Criticizing Criticism Series, The Sports Page: Phil Mushnick isn't a Sportswriter. That's Just His Cover For Being A Prick

 

 

I am a casual sports fan but a devoted fan of sportswriters. I’ve devoured many compendiums and collections of the columns of some of the greatest sportswriters in history many of whom – big surprise – have called New York home.

I’ve read the many columns of Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon before they moved into fiction. I’ve read a lot of the great work of Shirley Povich at the Washington Post and many of the collections of one of his successors Thomas Boswell. I’ve read two collections of Red Smith’s work, and the second actually covered more sports than baseball. I’ve studied the work of Ira Berkow and I’ve read some of the work of Dick Young. They were often referred to as ‘Knights of the Keyboard’ and many of them to have the quality of royalty.

Now if you read quite a bit of them you also notice that, like almost all the other media, they have blind-spots many of which demonstrate the often conservative world view. Lardner stopped writing about baseball because of Babe Ruth and the burst of the lively ball, though the Black Sox scandal understandably did more to tarnish his love of the game. Runyon was a devoted New York writer but the scandal did the same to him. Povich thought the presence of height in basketball ruined it as a sport (he thought so as early as the 1950s) and Dick Young, who in many ways was a tool of the owners, was their mouthpiece against the legendary organizer Marvin Miller and is hated in some circles after half a century for the belief he caused Tom Seaver to be traded to the Reds in 1977.

There is often a history of bias among sportswriters – Jimmy Cannon famously called Roger Maris ‘a freak’ after Maris turned him down for an interview in spring training of 1962, more or less killing him in the eyes of New York. Casey Stengel wooed them; George Steinbrenner made them his mortal enemies for twenty years. The relationship with the sportswriter and the sport they cover can always be difficult. Which brings me to Phil Mushnick.

I should mention that while I have my issues with the New York Post on certain matters, they don’t apply to the sports section which I will on a nearly daily basis glance at, particularly during baseball season but in recent years in regard to the other major New York franchise teams. And during the past year I have become aware of a columnist named Phil Mushnick.

Now because Mushnick’s columns are located in the sports section of the Post, one would assume that he was a sportswriter. As anyone who has had the misfortune of reading his work – and if you don’t live in New York, you probably don’t know who he is in which case you are blessed – Phil Mushnick is no more a sportswriter then David Denby and so many of the film critics for The New Yorker are movie critics or Victor Davis Hanson (Brits know him) is a writer of politics. He is in fact a troll in human form who for the past forty-two years eschews his venom about the world and claims to be writing about sports. The fact that he refers to himself as a ‘roving moralist’ and ‘self-appointed watchdog’ who believes that broadcasters should serve the event they are calling rather than themselves. How exactly they are supposed to do this is something that Mushnick never makes clear, especially considering that he’s never given a single example of any broadcaster, athlete or anyone who meets those standards. Apparently when a commentator makes a factual error or calls a play wrong, that person should not only be fired but put to death.

Now if you’ve read Mushnick’s work – and again, if you haven’t don’t – you could assume, justifiably he’s a racist. Which he is, no question. He’s also a misogynist, a homophobe, a snob, an anti-capitalist and the worst kind of sports conservative in which any change made to the sport is worthy of being condemned to death. You get the feeling reading his work that if he had been around in the 1940s, not only would he have been a full-time supporter of the ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ that kept baseball segregated, he would think it didn’t go far enough. Given his attitude I could see him arguing that any member of the Negro Leagues (and to be clear, he would be fine using the derivative: he actually printed in a column in the Post in 2012 and was unrepentant about it) but saying that the Negro Leagues should be torn down, that the players should be shot on sight and the fans blackballed from attending any game at ta professional level. And if any white sportswriter even suggested that their was equality that the FBI investigate him as a Communist sympathizer.

This is, in its own right, a true disqualifier to being a sportswriter. Sports is supposed to an equalizer. It’s supposed to be something where everyone, at least theory, is equal on the playing field and that the fans can all enjoy. Reading Mushnick’s work he not only doesn’t hold with the idea he actually thinks that in his ideal world: all sports would be played by white men and watched by white men, that the athletes should not only not receive salaries but pay ownership for the privilege, that the games should be broadcast to the fans free of charge – but the fans shouldn’t ask for anything else, certainly not representation on the field and the owners shouldn’t give in to diversity. The idea of Pride Night in Dodger stadium was repulsive to him and you can practically see the white sheet going up over his head as he writes it.

And to be clear it is always minority players that he claims are ruining the game – he’s written horrible things about Serena Williams, Tiger Woods and LeBron James, all but calling them uppity in his articles, when Michael Jordan fired a play-by-play announcer for ‘mistakenly’ tweeting the N-word he called that a mistake and thirty years earlier blamed Jordan for a series of ‘sneaker killings’ in 1990, suggesting that Nike was marketing its sneakers because basketball was ‘the sport of choice among drug dealers’, calling Stephen Smith, Joe Morgan bad broadcasters and claiming every time a baseball player of color of being ‘selfish’ when they didn’t apply modesty after hitting a home run and on and on and on.

But here’s the thing: those who simply call Mushnick a racist don’t understand the true level of his bigotry. He’s not a sports journalist either: he hasn’t actually covered any of the teams in the New York area in a very long time, not since the 1990s. He calls himself a sports critic which would be fine if he was criticizing the play on the field.. To be clear, sometimes he does but it’s always to tell you what everyone is doing wrong. And no that’s not the same thing as the movie critics write about because even they like some of the films they cover.

No the narrative Mushnick is upset about is that sports has been moving away from a ‘past-time’ to ‘programming’. Here he makes the flaws that so many fans do: that sports are a game and not a business. I don’t blame the fans for thinking this but Mushnick is a journalist and supposedly should know better. Yet in all of his columns he does everything he can to deride money as part of the game and more importantly how sports, whenever they try to make it more exciting, more interesting and yes, more inclusive – all things that business need to do to survive – he tears it apart as destruction of some beloved.

I actually admire Mushnick for building a lucrative career on being able to watch sports on television for living, tell his readers how shitty a job everyone is doing, and make a handsome salary for forty years.  Everything that has been done to try and get fans to the game – cable sports, streaming sports, trying to make the games more interesting, more fun, more accessible – is somehow destructive to the core of all professional sports.

In that sense Mushnick isn’t a sports journalist in any sense of the word. He doesn’t care about the score, who plays in the game, who wins or loses, whose playing, or even the sport he’s watching. All of his columns could be based in the same format in which they argue, very clearly, how the way the media, the commissioner, the managers and the players are destroying sports as we know it. They would  seem to be doing a terrible job because he’s been writing his column for thirty years and all of the sports he’s been writing about still draw viewers, and still put fans in the seat. But if you believe Mushnick the moment he finally drops dead (which can’t come soon enough) all sports will go into their death spiral and will not exist within weeks of his passing.

You kind of wonder why Mushnick watches sports to begin with, if the only reason is to tell everybody they’re doing it wrong. The answer, of course, is obvious: he wants to stir shit up. That he does so using not merely the dog whistles of conservative media but on more than one occasion the hate-speech itself is hardly surprising: he does work for Rupert Murdoch after all. Of course he has hurt himself by refusing to go on television and improve his brand the way so many of his colleagues on the various networks have become superstars.

And there’s a reason for this which Mushnick loves to write about: he’s fixated on whenever white sports reporters make ‘politically incorrect’ comments and get fired. He noted this about Don Imus, he mentioned Jimmy The Greek who famously lost his job on NFL Today in the mid-1980s for racist commentary, he mentions it for NBC journalists and ESPN ones. Whenever minority commentators make similar comments he rages about the double standards, and we know the real reason. Part of him no doubts yearns to go on TV. But he also knows that, unlike so many of the cable news networks his conglomerate owns the sports media world is infinitely less forgiving. He knows that if he were spew some of his venom on even a Fox Sports network, he would lose his job immediately and deservedly be ‘canceled’. And rather than show himself in public with the ‘courage of convictions’ he writes his columns from the safety of his living room, free to shit on sports from afar or perhaps a radio broadcast. He knows his self-appointed morals wouldn’t apply in the 20^th century, much less this one.

So for the foreseeable future Mushnick will write his sports columns which are not about sports or even media. He’ll deride Gleyber Torres for not running out a play, call Giancarlo Stanton a ‘one-dimensional overpaid player’, deride Juan Soto for his home run trot, say Serena Williams is mouthy because she was denied a table in a Paris restaurant, say when NBC called South Korea North Korea was the same as calling Abraham Lincoln Jefferson Davis, claim that Nick Saban was clueless as to how college football has changed when it was obvious to him and call Derek Jeter a horrible broadcaster because he was too restrained as a player. (He’s done all of those things in the past year. ) He’ll keep writing that he really loves sports; it’s just the media that covers them, the officials who manage them, the people they let into see them, and the people who play the sports that are his problems. And we in New York can count ourselves lucky that Mushnick is an institution in our city and continue to hope  for the day he is committed to one, where he will finally be surrounded  by the people who understand him perfectly.