PAUL FINEBAUM
I forever remind myself that none of this is about me. It’s not. And I’m very fine with all of that. But it’s only natural that sometimes you put yourself in somebody else’s shoes. And where compassion, selflessness, goodness and understanding are involved positive things can generally result. It doesn’t matter if the shoes fit or not; actually it’s better if they don’t. Because that’s how you learn. And then help.
But for real, if my name was Paul Finebaum…
I mean what are the chances that one emerges unscathed from childhood with a name like Paul Finebaum? Forgive my facetiousness, my flippancy. We’re all a little smarter than this or should be. I’m a bit waggish I know, but Paul Finebaum? Paul Finebaum? (As Mora Sr. so infamously and of course rhetorically asked the media years ago in a post-game tirade, “Playoffs? Playoffs?… Are you kiddin’ me?…Playoffs???”).
It just so happens that Paul Finebaum turned out fine; he’s pretty, pretty good. Unscathed I’m not sure but he’s riding on the crest of a popularity wave these days which is mighty impressive. Paul Alan Finebaum is an American sports author, radio and television personality and former columnist who hails from the great state of Tennessee where he was educated but somehow has a bit of New York coursing through his veins. His primary focus is sports with the accent on college football and action in the rabid Southeast is his bailiwick. After many years as a reporter, columnist and sports-talk radio host in and around Birmingham, AL. he was hired by ESPN in 2013 for its new SEC Network which launched in 2014 and produces a radio show from its regional base in Charlotte, North Carolina. Finebaum is considered one of the medium’s finest interviewers and he has been called by CNBC’s Emmy-Award-winning sports reporter Darren Rovell, “the best listener of any sports radio talk host.” Sounds like damning with faint praise because most of the (knuckle) heads only jabber ad nauseum at the expense of listening but Finebaum is the real deal. In January 2017, The Big Lead — Gannett Company’s news blog and a sister property of its flagship newspaper USA Today — rated Finebaum №25 on a list of “The 30 Most Powerful Talents in Sports Media Today,” commenting thusly:
“Finebaum owns the SEC region, and when he wields his cudgel on a coach or
program in scandal, it cuts deeper than just about any voice. He has his finger
on the pulse of Nick Saban and Alabama, which you might as well write in the
CFB playoffs every year in a Sharpie.”
And on February 1, 2018 Jason Barrett of Barrett Sports Media polled 35 radio executives from around the nation and listed Finebaum and his work №7 in “America’s Top 20 National Sports Shows of 2017.”
If this isn’t praise enough, ESPN’s highly acclaimed sportscaster Joe Tessitore remarked, “If you asked me who are the two greatest interviewers on radio and television, I would say Paul Finebaum and Howard Stern.” James Andrew Miller, considered the nation’s leading authority on ESPN offered this gilded embellishment: “Paul Finebaum knows the American Southeast like Jay-Z knows Brooklyn. And that’s a big blast of wind at your back if your job is covering college football. His instincts as an interviewer rank him in the top tier of the sports world. And he is beyond mere savvy when it comes to speaking very virally.”
It should come as no surprise then that Finebaum was champing at the bit and only too willing to share his pointed criticisms of the embattled Ohio State head football coach Urban Meyer. His tenure at Florida, well-documented as sweet on the outside but rotting from within as a prelude, Finebaum dropped the gloves when it came to putting his stamp on the Ohio State debacle. He steadfastly has maintained that the next step is for Meyer to hit the bricks. “I think it’s pretty obvious from Ohio State realizing that the moment they put him on administrative leave it telegraphed to everyone ‘he’s done,’ to Urban realizing he had to change the narrative by issuing that statement…coinciding with Zach Smith’s just purely embarrassing interview with ESPN,” Finebaum said. “And [now] I think the betting line in Vegas is…shifting back toward Urban Meyer surviving somehow, whether it’s a two-game suspension or four-game suspension; whether it’s a fine; whether it’s Urban…sitting down with Rece (Davis) or Tom Rinaldi and crying on camera while Shelley [his wife] looks at him and talks about how he’s the greatest man she’s ever known. You guys can spend plenty of time…coming up with the narrative, but I think we’ve all seen the movie before.”
He was just warming up. “When we’re talking about arrogance, that seems to go hand in hand with Urban Meyer,” he continued. “I have always liked him personally. I respect his coaching ability, but you can’t look past the University of Florida. He left a disaster down there. Yeah, he won two national championships thanks to Tim Tebow and Percy Harvin and countless other players who have been in the NFL since then, but left his entire legacy in burned ashes.” As for Ohio State? “(My initial) reaction was Urban Meyer cannot survive this,” Finebaum remarked. “And that’s before I even finished the first paragraph. As you got deeper and deeper into the story, it got progressively worse. Since then, I haven’t seen any indication from that school or from anyone else that he is. The second they put him on administrative leave, that telegraphed to me and many others that they were looking for a way out with a settlement, outright fire for cause. I don’t know. I cannot imagine…that he is going to be able to have anything more to say in terms of this football season. Let’s not forget. It’s irrelevant to the point…but this is one of the top four teams in the country, and now it looks like not only is that gone for him, but perhaps one of the great careers in college football history.”
When a small group of Ohio State fans — reported to be 100 or so — showed up on campus to support the embattled Meyer, they effectively were painting him as the victim. It was a very bad look which escaped few. An appearance at the microphone of Stacy Elliott, Ezekiel Elliott’s father, added unneeded fuel to the already blazing fire. (Elliott the younger was suspended by the NFL for domestic violence). Fodder for Finebaum who has little faith in Ohio State’s investigative process. Commented he, “The university appointed this so-called ‘Blue Ribbon Commission’ which includes three trustees, which concerns me and should concern anyone, but what else have they done? [Smacks of the Michigan State brouhaha, does it not?] That is the question I have. It seems to me this university is just hoping they can get past this and make sure their coach Urban Meyer is on the field for the first game. That’s the look I see from Ohio State and it’s shocking compared to what we have seen and what [has been] reported countless times at Michigan State and other universities. These universities continue to make the same mistakes, over and over.”
Lamentably and certainly with Stacy Elliott’s visibility in mind Finebaum zeroed in further. “The people that show up to events like this don’t care about what the best look is. They have blind loyalty…but that’s what we saw…We saw fans and parents of former players who don’t care about the facts, they don’t care about anything other than preserving the football program…Ohio State you would have expected more from them, you would have expected them to at least attempt to do the right thing and I’ve yet to see that…I see no inclination from this university to get rid of Urban Meyer as we speak…”
The world is upside-down in so many ways. And “everything in the country is broken,” grimly assesses Frank Rich, famed cultural and political critic and executive producer of HBO’s Veep and Succession. “Not just Washington,” he expounds, “which failed to prevent the (2008) financial catastrophe and has done little to protect us from the next, but also race relations, health care, education, institutional religion, law enforcement, the physical infrastructure, the news media, the bedrock virtues of civility and community.” What else is there? “Nearly everything has turned to crap,” he sadly concedes. And although he doesn’t lay all the blame on Trump and in fact remarks that his genius — if it could be called that — was to “exploit and weaponize” a discontent percolating for decades, he takes politicians in general to task. He harkens back to the days of yore when Americans trusted that if the going got tough enough, politicians would put the country first and do the right thing. No longer, but Rich still has hope particularly in the young like the Parkland teenagers and even the millennials, “despite their unsavory reputation.” They have a huge incentive to correct their elders’ mistakes and they can start by voting in large numbers for Democrats “to put a halt” to Trump’s egregious excesses and nitwit decision-making.
Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn harbors hope which is rooted in new politicians running for office now: women, veterans, Democrats and Republicans “not tainted by complicity in the last 15 to 20 years.” A selfless integrity nearly nonexistent today must be restored in short order and once again become the norm. We must start making the right choices pronto.
Making the right choices for the right reasons. Paul Finebaum knows all about that and isn’t afraid to talk about it. If he ever had a little sand kicked in his face as a kid, make no mistake: he’s the one doing the kicking today. And we need more like him, young and old.
