Glazer on Incognito interview: ‘The golf thing had nothing to do with any of that and happened over a year ago’

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Bob Raissman of the New York Daily News talked to Jay Glazer about his interview with Richie Incognito.

Raissman brings up a main criticism of the interview:

Still, the fact Glazer never asked Incognitio about the Dolphins golf outing incident, where he was accused of molesting a young female volunteer with a golf club, was a glaring, miserable omission. It definitely was a punch pulled. Glazer contended he raised the question but it was left on the cutting room floor. The interview lasted 45 minutes. Fox aired six.

“I wanted the interview to highlight racism, bullying, and the relationship between Richie and Jonathan,” Glazer said. “The golf thing had nothing to do with any of that and happened over a year ago.”

But watching Incognito having to deal with the golf question would have further opened a window into his soul. Now, his eyes are wide open. “He’s been beat down by all this….This thing has brought him to a whole other level with paparazzi and TV vans following him,” Glazer said. “I tried kidding with him that he’s become the Lindsay Lohan of sports. I don’t think he was amused.”

Glazer discussed his approach:

Glazer never got confrontational with Incognito. He didn’t muddy the waters by picking a fight. Many of his questions were pointed, like when he asked: “How do you tell America, how do you expect anybody in America to believe you’re not racist?”

“Look, I believe this story has gotten way out ahead of itself. People have jumped to conclusions. I’ve talked to everyone involved,” Glazer said during our conversation. “That’s why I have let everyone else do the talking. It’s not about what I think. I wanted the viewer at home to hear Richie and make up their own mind. What would the viewer want to know? That’s how I framed the questions.”

Incognito talks more; Glazer’s analysis; transcript of what he said

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The winner of the Richie Incognito mess: Hooter’s. It has a big (open to many interpretations) ad on the FoxSports.com site this morning, which will be getting plenty of traffic this morning.

Here’s what I have on my site, sans Hooter’s: Richie Incongito’s extended interview with Jay Glazer; Glazer discussing the interview on Fox Sports 1; A transcript of highlights from the interview is below.

My analysis to come.

Incognito: You can ask anybody in the Miami Dolphins locker room who had Jon Martin’s back the absolute most. And they will undoubtedly tell you, me.

Incognito: Jon never showed signs that football was getting to him, um, the locker room was getting to him.

Glazer: You’re saying you don’t know what led to this. Your teammates are saying, ‘We don’t know.’ His side has clearly said, ‘We do know.’ OK, and there’s bullying involved. There was a voice message left. I’m going to read it to you. You did leave this voice message?

Incognito: Yes, I did leave this voice message.

Glazer: And it’s, ‘Hey, what’s up, you half N-word piece of blank. I saw you on Twitter, you been training 10 weeks. Want to blank in your blank mouth. I’m going to slap your blank mouth. Going to slap your real mother across the face. (Laughter) You’re still a rookie. I’ll kill you.’ You hear that, going back to that now, do you look at that and say, ‘I left that for Jonathan Martin?’

Incognito: When I see that voicemail, when I see those words come up across the screen, I’m embarrassed by it. I’m embarrassed by my actions. But what I want people to know is, the way Jonathan and the rest of the offensive line and how our teammates, how we communicate, it’s vulgar. It’s, it’s not right. When the words are put in the context, I understand why a lot of eyebrows get raised, but people don’t know how Jon and I communicate to one another.

Glazer: But there’s one thing of saying that, another thing with a white man using the N-word. How do you tell America, how do you expect anybody in America to believe you’re not a racist?

Incognito: I’m not a racist. And to judge me by that one word is wrong. In no way, shape or form is it ever acceptable for me to use that word, even if it’s friend to friend on a voicemail. I regret that.

Glazer: How much in today’s locker room is it thrown around by African Americans and white players?

Incognito: It’s thrown around a lot. It’s a word that I’ve heard Jon use a lot. Not saying it’s right for when I did it in the voicemail, but there’s a lot of colorful words thrown around the locker room that we don’t use in everyday life. The fact of the matter remains, though, that that voicemail was left on a private voicemail for my friend, and it was a joke.

Glazer: Right, wrong, or indifferent, because of all this, you’ve become the face of bullying in America. Someone thinks of a bully, they think of Richie Incognito.

Incognito: This isn’t an issue about bullying. This is an issue of mine and Jon’s relationship where I’ve taken stuff too far and I didn’t know it was hurting him.

Glazer: Did Jonathan Martin overreact? Or was Jonathan hurting that much?

Incognito: I can’t sit here and tell you who overreacted, who did what. I can just sit here and be accountable for my actions. And my actions were coming from a place of love. No matter how bad and how vulgar it sounds, that’s how we communicate, that’s how our friendship was, and those are the facts, and that’s what I’m accountable for.

Glazer: You’re telling me there wasn’t any signs going into that?

Incognito: As the leader, as his best friend on the team, that’s what has me miffed — how I missed this. I never saw it. I never saw it coming.

Glazer: There’s so many subplots in this. How much has come out, where you looked at it and said … ‘That’s not even close’?

Incognito: I think the whole thing, I’ve been sitting here saying, ‘That’s not even close.’ It sounds terrible. It sounds, when it’s on the screen, it sounds like I’m a racist pig, it sounds like I’m a meathead. It sounds a lot of things that it’s not. And I want to clear the air just by saying I’m a good person.

Glazer: You obviously have had a very checkered history. From way back in college all the way up to recently with last year with the incident at the golf course. You’re sitting up here and saying, ‘Hey, I’m a good guy.’ It’s difficult for us, as America, to grasp that when all they see are the episodes.

Incognito: Right, no question. And if you go by just all the knucklehead stuff I’ve pulled in the past, done in my past, you’re sitting in your home and you’re thinking, ‘This guy is a loose cannon, this guy is a terrible person, this guy is a racist.’ When that couldn’t be farther from the truth. If I was a racist and I was bullying Jon Martin, when the press went in there and asked them questions, that locker room would have said, ‘Listen, we saw this, we saw that.’ I’m proud of my guys for having my back and telling the truth. But the fact of the matter is when Jon left the team on Monday, we played a game on Thursday. I spoke with Jon on Friday.

Glazer: You spoke with him?

Incognito: I texted with him, I text messaged, I spoke with him through text message. And he texted me and said, ‘I don’t blame you guys. I blame some stuff in the locker room. I blame the culture. I blame what was going on around me.’ And when all this stuff got going and swirling, bullying got attached to it and my name got attached to it. I just texted him as a friend and was like, ‘What’s up with this, man?’ He said, ‘It’s not coming from me. I haven’t said anything to anybody.’ And I’m like, ‘OK.’

Glazer: Would these be texts you would be willing to share?

Incognito: No question. I’ll give you, after this interview, I’ll give you my phone. And we’ll walk through all these texts, and I will show you the framework of a friendship.

Glazer: If Jonathan Martin was sitting right here next to you, what would you say to him?

Incognito: I think, honestly, I think I’d give him a big hug right now because we’ve been through so much and I’d just be like, ‘Dude, what’s going on? Why didn’t you come to me?’ If he were to say, ‘Listen, you took it way too far. You hurt me.’ … You know, I would just apologize and explain to him exactly what I explained to you, and I’d apologize to his family. They took it as malicious. I never meant it that way.

Good reads: Longest running sports publication is on bowling; First African-American player in SEC

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Here are a couple good reads from Sports on Earth.

Chuck Culpepper has a fun piece about bowling and the Bowlers Journal, which turns 100 this week.

LAS VEGAS — Quick, name the country’s oldest sports monthly.

Four… three… two… one…

 

That would be Bowlers Journal, which will turn 100 on Friday, which will be “Bowlers Journal Day” in Illinois by legislative proclamation. So happy Bowlers Journal Day, while acknowledging that Bowlers Journal’s longevity does tell us something essential about ourselves: we humans love to drive ourselves half-mad with games.

The knack for driving ourselves half-mad went on fine display Sunday at the South Point Hotel Casino. The half-madness visited even the best. “I think at the high level, the bowlers are better than they’ve ever been; these guys are just phenomenal,” said Bowlers Journal president Keith Hamilton, yet the half-madness bit almost the whole lot of them.

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Meanwhile, Dave Kindred recalls the first African-American to play in the SEC.

Live long enough, you have a story. That’s why (Nate) Northington came to Oxford. He told his story as part of a university-sponsored event known as Racial Reconciliation Week. Nate Northington’s story neither begins nor ends with Greg Page, but it cannot be told without him.

Northington was the first African-American to play in a Southeastern Conference athletic contest. All-State out of Louisville’s Thomas Jefferson High School, he was recruited for the University of Kentucky by the school president, by the state’s governor and, almost incidentally, by the school’s football coach, a Bear Bryant disciple named Charlie Bradshaw.

Northington then was 6 feet and 175 pounds. He had what coaches call “sudden speed;” here this instant, gone the next. After Northington signed with Kentucky, so did Page. He, too, was an All-Stater and African-American. He was a man among children, 6-2, 220, quick and strong, a defensive end from the mountains of eastern Kentucky. For a year, Northington and Page were roommates. They made unlikely partners, Northington so quiet as to be invisible, Page so boisterous he seemed to be everywhere.

They had in common a mission: They would be the SEC’s first black athletes. That became clear to Northington during a dinner at the governor’s mansion in the winter of 1965. He heard Gov. Ned Breathitt’s recruiting pitch and came away thinking: “Integrating the athletic programs in the SEC would remove one of the last vestiges of segregation in the South and move the country forward.” The governor pulled a scholarship offer sheet from his coat pocket. Northington signed it.

 

Football card: Jack Lambert: Nobody scored 55 points on his Steelers

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Pittsburgh Steelers fans probably could use a blast from the past after watching their team give up 55 points to New England Sunday. There were stretches where Jack Lambert’s Steelers didn’t yield 55 points in 5 games.

The Hall of Famer was mean, nasty, and immensely talented.

John Elway on facing Lambert in his pro debut at Denver:

“He had no teeth, and he was slobbering all over himself. I’m thinking, ‘You can have your money back, just get me out of here. Let me go be an accountant.” I can’t tell you how badly I wanted out of there.”

Weekend wrap: Schefter on covering Incognito story: How SI Boston cover came together

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Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports media….

Adam Schefter: Matt Yoder of Awful Announcing does a podcast with Schefter about his coverage of the Richie Incognito story.

In this interview, we not only chat with Schefter about his reporting about the Dolphins, but how NFL reporting has evolved and the amount of interest in the league’s news cycle.

-The timeline of his reporting and how it came together for him and Chris Mortensen, including his knowledge of the explosive voicemail. And, why this may just be the beginning of the story.
-The current power of reporting in the NFL and how this story has moved so quickly.
-How NFL reporting is like trying to stop the waves in the ocean.
-Juggling several stories at once including what’s happening in Miami, Aaron Rodgers’ injury, and health scares with head coaches.
-Why the hazing and bullying aspect of the Dolphins story resonates with the greater public.

Sports Illustrated cover: Nina Mandell of USA Today writes about the SI cover featuring David Ortiz and three First Responders from the Boston Marathon tragedy.

The magazine’s creative director, Chris Hercik, then came up with an idea: Sports Illustrated would find the police officers from the iconic picture of the aftermath of the bombing, a photo that appeared on the magazine’s cover, and they would then ask those officers to pose with Ortiz at Fenway.

It seemed like the perfect idea, said SI managing editor Chris Stone.

“What it came down to in the end was was this story really about David Ortiz or is it a bigger story in general?” Hercik said. “I think it’s more about the comeback or revitalization of Boston.”

Mark Fainaru-Wada: The co-author of League of Denial recently spoke to graduate students at the National Sports Journalism Center at Indiana about his new book. Manny Randhawa reports.

“The most valid criticism I think we got is that we really didn’t take a hard look at the NFLPA. And I think there are a couple of reasons for that. One is time; we had a limited amount of time to do the reporting and deliver the book. And we had to make choices as we went through that process. … We tried to deal with it some in the book, but we just ultimately decided, the NFL created this research arm, the NFL was driving the research, and the NFL was sending the message through its research that this is not a problem. At the same time it was attacking independent researchers and I think we just thought that was the way to tell the story in that moment.”

Bill Raftery: The veteran basketball analyst tells Richard Deitsch of SI.com why he left ESPN to call Big East games on Fox Sports 1.

“The Big East was a pretty good connection for me philopshically,” Raftery said. “I love the people at ESPN but I just thought it would be a naturally conclusion for me to go full circle with the Big East.”

Fantasy football: Richard Deitsch at MMQB praises ESPN2’s Fantasy Football Now on Sunday mornings.

“Our host Robert Flores says it at the top of every show—we are here to get you a win,” says FFN coordinating producer Scott Clark, who has worked on the show for the past two years and has worked at ESPN since 1999. “Everything is geared toward fantasy football and helping people with their lineups. We also try to be entertaining doing it. The questions we ask our reporters in the field are very different than the ones reporters are asked on Sunday NFL Countdown or SportsCenter because our questions are geared toward individual players. We will hit on players that will not be discussed on other shows because we will discuss the Top 50 wide receivers or running backs each week.”

Verne Lundquist: Jon Solomon of the al.com does an interview on Lundquist’s 50 years in broadcasting.

“I’ll know (when it’s time to retire),” Lundquist said in a recent interview, noting that Craig Silver, CBS’ longtime coordinating producer for college football, will know as well. “I don’t want to stay too long. We all know guys who did. I don’t want that happening. I don’t want the mistakes multiplying. I’m conscious, we all are. If I misidentify a guy, I feel really bad about it. You don’t get to come back the next day to correct it.”

Phil Simms: Bob Raissman of the New York Daily News likes what the analyst is doing on his various studio shows.

With the studio stuff, he can freelance. Like on the most recent episode of “Monday QB.” Reporter Jason La Canfora went into an all-too-serious soliloquy about the NFL trade deadline and who might be available and where they could be headed. This cat made it seem like NFL GM’s were deciphering ObamaCare.

The normal response would have had Simms chiming in, saying: “Jason, in conversations I’ve had around the league …” Instead, Simms went against the grain, casting aspersions on the report.

“I love hearing this trade rumor stuff. I do love rumors, but most of the stuff is just media created,” Simms said. “If there are two (trades) I will be shocked.”

Jewish sportscasters: ChicagoJewishNews.com talks to several Jewish sportscasters in Chicago about their religion and sports.

(Jordan) Bernfield, who says he has a strong Jewish identity and continues to enjoy celebrating Jewish holidays with his large family, thinks it’s more than coincidence that there are so many Jewish sportscasters in Chicago.

“I think often the Jewish values of striving to be the best, striving to be successful are values that coincide with trying to work in a business as competitive as this,” he says. “It’s because in many Jewish families success is valued, and there are so many Jews who strive to be at the top of a competitive field.”

 

Baltimore Sun: Maryland used social media PR campaign to sway opinion on Big Ten move

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Terrific piece of reporting by Jeff Barker of the Baltimore Sun. It really illuminates how teams, universities, players can help shift opinions in the modern media world.

Barker writes:

The University of Maryland anticipated most fans would initially react “emotionally and negatively” to last year’s decision to join the Big Ten Conference. So the school sought to influence the debate with a plan to lobby media pundits and plant positive comments into fan message boards.

Scores of documents and emails, obtained by The Baltimore Sun in response to a Public Information Act request, detail a public relations strategy that was as secret as the Big Ten negotiations themselves.

Maryland announced on Nov. 19, 2012, that it would depart the Atlantic Coast Conference after 60 years and join the Big Ten, effective in July 2014. It, as school officials predicted, led to fans expressing sadness and anger over losing popular ACC-related traditions such as facing rivals Duke, North Carolina and Virginia.

The public relations campaign was meant to help turn the tide in favor of the move. It included hiring a corporate communications consultant to help shape the message and also working to prevent news of the negotiations from getting out before the move was imminent.

“So far, this is unfolding just as we expected,” Brian Ullmann, the university’s assistant vice president for marketing and communications, wrote in an email to deputy athletic director Nathan Pine on Nov. 18, one day after negotiations on the impending move were disclosed in the media. “We knew that in the absence of our messaging during this initial stage, most fans would react emotionally and negatively. That has occurred and clearly the message boards and comments sections skew heavily negative. Several of us placed comments on boards and media sites last night to help balance it out.”

The Scott Van Pelt angle:

In the days before the Big Ten discussions were made public, Maryland and its consultants considered how to release the story.

“Scott Van Pelt is a powerful voice in the media and a loyal UMD grad,” public relations consultant John Maroon wrote to a Maryland communications official before the story broke. “It would be in our best interest to let Van Pelt break the story and talk about all of the positives.”

Van Pelt is an ESPN television and radio commentator who attended Maryland and remains involved with the university.

In an interview Wednesday, Maroon said his thinking was that Van Pelt had a “national platform” and could have helped introduce a conference move expected to produce “varying emotions.”

News of Maryland’s negotiations with the Big Ten was reported on ESPN.com under the bylines of several reporters, but not Van Pelt’s.

“The consultants provided many suggestions, of which that [giving the story to Van Pelt] was one,” Pine said in his email to The Sun on Wednesday. “We decided not to pursue it.”

Van Pelt could not immediately be reached for comment.

10 years later: Home of growing NFL Network, but still no team for Los Angeles

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Tom Hoffarth of the Los Angeles Daily News notes the irony of the NFL Network originating out of Los Angeles, which remarkably still doesn’t have a home team.

Hoffarth writes:

It’s 10 years after the fact, and the NFL Network’s now-sprawling Culver City compound continues to remain the only tangible evidence the league has any sort of interest in being part of Los Angeles.

As an entertainment platform, for sure.

As a franchise homestead? From one righteously profitable move does not another logically follow.

Months before the NFL Network officially launched Nov. 4, 2003, league officials scouted locations in Burbank, Hollywood and Manhattan Beach before deciding to plop down on a commercial lot and use about 28,000 square feet of combined space for Studio A and Suite 100 on an eclectic stretch of Washington Boulevard, next to an Islamic mosque, across the street from an elementary school and just a few blocks from the famed Sony Pictures lot where decades earlier “The Wizard of Oz” was made.

Sure, if the NFL only had a heart, a brain and the nerve a franchise would be back here by now. But what’s to say the NFL Network’s presence isn’t the gift that just keeps on regifting for this region of interest?

“Did I think we’d have a team here by now?” said NFL Network executive producer Eric Weinberger, one of a handful of employees part with this operation from the start. “Sure, but that was never part of the idea of having the network here.

“At the time, the plan was to have the signature show here — ‘NFL Total Access’ — and get celebrities to come in. This was an entertainment-meets-football kind of shop. We fell in love with the sound stages and also with the fact that we were very close to the (LAX) airport so it was very efficient for everyone. It’s just kept growing and we haven’t looked back.”

Later in the story, Hoffarth writes:

So how and where will this network stretch further into the next decade?

During a network 10th anniversary special Wednesday, Eisen put that question to a panel of Willie McGinest, Michael Irvin and Steve Mariucci.

“We work here in L.A. — Culver City — I want to see a team here,” Mariucci said. “I used to coach for the Rams down when we were in Anaheim. Rich, we gotta have a team here. That’s gotta happen here soon.”

Save that piece of video for the network’s 20th anniversary special. It could be a collector’s item.

Yes, by 2023, the NFL probably will have two teams in London, but no teams in the nation’s second largest market.

Last words on baseball: Please, please speed up the game; time-study examines problem

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For the better part of October, I pounded on baseball. Hard.

It’s not that I don’t love the game. I do. I just hate the way it is being played now.

Really, it would seem to be an easy fix for baseball: Enforce rules that require batters to stay in the box and demand that pitchers work faster. Simply pick up the pace.

If they played quickly in big games in Babe Ruth’s era, Mickey Mantle’s era, Reggie Jackson’s era, why can’t it be that way in Miguel Cabrera’s era?

I thought I would leave some parting shots from others to show I am hardly alone in this crusade.

********

Michael Glicken of Sports Media Monitor was intrigued by my rants about the length of games. Far more proficient in math than me, he took an analytical approach in evaluating the pace of play.

Glicken writes:

Our goal was not to explain every inefficiency that drives games longer (why game six in 1918 only took an hour and 46 minutes for example), it was to determine whether the present postseason games ran longer than “normal,” and get closer to the root causes.

Glicken offers a detailed analysis. Definitely an interesting read.

*******

Matthew Futterman of the Wall Street Journal did a piece on why kids aren’t watching baseball. I’ve made that observation from my own teenage boys, who only had a passing interest in the World Series. They were much more into college and pro football and the beginning of the NBA season.

Writes Futterman:

The average World Series viewer this year is 54.4 years old, according to Nielsen, the media research firm. The trend line is heading north: The average age was 49.9 in 2009. Kids age 6 to 17 represented just 4.3% of the average audience for the American and National League Championship Series this year, compared with 7.4% a decade ago.

Comparisons with the NFL are pointless. That behemoth of North American sports dominates nearly every demographic. But kids make up a larger segment of the television audiences for the NBA, NHL and even soccer’s English Premier League than they do for baseball.

Kids accounted for 9.4% of the NBA conference finals audience this year, compared with 10.6% a decade ago. They represented 9% of the NHL conference-finals audience in the spring. For Premier League soccer on the NBC Sports Network, kids are accounting for 11% of the audience.

Futterman then writes:

As riveting as the sport can be at its most intense moments, baseball’s primary activities are the pitcher staring at the catcher to decide what to throw and the batter stepping in and out of the batter’s box. It doesn’t have to be that way.

May we suggest two simple rule changes: Once batters step into the box, they shouldn’t be allowed to step out. Otherwise it’s a strike. If no one is on base, pitchers get seven seconds to throw the next pitch. Otherwise it’s a ball.

Wow, what a novel concept.

*******

Michael Bradley of the National Sports Journalism Center also harped on the time issue.

Baseball can, however, do something about two things that hurt it. First, the sport has become long and, frankly, boring. No matter how much Fox tries to play up the drama that accompanies every pitch of a Series game, there can be no denying the horribly tedious pace of just about every baseball game played. Come October, the tortoise becomes a slug. Game three of the 2013 Series, a 5-4 nine-inning affair, lasted 3:54. That’s absolutely uncalled for. It’s one thing to let a three-hour game wash over you on a balmy summer evening and quite another to endure hours of standing around when the alarm clock is ready to pounce at 6 a.m.

Bradley, though, adds baseball needs to do a better job of marketing its stars.

The magic of baseball doesn’t fire fans’ interests any longer. There has to be more. The NBA doesn’t sell the pick-and-roll or the three-point shot. It sells the people who make those things come to life. And it does that throughout the whole season and then during its draft and free agency. By the time the Finals come around, fans can’t wait to see these heroes on the biggest stage. And just about every team capable of reaching the Finals has stars with whom fans are quite familiar. Baseball does a terrible job with this. As the 2013 playoffs dawned, few fans outside of Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Oakland knew about those team’s top players, and that was 30% of the field. If baseball wants its World Series to be more popular, it must create a culture of stars, the better to rope in casual viewers.

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Joe Lucia of Awful Announcing also picks up on the marketing theme.

That’s why baseball is struggling among kids. It’s not the pace of the game, the length of the game, or the late start times – it’s all about marketing. Joey Votto is one of the best players in baseball, but when was the last time you saw him in a commercial? Chris Sale is the best player in the city of Chicago, one of the largest media markets in the country – but could a non-White Sox fan even pick him out of a lineup? If Andrew McCutchen shaved his head, could he walk into any convenience store in Pittsburgh and buy a candy bar?

Agree, Joe, but it also is pace of the game too. Combination of both.

*******

Anyway, I wanted to get in a few last shots. I’ll give it a rest for a while, but you can be sure I’ll be firing away again next October.

 

 

NFL Network at 10: How much bigger will it get?

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The NFL Network put out this nice infographic to note its 10th anniversary.

Indeed, the network has come a long way, and it still has plenty of room for more growth with the NFL still exploding on TV. The big question is: How many more games will it put on NFL Network? We should find out sooner than later.