It's Not Easy Being Greeny
don't read or get up before noon. He's half of the host of
ESPN Radio's popular morning show, "Mike and Mike in the
Morning" along with former NFL defensive tackle Mike Golic
and is an anchor on the weekday evening "Sportscenter."
But "Greeny" has also had a lifelong love for writing. He wrote
two unpublished novels before Villard Publishing picked up
memoir that he originally wrote as a journal about his
perspectives on being a husband, a father and a sports fan and how all three have profoundly affected the course of his life. But while his stories of getting snubbed by Jack McDowell after the MLB All-Star Game or almost getting arrested for using the ladies' room at a library because the mens' room didn't have a changing station have made his readers giggle, he said he's surprised so many people consider it a work of humor since they weren't really a laughing matter to him.
DG: You've been a nationally renowned sportscaster. You host one of the most popular morning shows in the country. Now you've got a New York Times bestselling book, and I heard [on your show] that you won an Emmy (the online animated adventures of his radio show, "Off-Mikes" by Animax Entertainment won the Sports Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Content for Non-Traditional Platform")…
MG: That's right, we won an Emmy. The book also just made the Boston Globe best seller list.
DG: Congratulations, so now you've got all this stuff, has your wife decreased your Idiot Quotient?
MG: No, I would say she still definitively thinks I'm an idiot.
DG: Why is that?
MG: Well the concept of it is that the idiot part of it comes from the complete disconnect between all husband and wives, and thus the way that disconnect manifests itself is that our wives think we're idiots. It doesn't make any difference how successful we are, it doesn't make any difference how smart we are, it doesn't make any difference how much money we make or anything else. That does not change the fact that once every four-and-a-half days, our wives will look at us and think to themselves, "My God this guy is an idiot."
DG: So is it something they are naturally attracted to it or is it something that develops after they get married?
MG: It's not even an attraction. It's just a gender thing. It's just the way men and women deal with one another. The sentence in the book that I think summarizes it best is when I wrote when one time I said to my wife, "Your need to deal with our problems is interfering with my need to pretend they do not exist." It's unavoidable, I guess, is the best way to put it.
DG: Has she read it?
MG: Oh yeah, my wife read it. She was reading it every step of the way while I was writing it.
DG: In ESPN Magazine, there was the section that you wrote [that you learned] about one of your friends whose wife had just left him and I noticed she had put comments in there and Golic did the same thing. Did she do that for the whole book?
MG: No, that was just the excerpt for ESPN. That was the magazine's idea, the executive editor Gary Belsky, a brilliant guy, had this idea that they wanted to run an excerpt to the book but wanted to do something a little different with it. So they had this idea that my wife would be commenting on it as it went along. Somewhere along the line, they got the idea to put Golic in there as well and I thought it came out very well and it was very funny.
DG: I don't mean to get too personal about the book, but you talk about being a little famous from your standpoint and I liked how you compared it someone like Bo Jackson who has to deal with fame 24-hours a day. Is fame necessarily a bad thing in your mind when it comes to sports?
MG: Well, as I said in the book, being a little famous is great. Being a little famous is the best. The level of famous I am is terrific. People come up to you and say nice things. You get a table in a restaurant. You get tickets to things. That part of it is great. But I've been around really famous people. A better example even then Bo was that I covered Michael Jordan and traveled with him for years at a time when he very well may have been the most famous person in the world, and I would not have traded places with him. I absolutely would not, for all of his money and all of his adoration and for all the wonderful things about being Michael Jordan. I would not have traded places with him. Enormous fame, really overwhelming fame, is suffocating, and, in the scheme of things, I think it is not worth it.
DG: But when it comes to your show, when you deal with sports fans, you're dealing with people.
MG: Right, "the beauty of sports is investing everything into something that means absolutely nothing." I really meant that more from my perspective as a sports fan than as a sports broadcaster. That's what being a sports fan means to me and that's the beauty of escape that is sports for me.
DG: But when you do a radio show like yours that's as widespread and popular, you get a lot of people that take it to such an extreme. What's worse: your wife thinking you’re an idiot or your listeners?
MG: Oh well, you should read my mail. You put your work out there on display and you have to be prepared for the fact that a lot of people who aren't going to like what you do, and there's certainly a lot of people who don't like it, don't like the show, don't like me. That just goes with the territory. When it first starts happening and when you first have a show, it's very tough to take the criticism and after all, you become somewhat immune to it. But it's totally different. Being criticized whether it's by media critics or by fans, it's difficult in a totally different way because it's sort of removing from the immediate. It's not like having my wife call me an idiot.
DG: Well, it's just that it reminds of the point in the book when you're at the Italian restaurant and you hear your own voice [on the radio] and one of the cooks goes "That guy is such an idiot" and I don't know if he said idiot but something to the effect of it.
MG: And actually I still go there by the way. It's right near my house.
DG: Did they eventually know?
MG: Well, I don't know that any of them have read the book. I never told them about that story. They have subsequently figured out who I am, and they're very nice to me. I would certainly guess before I wrote the book they had no idea that that event had taken place. Now I don't know, none of them speak English. For none of them, English is their first language. So I have no sense of whether or not they've read my book, and if they have, they have not said anything about it.
DG: And you probably changed the name of the restaurant.
MG: I did change the name of the restaurant, but they would know if it was them because I go there all the time.
DG: So did you always have aspirations to be a writer?
MG: Yeah I did. From the time I figured out I wasn't going to be the point guard for the New York Knicks, I always wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a real journalist at one time and subsequently, I actually told the story in the book about how I changed over to sports.
DG: Well I meant not necessarily a reporter, but did you want to become a novelist or a writer or a humor writer?
MG: I actually have written two novels. This is the third book that I've written. It's only the first one I can prove because no one ever published either of the other two. I am hopeful that at least one of the other two will get published now as a consequence of this having done so well. So I really enjoy writing. Writing is somewhat excruciating, but I really enjoy having written.
DG: Can you talk about the novels at all, or do you want to talk about the novels at all?
MG: I don't mind talking about them. The first is sort of a fairy tale, and the second is sort of a fictitious look at the seedy underbelly of the sports world. It's meant to sort of be an insider's look at the corruption at the heart of the world of sports, which I really thought with my background would have been an easy book to sell and yet none of the publishers we sent it to didn't like it enough to buy it. So, you know, maybe that will change now but that's what they were about.
DG: The book is written like a journal as your becoming a father and going through fatherhood. Is the book pretty much what the journal was?
MG: The book is my journal and the journal itself was about four or five times the length of the book and so my editor is a guy named Mark Tavani at Random House was the guy who helped me figure out how to turn it into a book. It went from being a mess into being a book. So as I wrote in the acknowledgements, I'm not trying to say that every single thing in the book is purely faithful to the events of my life. I'm not pretending that it's an autobiography. A lot of things are changed around to protect people and others are changed around to make them a little funnier, but generally speaking it is the story of my life and generally speaking, it is faithful to the journal that I kept for about six years.
DG: At one point did you say this has got to be a book?
MG: It was not even my idea. When my second novel got rejected, I was devastated, really crushed because I thought that was the end of my dream of being a writer. I wasn't going to go through it again. I had lunch with my agent to talk about it and I was just down, and he said, "Do you have any other ideas?" I said there was a time I started keeping this journal when my wife told me we were having a baby and I thought someday it would make an interesting book. It was going to be a What to Expect When You're Expecting for Dads. He said, "Well, let me take a look at it" and I showed it to him, and he said, "This is the book, Michael, this is the book."
DG: Mainly, to me, it seems like the book is a lot about relationships between your wife and your kids and your Aunt Ada who, well, can I interview her?
MG: She's a piece of work, but no, I don't think that's a very good idea.
DG: But there are some times when…you do talk about sports. Were you worried about the sports kind of overtaking or overshadowing the book or were you worried about sports being too much of a tangent?
MG: No, I wasn't. A journal is sort of about whatever is on your mind that day and a lot of days, sports is on my mind in part because it's my job and in a larger part because I'm just a fan and these are some of the things that I think about. It was sort of a collective effort between my editor and myself to decide how much of the sports stuff we wanted to put in there because, as I say I wouldn't call it a manuscript because it was really just a journal. But it was much, much, much, much longer than what eventually wound up in the book, so there was a lot of sports stuff that we took out. So we really had a choice to make about how much sports we wanted it to be and we arrived at whatever sort of felt nature. I'm fond of saying the book is a little about sports because my life is a little about sports.
DG: I don't know if you ever read other humorists or just seen the people who are trying to make a career out of humor writing, but it seems there's a lot more female humorists writing about being a mom that there are male humor writers writing about what's funny about trying to be a dad. Is it necessarily harder to come up with material for trying to become a dad because there's a part in the book where you and your wife are at a dinner party, and it seems like you jokingly mention that pregnancy is harder on the father and everybody's forks just drop.
MG: That was not a good day.
DG: Is it harder to try and find those moments? What's different about it?
MG: I don't think it's harder. It is just different. I think the association from children to a mother has always much stronger than the association from children to a father, but I think that has really changed. I don't think I'm the first, but I think there will be an enormous increase in this going forward because I think gender roles have obviously changed here. There was a time when men went out and made a living and women stayed home with the kids, and my wife doesn't stay home with the kids and she's goes out and makes a living and sometimes I stay home with the kids. And I think there are more and more guys like that and so, I think there will be more and more people who have this kind of experience and, subsequently, more and more people will write about it. I think sometimes guys have this idea that they want to be macho and it doesn't feel very macho to write about changing diapers but it's what guys are doing, at least it's what all the guys I know are doing, all the gu
ys who have little kids.
And it's funny you should call it humor writing because that really was not what I meant it to be. Probably the biggest surprise to me has been how much people have found the book funny because it really was not meant to be funny. There are some parts of it that I suppose are meant to be funny, but I don't consider it humor. You're not the first person who has suggested it to me. Obviously, I'm the one missing it.
DG: Well, when you're living it, it's not so funny.
MG: To me, most of the stories that people find funny really weren't so funny when they happened, certainly the story in the Italian restaurant that you were talking about. To call it a restaurant is really an exaggeration, it's more like a deli. That wasn't funny at all when it happened…that was as unfunny as unfunny gets. But I guess my voice, both when I talk on the air and when I write, people tend to find the way I relate things to be funny but I don't consider most of the book to be funny.
DG: Well, it's more personal…
MG: Yeah, it's basically the story of my life and maybe told in a relatively humorous fashion.
DG: Has your passion for sports changed? You talk about things in the book like the steroids scandal…
MG: My passion for sports has changed enormously. The biggest problem with covering sports for a living is that if you have to pay attention to the things about sports that you don't like. It really exposes the ugly side of it. When I was a kid and I think if I were just a fan right now and all I did was watch the games when they're being played, I would live in this sort of Pollyann-ish reality where these games really matter, but as much as I sort of like to think they do in my own mind. But the reality is when you are actually living in the world of sports, you recognize that what it is is a business like anything else. It's a business populated, in some cases, by a lot of guys who really aren't such good people and so there's a lot of ugliness and that definitely changes your perspective. Definitely. While I still love sports, I certainly don't have the sort of wide-eyed feelings about that I did before I got into this line of work.
DG: Has it changed for your kids or at least how you share it with your kids?
MG: Well, they're much too young. My kids don't know. My kids are five and three. I took my son to his first football game and he loved it and we had a great time. But to him, they are far, far, far too young to understand any of this stuff. But it will be interesting to me to see what they're perception of it is as they get older.
DG: You explore this in the book a little bit, but how do you think becoming a father has changed how you're a sportscaster or how you're a writer? Has it changed at all?
MG: It has in one regard. I've been a father for almost the entire time that we've had "Mike and Mike in the Morning." I was a talk show host in Chicago before I came here, and I definitely think there were topics and ways and things I would say on the air before I had kids that I would not now because, you know, I do have the thought in my head that my kids could be listening, that someone else is listening with their kids and, more to the point, that whatever I say on some level is going to be a reflection on my kids. I actually even wrote that in the book at some point. I wrote, "I wonder how Howard Stern feels about his daughters listening to his show," not that I would ever work that way. I never did that kind of show, but whatever the topics may be, that has changed my perspective on the world and that will change the way I do my show also. But, more to the point, I think I'm more cognizant of the fact that my kids might be listening, and other people are listening with their little kids and I think I have that thought in mind as I choose topics and as I choose words that I use on the air.
DG: What about as a writer and a novelist?
MG: Well, I haven't written a novel really since my kids are born and the first one was done well before my kids were born. I guess, I was writing the second one when my daughter was a baby. No, in fact, I think I was just finishing the editing process. I've really never written a novel since my kids were born, and this book is all about my kids. So I don't know what I'm going to do next from a writing standpoint. Having kids affects everything in your life, so I'm sure it has affected my writing.
DG: When they're old enough to read it, what do you think they'll think about? I talk to a lot of writers who are sometimes a little scared of being too personal with their writing or going too deep into their own life to share it with somebody else.
MG: I think they will think exactly as they do now, that Daddy is so silly. That's the reaction I'm hoping for.
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Danny Gallagher is a freelance writer, humorist and reporter living in Texas where Dads wear their hearts on their sleeves and their family portraits on their belt buckles. His Web site is www.dannygallagher.net. He was recently published in the Backstory section of the Christian Science Monitor.
© 2006, Danny Gallagher
