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Today: John Saward, a writer based in Chicago; and editor and journalist Maria Bustillos.
Issue No. 196
The Sage of Long Island
John Saward
Readers: Raise Hell
Maria Bustillos
The Sage of Long Island
by John Saward
Due partly to some yearning for back home, the smoldering and curious wreckage of Aaron Rodgers’s season, and an irresistibly joyous Mets run, I have been listening to Mike Francesa again, the gleaming, bronzed former pontiff of WFAN Radio’s midday slot. He has a podcast now that premieres live on YouTube. Here, a recent sampling.
The Jets? “I’ve always said, they could screw up a one-car funeral. The Jets are worse than that. They brought in an all-time quarterback—got him hurt the first year, and then killed his legacy. The first year they only maimed him, the second year they killed his legacy.”
The Dodgers: “can pound ’em from pillar to post.”
How might it feel to be a Mets fan after they beat the Phillies? Francesca quotes an old Marquette basketball coach who died 23 years ago. He speaks in a set of dusty idioms and mystifyingly irrelevant asides about John Calipari, who he knows very well of cawse, hacked up and stretched down the block, all of it delivered in a Long Island accent that sounds like that of a man about to give you a slightly illicit tip on a racehorse.
He spent a portion of his Week 9 NFL preview show just reciting the Indianapolis Colts’ entire schedule, week by week, not for any reason that was clear to me besides “sometimes they’re in close games.” His shows can be like an old man standing at the window, staring out at a gray sky and announcing that it looks like it might rain. He sighs, he groans, he aborts sentences halfway through, he asks rhetorical questions and then he answers them, because sometimes being the host of your own show is not enough, you must also be its co-host. He makes a sound scanning some woeful team’s record in road games that is like a father finding out his son was arrested.
Is it bad? Is it good? Is this even entertainment? I’m never quite sure. Francesca is instead something like a New York tribe elder, keeper of all the chokejobs and meltdowns, the grim lore, the bums made heroes, the anxieties and arrogances of my people, and when it is this time of year, when there are two quarterbacks adrift in the same town and both baseball teams briefly headed for each other, listening to him feels like hearing the Ronettes in December.
There was a time when so many radio whackos sounded at least a little like Francesca. The smugness and molten monologues, the thick regional accents. But some hideous other thing has taken their place. The antiseptic First Take roundtable, everything overlit and radioactively caffeinated, the contrived friction and the peppy chatter from 8:00 a.m. till around midnight, when Scott Van Pelt brahs and my mans his way through bad gambling beats on a set that looks like a space shuttle. Stephen A. Smith contorting his face and throttling his vocal register to some pretend-appalled level in audition for a meme you’re already sick of. But with Francesa there is no clammy striving, no McNuggety YouTube shorts about whether Kevin Durant is running from the grind.
The fake-thinky Xs and Os content and the bloodless front office mindzone that considers sports an economics riddle to be solved by ex-finance criminals don’t really exist in Francesca’s world. Instead there are gut instincts, nostalgia, and sneering disdain for just about everything else.
There are no commercials and there are no guests; sometimes, begrudgingly, he will answer e-mailed questions from listeners. There are long stretches of dead air. He is like a shipwrecked man on an island chatting on a shortwave radio, not so a plane might come find him, but because dryly reminiscing about Al Leiter is the one way he knows how to express himself to the world. This is all he knows how to do with his time.
There is no real incentive for Francesca to be broadcasting anymore; he is already a rich man and a Very Esteemed Long Islander. He has retired and come back and retired again, he has made on-air contract demands and demeaned his own networks, he has made so many grand exits and so many re-entrances. And now he is in this sort of twilit pseudo-retirement, a show that is not really a podcast and not really a live show, just these 28 minute instant reactions, no callers, but still delivered in a tone like someone out there in Massapequa has said something ridiculous.
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