Now That I Know How Old Phil Mushnick Is, I Understand His Bias…Even Less

 

I don't know if I've written this before but its worth repeating if I have. Sports-writing, more than any other genre of media, is by definition usually overwhelmingly conservative.

Because many of the best writers have been fans of sports long before they started writing about it professionally they have nostalgia baked into their blood. Therefore they will more often then any writer be inclined to look at the past with rose-colored glasses even if they know better. I don't always agree with this logic but unlike any other form of media I can find it understandable if not always excusable.

If I read the work of Roger Angell or Shirley Povich and see that they are nostalgia for sports in the era when they were young men I will grant them the respect that you must grant to those who saw Babe Ruth swing a bat or Jackie Robinson steal home.  And if Bob Costas writes, as he did in 1995, that the expanded postseason has robbed baseball of much of its magic I will take him seriously because he's spent his entire career watching the game and has an understanding of it that's deeper that mine.

This brings me, as it does more often than I want to admit, to Phil Mushnick of the New York Post. I agree with the masses that his so-called morality, which involves the worst kind of race baiting and cultural criticism, pushes the line of decency in a way that I'm not even sure those on Fox News or The Nation do. That said I was willing to cut him some slack because based on his writing and his nostalgia for the players of the 1960s, I'd assumed that he was at the very least in his early eighties, roughly the age of Doris Kearns Goodwin. I figured he'd been in a Yankees fan while she was a Dodger fan and that he tacitly agreed with Yankee ownership decision to delay integration as long as possible. It didn't excuse his behavior but it explained it.

Then for reasons I will get to in the essay I found myself looking Mushnick up online and I found his Wikipedia entry. And I stopped dead. Mushnick just turned 74. And apparently he's been the New York columnist been sports-writing for the Post since 1982.

Everything I thought about Mushnick makes less sense. That quote I'm found of from A New Leaf : "You have devoted yourself to a way of like that perished long before you were even born" now seems to sum up every Mushnick has done. Which is a bizarre attitude for him in particular.

Just to give a chronology of events,  some involving New York for those who might not know:

Mushnick was five in 1957 when the Dodgers and Giants left New York for the West Coast.

He was nine when major league baseball expanded for the first time.

When he was twelve Mel Allen was fired and Red Barber the following year.

When he was fourteen the first Super Bowl took place.

When he was seventeen the Jets won the Super Bowl for the first and only time.

When he was 20 Title IX was created.

By the time he joined the Post as a copy editor in 1973 Ted Turner had bought the Atlanta Braves and had turned TBS into a super station where they were broadcast.  So his entire adult life cable has always existed.

When he was 23 and serving as a beat reporter, the Seitz decision which created free agency was handed down.

In 1976 the ABA folded and the NBA became one big family.

In 1978 a landmark decision was handed down that allowed women to go into locker rooms for professional sports. By that time Mushnick would have been a beat reporter himself. I've no idea how he reacted to that.

When he was 27 ESPN was created which changed sports reporting forever.

By the time he was reporting Muhammed Ali's career was on the downside and would be over at the age of 28.

And by the time he became the sports TV and radio columnist for the Post in 1982 at which point talk radio had been formed.

 

So just so we're clear at no point in Mushnick career did he ever know a time when athletes weren't getting paid millions of dollars, when media frenzies didn't exist around athletes at a huge level, when cable wasn't covering sports or for that matter when women weren't allowed to be invited into men's lockers room to cover sports.

Mushnick's has always defined himself as a self-appointed watchdog and roving moralist. One of his recurring themes is that broadcasters should serve the event they are calling rather then themselves. Considering that his only memories of broadcasters doing this were when he was a child and he never lived in a period when they didn't serve themselves (Howard Cosell had been part of sports the entirety of Mushnick's career to that point, just the use the most obvious example) one wonders how he could have reached this decision and what basis he made it on. He didn't grow up in the 1930s and listen to Red Barber for the Dodgers and Mel Allen was gone from baseball when he was 12.  

He's basically arguing that a model that was never in affect when he was in sports should be the only model going forward. This is the flipside of everything left-wing scholar I've read who argues the Founders should have had values that were in alignment with the 21^st century. Both are ludicrous the moment you think about it and considering Mushnick's age, it's just as hypocritical.

Mushnick hasn't been in a locker room for a very long time. He actually stopped covering sports beats in the late 1980s according to his own interviews. This makes his behavior all the more bizarre. He's holding athletes and commentators to a professional standard – and he doesn't even bother to show up at events or interview them.  A recent Yankee sports writers has confirmed as much as do multiple other New York sportswriters. One of the perks of being a sportswriter, I'd think, is that you could go to any game you wanted for free and watch from the good seats. Mushnick seems to spend his entire career watching TV and criticizing the commentators and the behavior of the players.

This would seem to be a bizarre way to cover sports, particularly considering he seems to hate every network, radio commentator and cable broadcaster as covering sports 'wrong' . Can you imagine Mushnick watching a game at a sports bar? Its bad enough when the customers are complaining about how lousy the team is; Mushnick would be there saying: "Who cares how the Giants played? The announcers are ruining the game!"

That actually brings me to what inspired this article. As even the casual sports fan might be aware of the New York Knicks are on one of the greatest runs, not just in franchise history but the history of basketball. I don't really pay much attention to the sport, but even I'm aware of just how dominant the Knicks have been playing the game especially in the postseason. They won eleven consecutive playoff games and are currently beating their opponents by an average of 23.2 points a game. Over the last week and a half they managed one of the most impressive comebacks in basketball history in Game 1 against of the Eastern Conference Finals. (Yes I know it was historic.) They then destroyed the Cleveland in increasing fashion beating them by more then 40 points in Game 4.  This led to them clinching their first finals since 1999. The Knicks haven't won it all since 1973 – which is when Mushnick starting working at the Post.

Now last year when Tom Thibideaux was fired after losing the Eastern Conference finals despite being the first coach to get there in a very long time everyone in New York – and I include myself – thought ownership was stupid beyond words. Now just one year later ownership looks very smart having hired Mike Brown and everyone who thought otherwise – again, myself included – looks like an idiot. As someone who can barely remember the last time the Knicks were this close to a championship in 1999 and who has a very clear memory of what it means for other teams in professional sports – not just those in New York – I know how much this means to the city, not just sports fans. And you would think that a New York sportswriter whose career began the last time the Knicks won a championship would note the significance, be happy about it, or at the very least write about it in his column.

So imagine my utter shock when I looked at Mushnick's column today and found his major article was about The World Cup and FIFA's horrible prices. There was no mention of the Knicks at all. The only mention he made of basketball had to do with an ESPN reporters bad reporting of why the Celtics blew a 3-1 lead to Cleveland. There were 15 pages about the finals, in large part because the Spurs finally won yesterday and we finally know who we're playing against this week. For Mushnick it might as well not be happening.

Indeed while the NBA playoffs were going on the only column Mushnick wrote about basketball was to judge Commissioner Adam Silver for not punishing an Victor Wembayama for committing a vicious foul on May 11^th.   The entire week of the Knicks championship he wrote two columns arguing about a Brewers relivers on the mound behavior and how Commissioner Manfred gave a barely passing suspension. He argued that the commentator during the Knicks playoff run 'speaks too often, too long and too confusingly of much value." That's all he had to say about the Knicks three days after they got to the finals. He was more upset about the Knicks not being able to watch games on TV rather then streaming. In the last month the only time the Knicks playoff ran came up was when he thought the commentators or the commissioners were lacking.

To be clear something that hasn't happened in 52 years is happening to New York city basketball fans right now, something joyous, something we should all be united about. For Mushnick it matters less to him then how a player in San Diego is performing bad behavior on the pitchers mound. That is the kind of attitude you might expect from a conservative or a radical progressive but for a sportswriters whose writing for a New York newspaper it really makes you question his priorities.  One wonders if the Knicks win the championship the only thing that he'll care about is that TV spent too much time doing focus on Spike Lee during the victory celebration.

And for a guy who spends so much time glorifying sports figures of the past as if he was in Ebbets field when the Dodgers won their only championship and got champagne splashed on him in the locker room the fact that Mushnick doesn't seem to care about a significant moment in New York's present really makes you wonder what he's doing reporting on sports at all.  For Mushnick it's not whether you win or lost, it's about how overpaid the players are, how the commissioners coddle them, how the sportscasters badly broadcast it, and how undignified the fans are.  

I've had my issues with Mushnick's moralizing before and I've been willing to share them. But in this case I truly wonder what the point of him on the Post is. If something that hasn't happened in the lifetimes of most fans, something that is from a period of something Mushnick lived through in his home state is less important to him to report rather than the lack of morals of an athlete in San Diego and if the commentary on the game play is more important to him that the play on the field then really its time for Murdoch and the editors to cut him loose.

And I say this as a New Yorker. I get the entitlement that comes with living here and the idea that if you gives you the idea that you have the ability to look down on everyone else because you live in New York. I'm aware that in recent years New York hasn't been able to back it up with championships to match its media market and revenue stream. Perhaps that might lead to you looking down on your field.  But if you can't do the good part of sports – embrace the joy when the home team does something impossible -  then you're not a sports writer. You're not a fan. You're just a prick.  I grant you New York has more than its share but you don't have the athletic gifts to balance it out.

Oh and by the way Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle had multiple affairs and got drunk every night. If you don't know that now and you think players behavior is crude today, you never had any standards for morality to begin with.