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.