“It’s the classic Washington scandal. We screwed up by telling the truth.” – C.J. Gregg, The West Wing “The U.S. Poet Laureate“
Bob Ryan returned to ESPN airwaves Sunday night, and The Big Lead had the reason behind his suspension. SI‘s Richard Deitsch alluded to it Sunday night, but it was Ryan’s comments about fellow ESPN colleague, Mark Jackson, that got the famed Boston sports columnist suspended.
Ryan disparaged Jackson on a Jan. 6 episode of the Dan Le Batard show, which Deadpan has the video of, and he didn’t appear again on the air until Sunday, when he appeared on Sports Reporters.
Here’s the inflammatory passage from Ryan during his back and forth with Le Batard:
Bob Ryan: I am on record, thank God, publicly saying two years ago, I looked at the NBA, I looked at the rosters and what was going on, and said, “The most talented team one through eight, at least, in the NBA is the Golden State Warriors. They’re doing okay, but I know that they can do better. I know if they had a real coach, not some phony, Bible-pounding phony that Mark Jackson is, when he isn’t even a legitimate Bible pounder, I know that they’ll be better off.”
I didn’t know that it would be Steve Kerr. I didn’t know that it would be Luke Walton. I didn’t know WHO it would be, but I knew that he was out there, and there were plenty of them out there that could make them a better team, yes.
Dan Le Batard: I mean, Bob, that was savage, what you just did. A legitimate Bible pounder?
Bob Ryan: Yeah, because he’s a phony. That’s all. Well, I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. And I can’t believe they took him back on that broadcast. Oh my God. He’s a con man, and he’s done very well at it. I’ll give him credit for being a great one.
Two days after that show aired, ESPN issued a statement: “Bob’s comments were inappropriate and personal. We have addressed it with him. He recognizes he was wrong.”
Bob himself tweeted an apology the night the show aired saying, “I made personal and disparaging radio remarks about Mark Jackson that were way over the top. Have reached out to Mark with my sincere apology.”
Here’s the thing. Ryan isn’t really wrong. Yes, the comments were inappropriate and we think ESPN did the right thing suspending him. Plus, Ryan apologized because he knew he stepped over the line. But there’s certainly some truth to Ryan’s comments.
As The Big Lead mentions, Jackson’s previous tenure in Golden State didn’t go so well, something Yahoo’s Adrian Wojnarowski alludes to in his piece about David Blatt’s firing. You see, LeBron James wanted Jackson as a coach, but Jackson’s acrimonious history with the Warriors — his first professional coaching gig — was the reason GM David Griffin passed.
In the end, here was the problem for Klutch Sports’ original plan: Cleveland refused to hire Jackson. General manager David Griffin is too well-connected in the NBA, too knowledgeable of the truths inside Jackson’s Warriors regime to let that happen.
We’ll get to some of “the truths inside Jackson’s Warriors,” but first let’s make sure to highlight the insanity from that quote from Wojnarowski. On Wednesday, we saw a piecemeal rundown at The Big Lead about how LeBron has a long history of either directly, or indirectly, getting his head coach fired. There are plenty of speculative holes in the timeline, but it’s clear to even the most casual sports fans that the greatest basketball on the planet for the last half decade has had an integral voice in the shaping of the team around him — that obviously includes the coach. But Jackson was just so bad in Golden State, Griffin directly overruled LeBron’s preferred choice.
However, that’s not all that supports Ryan’s claims about the former Knicks and Pacers point guard.
Jackson is a licensed minister at True Love Worship Center International in Reseda, Calif., and his proselytizing is pretty overt.
That religious zeal extends to Jackson’s condescending comments about the first openly gay NBA player in history, Jason Collins. But that’s not the only hypocrisy that matches Ryan’s characterization of his colleague.
Lets also not forget that while Jackson coached the Warriors he deliberately tried to turn the entire team against backup center, Festus Ezeli. And Andrew Bogut wasn’t a big fan of his former coach, either; although, Bogues was Jackson’s only public detractor after getting fired by the Warriors — the rest of the team loved him. After Jackson left Golden State, Bogut implicitly alluded to how full of himself Jackson was.
Despite all the mounting evidence to support Ryan’s impromptu on-air takedown, that’s not even Jackson’s most obvious moment of false virtue. As both Deadspin and the Big Lead alluded to in their posts on this story, Jackson — for all his pious gusto — actually had an affair with an ex-stripper and was later extorted by said stripper over his own nude pics.
Doesn’t this paint a pretty clear picture of Jackson as a “bible-pounding phony”?
There’s an episode of West Wing we were reminded of when we first saw this story, and we quoted from it at the beginning of this post.
If you’re unfamiliar with the show, or you don’t remember that episode, President Bartlet — played by Martin Sheen — utters some disparaging remarks to a Philadelphia news station about the likely GOP candidate he’ll run against in the upcoming elections. He seems to think the camera is off when he tells the anchor of his likely challenger, “I think we might be talking about a .22 caliber mind in a .357 magnum world.” The comment is picked up on B-roll and it enters the beltway news cycle shortly thereafter.
C.J. Cregg is President Bartlet’s press secretary on the show, and after the seeming blunder by the president she astutely points out the real issue behind the comments: They’re true. Bartlet’s opponent in the upcoming debates is not smart enough to be the Commander-In-Chief (hold your Dubya jokes for the comments). But, despite the veracity of the president’s comments — and Bob Ryan’s about Mark Jackson — you can’t just say that out loud. That’s why Bartlet smartly does it when he’s supposed to be off air (without getting too much into the plot of the episode, Bartlet purposely said the comment when the mic was hot because he was in a battleground state, and used gun diction to punch it up for red state constituents).
But Bob Ryan made his remarks on an ESPN show, and he made them about an ESPN colleague. You can’t do that, as ESPN has proved over and over again. Ryan’s comments are still true, though, even if the suspension was warranted.
