While he’s in St. Louis for a couple of days, Tony Kornheiser called into my show this afternoon.
I asked him what he thought of his Monday Night Football debut and what he expects to bring to the games each week — he answered candidly, as he always has. Tony also fired back hard at Paul Farhi (a columnist for his own paper, the Washington Post), who took some shots at Tony in his review of his first MNF telecast. I believe Tony described Farhi as “a backstabbing, two-bit weasel.”
Listen to the conversation here.
My history with Tony goes back to my days as a morning radio guy in Washington, DC, in the late 1980s, when he would come on as a guest occasionally and complain that I had made him wake up far too early. Then we worked together (for a very short time in 1992) at a station that wooed me away and offered Tony his first fulltime radio show. I did the morning show with my whole ensemble, then James Brown was on for three hours, then Tony held down middays. He lasted longer there than any of us, and was eventually picked up by ESPN Radio for national syndication, which led to the TV show “Pardon The Interruption” with Michael Wilbon, which continues to go gangbusters.
As I said this afternoon, as Tony settles into the rhythm of doing the Monday night games and becomes more comfortable in the booth, he’ll be great at that, too.