it to people like me and calling it the greatest mistake of his life. But Pete Rosel us right about one thing. Despite the assassination, Despite the grief, despite the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was shot on live national television forty minutes before the NFL kicked off its games that day. Attendance for the games was normal, down maybe a thousand per game. There were sixty eight thousand fans at Yankee Stadium for the Cardinals Giants game. But Bill McPhail told me that during halftime one of them, a man appeared at their seats asked, are you Pete Roselle? Are you the reason we're here today? And when Roselle confirmed it, the man punched Roselle in the face, said nothing and walked away. Bill told me he moved to follow the man to apprehend him, but Roselle stopped him. Don't I know how he feels. The NFL made a mistake in nineteen sixty three, it made a mistake in nineteen seventy eight, It made a mistake in two thousand one. It made a mistake Monday night. And if somebody had just said yes, we originally thought we might be able to resume the game. We did not know how serious his condition was. We were terribly mistaken. We can only say that, like everybody else who saw what happened. We were shocked and terrified. And when you are traumatized, not only do you often make mistakes, but the one mistake you are most likely to make is to try to pretend everything is normal and carry on as if everything is normal. We did that. We are sorry. If the NFL had just said that, I could not imagine anybody complaining about it. But do not gaslight people. Do not lie to people. Do not imply your broadcast partners whose content you watch like sensors, misled the nation. You were already guilty of being callous. Do not add dishonesty to your crimes. There is something else about the Damar Hamlin tragedy that bears repeating, and this has nothing to do with the nash Football leagues. Bluntly, there is still a crazy component in our society that blames, and until further notice, will blame the death or illness of anyone at any time on COVID vaccinations. These creatures appeared on Twitter, Kevin Sorbo, Lenny Dikestra, Charlie Kirk, Rogan, oh Handley, Grant Stinkfield. There was another one who actually declared that Hamlin was dead because of COVID vaccines. They also all appeared in the right wing echo chamber because there is no tragedy too traumatic for them to try to exploit to serve their paranoid, uninformed, dangerous, indefensible conspiracy theories. And they jumped on the Damar Hamlin story as if it proved those conspiracies, because they have no souls, no consciences, and ironically no hearts. And their basic, stupid, simplistic argument is that no National Football League player had ever collapsed that way before COVID vaccines. Therefore, COVID vaccines caused it. Therefore COVID vaccines are evil. Therefore vote Republican. It is a sick and twisted mentality, and how we will purge it from this nation I do not know. Maybe more importantly, that spits on the graves of the players in the National Football League and in other sports who have died of heart failure, heart attacks, other heart disease on fields and on courts and in arenas since sports began. I thought immediately of Hank Gathers, the loyal and Merrymount basketball star who died in the middle of a playoff game, died on the court in front of his home fans, and I remember the unspeakable sadness and the gloom I felt while reporting from his campus that night. And I think of J. V. Caine, the seventh pick in the nineteen seventy four football draft and a star tight end of the St. Louis Cardinals, making his way back from a serious tendon injury. He collapsed during a no contact practice on July nineteen seventy nine, died within two hours, and was later found to have had a rare congenital heart problem that no one could have discovered until the autopsy. And most of all, I am thinking of, and especially I am enraged on behalf of the memory of a player named Chuck Hughes. With less than two minutes to go in the Chicago Bears Detroit Lions game at Tiger Stadium in Detroit on October one, Chuck Hughes caught a thirty two yard pass from the Detroit quarterback Greg Landry. He was tackled virtually simultaneously from different directions by two Chicago defenders, Bob Jeter and Gary Lyle. Three plays later, as he made his way back to the Lions huddle, Chuck Hughes dropped to the turf clutching his chest, he was dead within minutes. His autopsy showed profound, undiagnosed arterio sclerosis hardening of the arteries. Professionals said the violent double tackle could have triggered the coronary thrombosis and then the heart attack that killed him on the field, but it was basically irrelevant. One of his coronary arteries had been sev blocked. Football World mourned that year. And if there were scumbags like Kevin Sorbo and Lenny Deistra and Charlie Kirk and Rogano Handley and Grant Stinkfield around hoping to tread on the grave of Chuck Hughes to try to sell whatever conspiracy theories they were pushing in nine, they had the presence of mind to keep their goddamned mouths shut, where we had the presence of mind to never to listen to them in denying it's via original intent to restart that game. The National Football League has provided enough insensitivity and dishonesty and shame to make this particular nightmare somehow worse. We do not need amateurs like these anti backs, opportunistic worms to pile onto that still ahead, so a local TV news reporter in New York put me on the air in one of his reports in ninety three and a decade later, he was sitting next to me on the anchor desk at CNN and he introduced himself and I said, we've met before, and he said, oh, the story of baseball cards and television, and how quickly ten years can pass. Coming up first, the daily roundup of the scrants, morons and Dunning Krueger effect specimens who constitute today's worse persons in the world. Le Bronze Michael Flynn. I don't know if he fought one too many battles without his helmet on, or if he's getting paid to say this stuff, But for eight years he's been saying this stuff. Quote. Russia has achieved all of their objectives in Ukraine, and they're now exposing bio labs that have been in there sponsored by the US. The guy that just showed up to speak to our Congress in a sweatsuit should have been thrown out unquote. I don't know. I think it reads better in the original Russian. When are we going to do something about this guy? Flynn? I don't know if he's disloyal or mentally discombobulated, but he should be under Lock and Key, the runner up. Trump, speaking of under lock and Key, this is why you do not make deals with a psychopath. You may recall that Kevin McCarthy dissolved whatever remaining glue ad heired Congressional Republicans not only to America but to each other the day after the coup, when he later went to Mari Lago to kiss Trump's ring. A smarter, more patriotic man would have used the post January six momentum that was the feeling of horror and shame two years ago this month and put it into a fire hose and then pointed the fire hose at Trump. Instead, McCarthy made a deal and reached by NBC last night about whether or not he was sticking by that deal, which was his endorsement of McCarthy to become Speaker of the House. Donald Trump said, quote, we'll see what happens. We'll see how it all works out. The reporter says, he asked the question again, and Trump repeated, we will see what happens and hung up. Nicely played Kevin, but our winner, George Santos, He issued a press release yesterday saying he had been sworn in as Congressman from New York, but in fact he's still only Congressman elect because no speaker means no swearing in. The liar from Long Island cut a very sad figure. Indeed, in the house yesterday, nobody talking to him, nobody feeding him popcorn. He was left alone to yawn without covering his mouth. And worst of all, when he went to his new office, he found it was surrounded by reporters. There are reporters covering Congress and they can just stand there and wait for me. I didn't see that in the prospectus. So Santos promptly turned around and walked away from the reporters, who trailed him, peppered him with questions and he said nothing for like a minute. The audio maybe better without the video. He's wearing a backpack like he might have worn at Horstman Prep School if he'd actually gone there and not just lied about it. So he looks like Charlie Brown on a really, really bad day. And the baseline noise here, the shuffling feet, that to me is the chef's kiss. Oh George, do you feel like you're qualified to serve in this Congress right now? How do you hope your constituents can trust you even though that you've misrepresented your biography to them? What's your response to call spar House the assustigation of my nickeloda? Do you have any statements about your campaign and how you hope to govern? Do you hope to carry out your full terms? To the number one story on the Countdown and my favorite topic, me and things I've promised not to tell. I believe it was this time of year, early winter, thirty nine years ago that the CBS television station here in New York, Channel two dismissed a news reporter named Charles Crawford. I was reminded of him the other day because he bridges two stages of my life that from this advanced age, I feel like two separate lives. Until I was about fifteen and went out on my first date, I spent all of my time doing about four things and four things only, going to school, going to baseball games, collecting sports memorabilia, and trying to figure out how I was going to be a sportscaster or sportswriter when I grew up. Incidentally, I think I'm now up to doing about six things and six things only anyway. In nineteen one, the fact that there were adults who collected baseball cards and spent literally hundreds of dollars on some of them was sprung on an unsuspecting America. The first big card convention, a gussied up flea market in a Detroit area hotel over a three day weekend to which people traveled from other states, was so completely unbelievable that CBS News sent a crew and a reporter to cover it. The story closed out in an addition of the CBS Evening News one night. I think it's so shocked Anchorman Walter Cronkite that he said dush or something before recovering to sign off that say it is Monday, AUGUSTE. Cronk The couple of thousand of us who constituted the entirety of the known baseball card hobby all lent out a squeal of delight in front of our black and white TVs, and the main streaming of baseball cards began. The most amazing part of it was it was almost all adults. There was a kid my age in Indianapolis named Elliott Doc who had a fabulous collection. There was another one near Philly named Robert Liftson, and he and I have been friends fifty years now, and he was over at the apartment in December talking cards. There were some other older teenagers seventeen eighteen nineteen, but other than that it was all adults, adults who had either secretly never stopped collecting baseball cards or had resumed collecting them, and who could enjoy everything from a newly issued Reggie Jackson card to a newly discovered example from the set issued by Kalamazoo Bats cigarettes in eight In nineteen seventy two, the first such cards show in the metropolitan New York area was held, and at the age of thirteen, I went with my parents and sister in tow and I had, for me anyway, a transcendent experience, and they did not, unless you consider a summer weekend in a hotel in Lake Ground, Kunkama, New York, transcendent. At least there was a pool and it didn't rain anyway. The next year, in partnership with some others, one of the really good people in the hobby, an adult named Mike Aaronstein, also still a friend of mine fifty years later, the man who basically invented everything from plastic sheets to keep your cards in to reprints of old cards to cards of minor league players. He staged the first show in New York City in a Union hall all the way downtown, Bang on ast your place, over the Memorial Day weekend. He was told he was going to lose his shirt on this. In fact, by early Friday evening, like two hours after the thing opened, the crowd was so large and dense I could not see from my chair behind the table I had bought from which I was selling my duplicates, to the table directly across the aisle from me, which was no more than twenty ft away. It was such a success Mike hurriedly booked the hall for a second show for Thanksgiving. Well, by now three, if you put a bunch of these crazy adults paying good money to buy old baseball cards twenty five dollars for a nineteen fifty two tops, Mickey Mantle, are these people escape bees for my psychiatric facility? Well, if you did that, some reporter was going to show up and cover the lunacy. This was especially true of local television news, especially on a weekend where a story that was not exactly like every other story that you could shoot before noon, developed the film and get it on the air at six pm. That was a gift from the gods, which is how I came to see a little commotion at the front door of that nineteen seventy three Memorial Day weekend card show and see emerging from the commotion a man carrying a small TV camera, followed by another man carrying a big TV boom microphone, followed by another man who was Charles Crawford, the reporter from Channel two News. I knew it was him because I knew everybody on TV in New York in nineteen seventy three by sight, because I watched as much TV news as I could, because bluntly I was studying it. My dad was at my table with me, and while I hope that Mr Crawford would come over and interview me among the hundreds of collectors and dealers there, my dad was a little less reliant on happenstance and accident and was more hands on. Be right back, he said, And the next thing I knew, he was button holding Charles Crawford and gesturing back towards me. And the next thing I knew. After that. Charles Crawford was standing in front of my table, asking me a few questions, but mostly asking me to show his cameraman how I was able to use my quote filing system so sophisticated it allows him to find any card a collector might want. In seconds. That was it my television debut. No sound bite, not even my name, just my hands pulling out a drawer from a small filing cabinet and definitely locating in Rico Petrocelli card or whatever it was. There was also about three seconds of me looking straight towards the camera, just as Charles Crawford told me to my eyes, a mixture of abject fear and an inscrutable scheming quality, which quite bluntly at its essence, amounted to my internal dialogue about how I could get Charles Crawford to surrender his camera crew and his job so I could go leave the card show and work for Channel two News that night. I have gone into excruciating detail about my career timeline, and for purposes of the Charles Crawford story, I will only hit the bullet points. This is the year nineteen seventy three. By nineteen seventy five, I was on the air at the professional commercial radio station owned by Cornell Students. In nineteen seventy eight, I was an intern at the news assignment desk and for the sportscaster at another New York TV station, Channel five. In nineteen seventy nine, I got my first full time job at u p i S Radio Network. In nineteen eighty one, I got my first TV gig as a substitute sports reporter for CNN in New York. In two I got that job full time and now back to three when they started letting me anchor for the first time a daily four minute sportscast every night at five forty five in the middle of the newscast that was co anchored by CNN's Vice president and New York Bureau chief, Mary Alice Williams. One day, now at the age of nearly twenty five, a cynical vetant of twenty eight months in television, I came down from our offices on the twenty fifth floor to our studio in the lobby of one World Trade Center to do my sports cast. But apparently Mary Alice Williams was off that day, because when I got to the anchor desk at five forty two or so. The anchor at the desk in her place was Charles Crawford, the same Charles Crawford, the Charles Crawford who had put me on TV a decade before from the Vree Cards show at the District Union Hall on Astor Place, a co anchor in Atlanta, teas my sports cast and way when he went to the commercial break, Charles Crawford introduced himself to me and I said we've met, and he said, oh, how when? And I said, well, I'll tell you now so you can recover during the sportscast. And as I quickly recounted it and quoted his narration word for word, this fourteen year old has a filing system so sophisticated it allows him to find any car to collector might want in seconds. I told him that, and his face got whiter and whiter and whiter, and he told me not to worry if he got up and left while I was doing the sports cast, because he needed to walk around for a bit and get some air to his credit. When we came back from my report, he introduced me as his old friend when he came back and said don't misunderstand me. I'm not offended or anything. I'm glad you made it, but just remember this will happen to you some day too. I mean, I'm only forty seven. And I laughed and I told him it already had happened to me. That I had gone back to my college radio station a year after I had graduated, and a kid walked up to me and said he was just starting to train as a sportscaster there and he had been listening to me since he was eleven years old. And I went whiter than Charles Offerd did on that set, and I said, oh, hell does that work only twenty one? I only started here five years ago. And he explained he was still attending Ethicca High School at the moment, he was only sixteen. And I told Charles Crawford that my response was not like his. To go for a walk. I said, I went out and went for a drink, and Charles said, that's also my plan. As soon as the newscast is over, I'll buy you one. It couldn't have been nicer. And just as I was leaving CNN the next spring, they were hiring him full time, and he eventually became CNN's chief science correspondent. He was still with them in the late nineties, and he passed away in two thousand sixteen at the age of eighty one. I remember him for the nineteen seventy three Cards Show, of course, but also for that drink at the bar that was literally a hundred yards from CNN New York front door. He had all kinds of advice about dealing with TV executives. These people are as dangerous as anything in this world. And I was a pilot instructor in the Air Force for eight years. I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. If you're not following or subscribing to the podcast, please do so. Here are the credits. Most of the music, including our theme from Beethoven's Ninth, was arranged, produced, and performed by Brian Ray and John Philip Channel. They are the Countdown musical directors. All orchestration and keyboards by John Philip Chanelle guitarist based on drums by Brian Ray, produced by t k O Brothers. Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed by No Horns Allowed. The sports music is the Overman theme from ESPN two and it was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN, Inc. Musical comments by Nancy Faust. The best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today was Tony Kornheiser. Everything else was pretty much my fault. So let's countdown for this, the seven under and twenty ninth day since Donald try first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States. Arrest him now while we still can a new edition tomorrow. Until then, I'm Keith Olderman. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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