Boomer & Gio have different rules for others, selves
WFAN and CBS Sports Network’s Gregg Giannotti suffers from anxiety attacks, even on the air? I’m sorry to learn that.
Yet, no radio or TV team seems to have more low fun with the afflictions of others — callers, public figures — than Giannotti and “Weekday” Boomer Esiason. Despite their own personal and family issues, which they only address in dead-serious, mature-adult terms, all others are child’s prey.
Given these overly sensitive times, it still strikes me as impossible that the “Boomer & Gio” show suffered no official sling or arrow from management for last year’s cheap, childish and cruel degradation of former Knicks general manager Donnie Walsh, then 80, for being relegated by spinal surgery to a wheelchair.
Nothing funnier than a man in a wheelchair. But such are modern radio stars.
Howard Stern, whose fame and enormous fortune were largely predicated on put-downs and ridicule of the well known, demanded respect for his privacy during his divorce.
Don Imus and company laughed themselves dry playing the recording of Mike Schmidt’s tear-filled retirement news conference. Then, Imus broke down while discussing his retirement on “CBS Sunday Morning.”
➤ Once again, and with feeling: In former Manhattan, Villanova and Massachusetts coach Steve Lappas, CBS has one of the best and best-hidden college basketball analysts, period.
His calls throughout the Kentucky-Arkansas game Saturday were so accurate and spontaneous — “How can that count? He was hanging on the rim with one hand, scoring with the other!” — were so sharp one couldn’t help but pay full attention.
➤ Whose advertising patches will appear on the Yankees’ once-sacrosanct (pre-Nike swoosh money) uniforms? As with the umps’ FTX patches, pure greed, nothing better, will determine the winner.
➤ So with his role in a near-campus shooting murder unresolved, Alabama freshman Brandon “Wrong Place, Wrong Time” Miller has been named the AP’s SEC Player of the Year. The award could not have been held in abeyance pending the legal outcome? There was, after all, a murder, not an unresolved parking ticket.