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Speaker 1: This is Dave Lapper, and you're listening to the Home of the Bengals, ESPN 1530.
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Speaker 2: Sure are.
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Speaker 3: What's up?
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Speaker 4: Good afternoon, Mo Egger, ESPN 1530. Thank you so much for listening today. We've got a lot of ground to cover.
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Speaker 3: Our sports legal expert, attorney Stuart W. Penrose, in 30 minutes.
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Speaker 4: I am stoked for our next conversation. In all the years we've been doing this show... There's a handful of guests that I could tell you exactly how many times we had them on, and for the most part, the circumstances under which we had them on. And probably at the top of that list is the great Peter King, longtime of Sports Illustrated, later on of NBC Sports and Pro Football Talk and Football Morning in America, his Monday morning column, the day after all the NFL games on Sunday for years.
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Speaker 3: Absolutely must read.
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Speaker 4: He is now retired from that, but his book, which I devoured while.
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Speaker 3: On the UC road trip this weekend, is called The Game.
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Speaker 4: It is filled with reflections from a lifetime covering a sport, having a front row seat for its growth, for its evolution, both the good and bad of it. Peter will be signing and discussing the book on a Saturday evening at Joseph Beth Booksellers. That event's going to start at 7 o'clock. You can learn all about that at josephbeth.com. Get the book there. It is a pleasure to bring in one of my all-time favorites, Peter King. Awesome to have you. I can't thank you enough for doing this, and good afternoon.
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Speaker 1: Mo, great, great to be on with you. And you left one thing out of that incredibly flattering.
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Speaker 2: Bio, and that is.
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Speaker 1: that I cut my teeth right in your backyard.
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Speaker 2: The first five years of my career.
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Speaker 1: In Cincinnati, and it could not have been a better opportunity for me, working at the Enquirer, covering high schools and colleges, and then the Bengals, and also covering Aaron Pryor and Buddy LaRosa and Tommy Ayers and and just really covering Bob Trumpy and the radio TV sports beat.
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Speaker 2: I don't know.
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Speaker 1: I just, I had the time of my life working for those five years in Cincinnati. So I am ecstatic to be coming back to Cincinnati Saturday night to, uh, sign books and to talk to people. I'm going to be talking at the bookstore with Paul Docherty, good friend of mine. And so I'm really, really looking forward to that. But anyway, thanks a lot for having me on.
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Speaker 4: I appreciate you doing this. And I was going to go there first, because here's what I liked most about the book. It's like your favorite band playing your favorite song at the top of the set list, because the very first chapter, you're writing about the Bengals and covering Paul Brown and covering Sam Weiss. So like, I didn't have to wait. Not that I didn't devour it. I didn't have to read a few hundred pages before you got to the stuff that I wanted to read about the most.
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Speaker 1: Well, and, you know, look, the craziest thing about, you know, the NFL four decades ago is how approachable it was, where Sam Weitsch, the rookie coach of the Bengals, me, the rookie beat guy, I've never covered the NFL before. One of the first interviews I ever had with an NFL person is with Sam. And he opened the interview by saying, do you want to know who we're going to draft? because this happened obviously right before the NFL draft.
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Speaker 2: I said, of course I do.
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Speaker 1: And so you're very, very, you're a little bit worried that the guy is trying to take you down the wrong path. But it turns out he was absolutely right. He told me a bunch of the guys who they were going to draft, including Boomer Esiason, picked up Boomer and Pete Koch at the airport in my two-door Volkswagen Rabbit hatchback. And just, I don't know, it was a different time, different date. I lived on the ground floor of the dorm at Wilmington College in training camp with Mike Brown, catty corner across the hall, Paul Brown down the hall with Sam Weitsch in the RAs quarters. in that dorm basically saying, if you ever need, have any questions or need me, just come knocking at my door after night meetings. So probably six or eight times that summer, 945 at night. Indeed, I went and knocked on the door of Sam Weitsch and said, hey, what is this no huddle thing that you're practicing?
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Speaker 2: So it was the.
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Speaker 1: Absolute perfect time team to break in with, players, coaches. Anthony Munoz, what a great person, great guy he was. Boomer, Ken Anderson was fantastic. Collinsworth, all of these guys. It was just a treat and a blessing for me to be able to have that as my first year covering the NFL.
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Speaker 4: How do you begin to describe, because when you think of Bengals and you think of Paul Brown, you think conservative. When you think of Sam Weish, that's.
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Speaker 3: Not the word that comes to mind. And you capture a lot of that in the opening parts of the book. But how do you.
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Speaker 4: Describe to folks who might not be familiar with those characters and what they meant to football here? How do you describe to folks what that working dynamic was like since you had such a front row seat for it?
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Speaker 1: Well, first of all, Paul Brown was an arch-conservative guy, but that really didn't matter.
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Speaker 2: If he could win a football game, he was for it.
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Speaker 1: And so he loved Sam's imagination.
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Speaker 2: Sometimes he thought.
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Speaker 1: That Sam tilted at windmills and fought the wrong battles, which I did too. But Paul Brown wanted Sam Weitsch's imagination on his team. And it was, I think the players loved it too. Boomer loved it. You know, as he grew into that job and began playing more and more, uh, he absolutely loved the fact that he could go to Sam and Sam would be explaining, uh, you know, a play to him. And one really sticks in my mind. There was a There was a play that had the number 61 in there, and Sam was big on visualization. He was big instead of just having a number. How can a guy remember a number? Sam was big on a term that would make a guy remember the number, and so he had a play that had the number 61 in it.
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Speaker 2: It was a running play. And so he told Boomer, OK, listen.
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Speaker 1: We're going to have one of the words we're going to have in here is mantle for 61. And Boomer goes, why mantel? And Sam goes, well, you know, Boomer wants to know, why are we putting Mantle in there? What's 61? He goes, well, Mantle had 61 home runs.
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Speaker 2: He goes, no, he didn't. That was Roger Maris.
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Speaker 1: Mickey Mantle didn't hit 61 homers. And Sam goes, ah, those guys will never know. So Mantle became, you know, the name of this play that had 61 in there. But I think Sam's idea was– If I make football not like coming to work, my guys are going to love coming to work. And I think in many ways he was absolutely correct because those guys, so many of them, just loved coming to work every day.
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Speaker 3: Peter King is with us Saturday night.
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Speaker 4: Joseph Beth Bookseller starts at 7 o'clock signing and discussing The Game, his new book, which is absolutely terrific. It's a real journey through, and I'm 49 years old, so you're writing about my formative years as an NFL fan. You're writing about things that I remember, but maybe not that well as a kid. I developed in reading this a more favorable view of Paul Tagliabue, and not that I had a bad opinion of him, but I think just it's been so long since he's been the commissioner. When he took over as the commissioner, I was a kid. I don't really think I was as cognizant of how influential... In a positive way, but also, and I think what I like about what you write about a lot of figures is you don't just glorify them.
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Speaker 3: You write about.
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Speaker 4: Some things that maybe are a little bit more on the regrettable side. I'm curious, who is like the most misunderstood figure in the 40 years that you were covering the NFL that folks have maybe the wrong perception of?
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Speaker 1: I think you brought him up tagliabue, but I've got to start by telling you that the commissioner who preceded him, Pete Rozelle, is known as the greatest commissioner in the history of sports. And I don't think that that's wrong necessarily, but I do think that some of Rozelle's weaknesses have really been glossed over. His last seven years were a debacle. He lorded over two player strikes and also a tremendous loss in a lawsuit against Al Davis that basically allowed teams to move almost at will. And so, you know, Pete Rozelle stayed too long at the party. But understand that when Paul Tagliabue took over, Pete Rozelle also, you know, when he was the commissioner of this game... Pete Roselle believed that, basically, absence makes the heart grow fonder. He wanted the NFL to disappear in the offseason.
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Speaker 2: That first year, I.
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Speaker 1: Covered the NFL. 1984, there was one event in the offseason. It was the NFL draft. It started at 8 a.m. in New York City, and it ended after midnight in New York. They had all 12 rounds of that draft in one day.
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Speaker 2: And that was it.
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Speaker 1: After that, Roselle was content with making football disappear because what he thought was that.
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Speaker 2: Everybody will come back and they.
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Speaker 1: Will really be eager to embrace football this fall.
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Speaker 2: And, of course, they were.
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Speaker 1: But Tagliabue said, hang on a minute. I'm going to get people into football in the offseason. We're going to have some events in the offseason. The draft got a lot bigger. It became a multi-day event. Not only did the draft get bigger, but free agency, which was forced on the league by a judge in Minnesota named David Doty, it became in 1993 a huge news event. I covered the Reggie White stakes, which ended with him signing with Green Bay.
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Speaker 2: And I will never forget.
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Speaker 1: How excited they were at Sports Illustrated that we were going to put the NFL on the cover in the offseason because NFL on newsstands at any time, always sold a lot more copies. So the business people at SI love that. And so we put Reggie White on the cover in the middle of March 1993 and sold a boatload of copies. And so it became a big deal. Tagliabue got the draft going. He got the scouting combine became more of a bigger deal. NFL Network was born. International football games began in 2005, all under Tagliabue. And then Goodell came along and he just, he went even crazier with the offseason to the point that in 2009, he had the special events department in the NFL create this thing called the calendar wheel. And I write about this in the book. Nobody's ever heard of it. But they wanted to make the NFL a year-round event. That is why with tentpole events throughout the offseason.
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Speaker 2: So they did.
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Speaker 1: And that is why in 1985, when Americans were asked, what's your favorite sport? Pro football edged baseball 24 to 23 percent. And when they were asked the year after I quit doing the job 2024, when they were asked the same question, football, you know, by a margin of four to one out distance baseball. That is because they made football a year round event.
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Speaker 4: I think the part of the book that I enjoy the most, aside from you writing about the Bengals, is the oral history of how the Combine came to be. The event that it's turned into, where it was this closeted thing with a handful of teams gathering intel, and now it's one of those tentpole events. How would you describe your relationship with the game and the league right now?
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Speaker 2: I love football.
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Speaker 1: I watch Scott Hanson every Sunday afternoon for six and a half hours, like I'm sure a lot of people in America do.
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Speaker 2: But I also see it's warts.
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Speaker 1: You know, the gambling aspect really, really bothers me. There's going to be more people in Gamblers Anonymous in five years than Alcoholics Anonymous. And not only that, but You know, how is the NFL going to feel down the road when it looks back and sees a generation, you know, thousands and thousands of young.
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Speaker 2: People, high school, college kids?
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Speaker 1: Who, you know, use the NFL and gambling on the NFL as basically a gateway to spending too much of their life and too much of their money on gambling, which I'm sorry, you're just not going to win.
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Speaker 2: I think that bothers me.
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Speaker 1: What really bothers me the most probably is this insatiable appetite.
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Speaker 2: For more and more and more. Stop expanding the schedule.
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Speaker 1: You're asking players, already players who are subject to too many head hits, you're asking them in 2021 when the schedule went to 17 regular season games per team, you're asking starters to play 60 to 65 more snaps a year. Now on top of that, in what year, 28, 29, whenever it happens, you're going to be asking players to to have even more snaps than that. And so that really bothers me. It's never enough for the NFL, ever. And at some point after you get 18 games, you're going to have whoever the next Jerry Jones is in the league.
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Speaker 2: Jerry's in his 80s now.
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Speaker 1: Whoever the next Jerry Jones is is going to be thinking about the 20-game schedule.
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Speaker 2: Stop. Stop.
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Speaker 1: If you are serious about the health of your players, stop pushing them to do more.
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Speaker 4: Who are the people that you miss covering and interacting with on a regular basis in the league the most?
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Speaker 1: Probably number one is Andy Reid, because Andy Reid, who who thought that when he went to college, that if he had a choice, one choice in life, it was not going to be to be a coach.
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Speaker 2: It was going to be to succeed.
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Speaker 1: Paul Zimmerman is writing about the NFL for Sports Illustrated. And so over the years, he has really been a go-to guy and understands exactly what I love to do and what I need to do, which is to get to go down every rabbit, to go down the rabbit hole of every huge play in a Super Bowl or in a playoff game.
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Speaker 2: And Andy Reid loved, loved it.
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Speaker 5: It worked out. Yeah. There's a bunch of players who, over the years, they got to know and who I miss.
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Speaker 2: But, I mean, I miss.
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Speaker 5: Mahomes because I think it's easier to break in the NFL. In all ways, value, empathy. It's kind of this.
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Speaker 4: Do we still have Peter? Is Peter still with us? I believe we had a spotty connection. Peter, you hear me okay? All right, try to reconnect. Peter King is going to be at Joseph Beth Booksellers on Saturday evening signing the game. He'll discuss it. Paul Doherty is going to be there. Starts at 7 o'clock. You can go to josephbeth.com. and get more information on the event. It's not ticketed or anything, but you can RSVP. So again, go to josephbeth.com. Peter King, it is a wonderful read if you care at all about some of the inner workings of the NFL, some of the key figures over the last 40 years.
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Speaker 3: I'm telling you, you will love this book.
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Speaker 4: And heavy on the Bengals because of Peter's time covering the Cincinnati Bengals for the Inquirer.
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Speaker 3: Peter, you back with me for another minute?
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Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm back.
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Speaker 3: Sorry about that.
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Speaker 2: I apologize. No problem.
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Speaker 3: No problem.
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Speaker 4: I wanted to go back to your time working for the Inquirer because we could talk about covering the Bengals. Because I'm a nerd, I have a newspapers.com account. And what I spend some of my free time doing is I read old newspapers.
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Speaker 3: So I have seen your sports radio and TV columns.
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Speaker 4: I'm thankful you're not covering that beat here now because you would probably crush me. What was your favorite non-Cincinnati Bengal thing, game, event, or person to cover when you were at the Inquirer?
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Speaker 2: You know, I.
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Speaker 1: Got to say, even though I'm not the biggest boxing fan anymore, because, man, I sat ringside at Aaron Pryor versus Alexis Arguello.
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Speaker 2: And all I can say is that was.
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Speaker 1: that was really blood sport at its best, so much so that Mark Purdy and I, the columnist, I know that I looked down at my pad at the end of that fight after sitting at ringside, and quite literally, there were nine splotches of blood on my reporter's notebook.
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Speaker 2: I mean, it was a brutal, brutal thing.
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Speaker 1: I miss covering boxing because I one time wrote a story that I didn't think was too bad, but Aaron Pryor thought it was not complimentary. Aaron Pryor stormed into the Inquirer offices on Vine Street at 8 o'clock in the morning, the morning that the paper came out.
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Speaker 2: And he said, where's King? Where's King? And I'm happy.
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Speaker 1: I was probably still asleep out in my home in Mount Washington, just off Beachmont Avenue.
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Speaker 2: But anyway, I, I, I, you know.
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Speaker 1: I saw him later in the day and he had calmed down by then, but I love covering boxing because man, that is the base, uh, of great sport because you can see everything you can go. I went to Nicaragua to interview Alexis Arguello before the prior Arguello fight.
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Speaker 2: It was so cool.
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Speaker 1: But, anyway, there were so many things at the inquirer that you could do that just, you can't, you just can't do anymore. I mean, I went to Bloomington, Indiana to cover a, an Indiana Purdue basketball game in three hours before the game. I'm sitting there in his office with Bobby Knight, spending 45 minutes with him. I, you know, in those days, the Cincinnati inquirer was a big deal going around the Midwest and, Going up and doing games at Ohio State and going down and covering Dickie Beal as the point guard of the UK basketball team.
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Speaker 2: You know what?
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Speaker 1: I'll never forget this one time. I covered the SEC basketball tournament.
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Speaker 2: It was at.
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Speaker 1: Vanderbilt in Nashville. And I will never forget this. There was this enormous power forward for Auburn named Charles Barkley. And Charles Barkley got, you know, he was subbed out sitting on the bench in the second half. And Charles Barkley is there on the bench eating Goo Goo Cluster candy bars.
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Speaker 2: And I just said to myself, man, this is great. In college basketball, you've got to eat in candy bars. It's unbelievable. But I don't know.
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Speaker 1: I felt like that was so fantastic, those five years I spent in Cincinnati. Loved every minute of it.
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Speaker 4: You could maybe maybe that's your next book, you know, just write about your time here in town. You'll be here Saturday night. Joseph Beth, seven o'clock. Paul Doherty joining you. And it's going to be awesome. I can't thank you enough for doing this. I'll never forget the first time we got you on the show. I had my producer at the time, Lindsay Amble, up to you at a Bengals training camp practice. And I'm like, Linz, if you get him on, you'll be my hero, and you join me that afternoon. And I've never forgotten. So I can't thank you enough for doing that. Hey, no problem, Mo.
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Speaker 1: Thanks for carrying on the mission, Mo.
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Speaker 2: Really appreciate it.
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Speaker 4: You got it. Peter King, the legendary Peter King. The name of the book is The Game. And I'm telling you, fantastic read. Saturday night, Joseph Beth, 7 p.m. Go see Peter King. Listen to him tell stories. you will not be sorry. We are way late, 26 after four. We're broadcasting today from the transept downtown on ESPN 1530 Cincinnati Sports Station.
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Speaker 1: Cincinnati's ESPN 1530. Traffic.
Speaker 1: This is Dave Lapper, and you're listening to the Home of the Bengals, ESPN 1530.
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Speaker 2: Sure are.
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Speaker 3: What's up?
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Speaker 4: Good afternoon, Mo Egger, ESPN 1530. Thank you so much for listening today. We've got a lot of ground to cover.
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Speaker 3: Our sports legal expert, attorney Stuart W. Penrose, in 30 minutes.
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Speaker 4: I am stoked for our next conversation. In all the years we've been doing this show... There's a handful of guests that I could tell you exactly how many times we had them on, and for the most part, the circumstances under which we had them on. And probably at the top of that list is the great Peter King, longtime of Sports Illustrated, later on of NBC Sports and Pro Football Talk and Football Morning in America, his Monday morning column, the day after all the NFL games on Sunday for years.
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Speaker 3: Absolutely must read.
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Speaker 4: He is now retired from that, but his book, which I devoured while.
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Speaker 3: On the UC road trip this weekend, is called The Game.
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Speaker 4: It is filled with reflections from a lifetime covering a sport, having a front row seat for its growth, for its evolution, both the good and bad of it. Peter will be signing and discussing the book on a Saturday evening at Joseph Beth Booksellers. That event's going to start at 7 o'clock. You can learn all about that at josephbeth.com. Get the book there. It is a pleasure to bring in one of my all-time favorites, Peter King. Awesome to have you. I can't thank you enough for doing this, and good afternoon.
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Speaker 1: Mo, great, great to be on with you. And you left one thing out of that incredibly flattering.
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Speaker 2: Bio, and that is.
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Speaker 1: that I cut my teeth right in your backyard.
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Speaker 2: The first five years of my career.
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Speaker 1: In Cincinnati, and it could not have been a better opportunity for me, working at the Enquirer, covering high schools and colleges, and then the Bengals, and also covering Aaron Pryor and Buddy LaRosa and Tommy Ayers and and just really covering Bob Trumpy and the radio TV sports beat.
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Speaker 2: I don't know.
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Speaker 1: I just, I had the time of my life working for those five years in Cincinnati. So I am ecstatic to be coming back to Cincinnati Saturday night to, uh, sign books and to talk to people. I'm going to be talking at the bookstore with Paul Docherty, good friend of mine. And so I'm really, really looking forward to that. But anyway, thanks a lot for having me on.
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Speaker 4: I appreciate you doing this. And I was going to go there first, because here's what I liked most about the book. It's like your favorite band playing your favorite song at the top of the set list, because the very first chapter, you're writing about the Bengals and covering Paul Brown and covering Sam Weiss. So like, I didn't have to wait. Not that I didn't devour it. I didn't have to read a few hundred pages before you got to the stuff that I wanted to read about the most.
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Speaker 1: Well, and, you know, look, the craziest thing about, you know, the NFL four decades ago is how approachable it was, where Sam Weitsch, the rookie coach of the Bengals, me, the rookie beat guy, I've never covered the NFL before. One of the first interviews I ever had with an NFL person is with Sam. And he opened the interview by saying, do you want to know who we're going to draft? because this happened obviously right before the NFL draft.
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Speaker 2: I said, of course I do.
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Speaker 1: And so you're very, very, you're a little bit worried that the guy is trying to take you down the wrong path. But it turns out he was absolutely right. He told me a bunch of the guys who they were going to draft, including Boomer Esiason, picked up Boomer and Pete Koch at the airport in my two-door Volkswagen Rabbit hatchback. And just, I don't know, it was a different time, different date. I lived on the ground floor of the dorm at Wilmington College in training camp with Mike Brown, catty corner across the hall, Paul Brown down the hall with Sam Weitsch in the RAs quarters. in that dorm basically saying, if you ever need, have any questions or need me, just come knocking at my door after night meetings. So probably six or eight times that summer, 945 at night. Indeed, I went and knocked on the door of Sam Weitsch and said, hey, what is this no huddle thing that you're practicing?
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Speaker 2: So it was the.
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Speaker 1: Absolute perfect time team to break in with, players, coaches. Anthony Munoz, what a great person, great guy he was. Boomer, Ken Anderson was fantastic. Collinsworth, all of these guys. It was just a treat and a blessing for me to be able to have that as my first year covering the NFL.
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Speaker 4: How do you begin to describe, because when you think of Bengals and you think of Paul Brown, you think conservative. When you think of Sam Weish, that's.
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Speaker 3: Not the word that comes to mind. And you capture a lot of that in the opening parts of the book. But how do you.
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Speaker 4: Describe to folks who might not be familiar with those characters and what they meant to football here? How do you describe to folks what that working dynamic was like since you had such a front row seat for it?
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Speaker 1: Well, first of all, Paul Brown was an arch-conservative guy, but that really didn't matter.
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Speaker 2: If he could win a football game, he was for it.
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Speaker 1: And so he loved Sam's imagination.
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Speaker 2: Sometimes he thought.
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Speaker 1: That Sam tilted at windmills and fought the wrong battles, which I did too. But Paul Brown wanted Sam Weitsch's imagination on his team. And it was, I think the players loved it too. Boomer loved it. You know, as he grew into that job and began playing more and more, uh, he absolutely loved the fact that he could go to Sam and Sam would be explaining, uh, you know, a play to him. And one really sticks in my mind. There was a There was a play that had the number 61 in there, and Sam was big on visualization. He was big instead of just having a number. How can a guy remember a number? Sam was big on a term that would make a guy remember the number, and so he had a play that had the number 61 in it.
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Speaker 2: It was a running play. And so he told Boomer, OK, listen.
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Speaker 1: We're going to have one of the words we're going to have in here is mantle for 61. And Boomer goes, why mantel? And Sam goes, well, you know, Boomer wants to know, why are we putting Mantle in there? What's 61? He goes, well, Mantle had 61 home runs.
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Speaker 2: He goes, no, he didn't. That was Roger Maris.
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Speaker 1: Mickey Mantle didn't hit 61 homers. And Sam goes, ah, those guys will never know. So Mantle became, you know, the name of this play that had 61 in there. But I think Sam's idea was– If I make football not like coming to work, my guys are going to love coming to work. And I think in many ways he was absolutely correct because those guys, so many of them, just loved coming to work every day.
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Speaker 3: Peter King is with us Saturday night.
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Speaker 4: Joseph Beth Bookseller starts at 7 o'clock signing and discussing The Game, his new book, which is absolutely terrific. It's a real journey through, and I'm 49 years old, so you're writing about my formative years as an NFL fan. You're writing about things that I remember, but maybe not that well as a kid. I developed in reading this a more favorable view of Paul Tagliabue, and not that I had a bad opinion of him, but I think just it's been so long since he's been the commissioner. When he took over as the commissioner, I was a kid. I don't really think I was as cognizant of how influential... In a positive way, but also, and I think what I like about what you write about a lot of figures is you don't just glorify them.
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Speaker 3: You write about.
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Speaker 4: Some things that maybe are a little bit more on the regrettable side. I'm curious, who is like the most misunderstood figure in the 40 years that you were covering the NFL that folks have maybe the wrong perception of?
00:08:51
Speaker 1: I think you brought him up tagliabue, but I've got to start by telling you that the commissioner who preceded him, Pete Rozelle, is known as the greatest commissioner in the history of sports. And I don't think that that's wrong necessarily, but I do think that some of Rozelle's weaknesses have really been glossed over. His last seven years were a debacle. He lorded over two player strikes and also a tremendous loss in a lawsuit against Al Davis that basically allowed teams to move almost at will. And so, you know, Pete Rozelle stayed too long at the party. But understand that when Paul Tagliabue took over, Pete Rozelle also, you know, when he was the commissioner of this game... Pete Roselle believed that, basically, absence makes the heart grow fonder. He wanted the NFL to disappear in the offseason.
00:09:57
Speaker 2: That first year, I.
00:09:58
Speaker 1: Covered the NFL. 1984, there was one event in the offseason. It was the NFL draft. It started at 8 a.m. in New York City, and it ended after midnight in New York. They had all 12 rounds of that draft in one day.
00:10:17
Speaker 2: And that was it.
00:10:19
Speaker 1: After that, Roselle was content with making football disappear because what he thought was that.
00:10:27
Speaker 2: Everybody will come back and they.
00:10:28
Speaker 1: Will really be eager to embrace football this fall.
00:10:33
Speaker 2: And, of course, they were.
00:10:34
Speaker 1: But Tagliabue said, hang on a minute. I'm going to get people into football in the offseason. We're going to have some events in the offseason. The draft got a lot bigger. It became a multi-day event. Not only did the draft get bigger, but free agency, which was forced on the league by a judge in Minnesota named David Doty, it became in 1993 a huge news event. I covered the Reggie White stakes, which ended with him signing with Green Bay.
00:11:05
Speaker 2: And I will never forget.
00:11:06
Speaker 1: How excited they were at Sports Illustrated that we were going to put the NFL on the cover in the offseason because NFL on newsstands at any time, always sold a lot more copies. So the business people at SI love that. And so we put Reggie White on the cover in the middle of March 1993 and sold a boatload of copies. And so it became a big deal. Tagliabue got the draft going. He got the scouting combine became more of a bigger deal. NFL Network was born. International football games began in 2005, all under Tagliabue. And then Goodell came along and he just, he went even crazier with the offseason to the point that in 2009, he had the special events department in the NFL create this thing called the calendar wheel. And I write about this in the book. Nobody's ever heard of it. But they wanted to make the NFL a year-round event. That is why with tentpole events throughout the offseason.
00:12:16
Speaker 2: So they did.
00:12:17
Speaker 1: And that is why in 1985, when Americans were asked, what's your favorite sport? Pro football edged baseball 24 to 23 percent. And when they were asked the year after I quit doing the job 2024, when they were asked the same question, football, you know, by a margin of four to one out distance baseball. That is because they made football a year round event.
00:12:48
Speaker 4: I think the part of the book that I enjoy the most, aside from you writing about the Bengals, is the oral history of how the Combine came to be. The event that it's turned into, where it was this closeted thing with a handful of teams gathering intel, and now it's one of those tentpole events. How would you describe your relationship with the game and the league right now?
00:13:11
Speaker 2: I love football.
00:13:12
Speaker 1: I watch Scott Hanson every Sunday afternoon for six and a half hours, like I'm sure a lot of people in America do.
00:13:20
Speaker 2: But I also see it's warts.
00:13:23
Speaker 1: You know, the gambling aspect really, really bothers me. There's going to be more people in Gamblers Anonymous in five years than Alcoholics Anonymous. And not only that, but You know, how is the NFL going to feel down the road when it looks back and sees a generation, you know, thousands and thousands of young.
00:13:45
Speaker 2: People, high school, college kids?
00:13:48
Speaker 1: Who, you know, use the NFL and gambling on the NFL as basically a gateway to spending too much of their life and too much of their money on gambling, which I'm sorry, you're just not going to win.
00:14:03
Speaker 2: I think that bothers me.
00:14:06
Speaker 1: What really bothers me the most probably is this insatiable appetite.
00:14:11
Speaker 2: For more and more and more. Stop expanding the schedule.
00:14:16
Speaker 1: You're asking players, already players who are subject to too many head hits, you're asking them in 2021 when the schedule went to 17 regular season games per team, you're asking starters to play 60 to 65 more snaps a year. Now on top of that, in what year, 28, 29, whenever it happens, you're going to be asking players to to have even more snaps than that. And so that really bothers me. It's never enough for the NFL, ever. And at some point after you get 18 games, you're going to have whoever the next Jerry Jones is in the league.
00:15:01
Speaker 2: Jerry's in his 80s now.
00:15:03
Speaker 1: Whoever the next Jerry Jones is is going to be thinking about the 20-game schedule.
00:15:07
Speaker 2: Stop. Stop.
00:15:09
Speaker 1: If you are serious about the health of your players, stop pushing them to do more.
00:15:16
Speaker 4: Who are the people that you miss covering and interacting with on a regular basis in the league the most?
00:15:24
Speaker 1: Probably number one is Andy Reid, because Andy Reid, who who thought that when he went to college, that if he had a choice, one choice in life, it was not going to be to be a coach.
00:15:37
Speaker 2: It was going to be to succeed.
00:15:40
Speaker 1: Paul Zimmerman is writing about the NFL for Sports Illustrated. And so over the years, he has really been a go-to guy and understands exactly what I love to do and what I need to do, which is to get to go down every rabbit, to go down the rabbit hole of every huge play in a Super Bowl or in a playoff game.
00:16:05
Speaker 2: And Andy Reid loved, loved it.
00:16:09
Speaker 5: It worked out. Yeah. There's a bunch of players who, over the years, they got to know and who I miss.
00:16:32
Speaker 2: But, I mean, I miss.
00:16:33
Speaker 5: Mahomes because I think it's easier to break in the NFL. In all ways, value, empathy. It's kind of this.
00:16:49
Speaker 4: Do we still have Peter? Is Peter still with us? I believe we had a spotty connection. Peter, you hear me okay? All right, try to reconnect. Peter King is going to be at Joseph Beth Booksellers on Saturday evening signing the game. He'll discuss it. Paul Doherty is going to be there. Starts at 7 o'clock. You can go to josephbeth.com. and get more information on the event. It's not ticketed or anything, but you can RSVP. So again, go to josephbeth.com. Peter King, it is a wonderful read if you care at all about some of the inner workings of the NFL, some of the key figures over the last 40 years.
00:17:31
Speaker 3: I'm telling you, you will love this book.
00:17:33
Speaker 4: And heavy on the Bengals because of Peter's time covering the Cincinnati Bengals for the Inquirer.
00:17:39
Speaker 3: Peter, you back with me for another minute?
00:17:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm back.
00:17:41
Speaker 3: Sorry about that.
00:17:42
Speaker 2: I apologize. No problem.
00:17:45
Speaker 3: No problem.
00:17:46
Speaker 4: I wanted to go back to your time working for the Inquirer because we could talk about covering the Bengals. Because I'm a nerd, I have a newspapers.com account. And what I spend some of my free time doing is I read old newspapers.
00:17:59
Speaker 3: So I have seen your sports radio and TV columns.
00:18:02
Speaker 4: I'm thankful you're not covering that beat here now because you would probably crush me. What was your favorite non-Cincinnati Bengal thing, game, event, or person to cover when you were at the Inquirer?
00:18:16
Speaker 2: You know, I.
00:18:18
Speaker 1: Got to say, even though I'm not the biggest boxing fan anymore, because, man, I sat ringside at Aaron Pryor versus Alexis Arguello.
00:18:29
Speaker 2: And all I can say is that was.
00:18:34
Speaker 1: that was really blood sport at its best, so much so that Mark Purdy and I, the columnist, I know that I looked down at my pad at the end of that fight after sitting at ringside, and quite literally, there were nine splotches of blood on my reporter's notebook.
00:18:52
Speaker 2: I mean, it was a brutal, brutal thing.
00:18:54
Speaker 1: I miss covering boxing because I one time wrote a story that I didn't think was too bad, but Aaron Pryor thought it was not complimentary. Aaron Pryor stormed into the Inquirer offices on Vine Street at 8 o'clock in the morning, the morning that the paper came out.
00:19:12
Speaker 2: And he said, where's King? Where's King? And I'm happy.
00:19:15
Speaker 1: I was probably still asleep out in my home in Mount Washington, just off Beachmont Avenue.
00:19:21
Speaker 2: But anyway, I, I, I, you know.
00:19:25
Speaker 1: I saw him later in the day and he had calmed down by then, but I love covering boxing because man, that is the base, uh, of great sport because you can see everything you can go. I went to Nicaragua to interview Alexis Arguello before the prior Arguello fight.
00:19:47
Speaker 2: It was so cool.
00:19:47
Speaker 1: But, anyway, there were so many things at the inquirer that you could do that just, you can't, you just can't do anymore. I mean, I went to Bloomington, Indiana to cover a, an Indiana Purdue basketball game in three hours before the game. I'm sitting there in his office with Bobby Knight, spending 45 minutes with him. I, you know, in those days, the Cincinnati inquirer was a big deal going around the Midwest and, Going up and doing games at Ohio State and going down and covering Dickie Beal as the point guard of the UK basketball team.
00:20:30
Speaker 2: You know what?
00:20:31
Speaker 1: I'll never forget this one time. I covered the SEC basketball tournament.
00:20:35
Speaker 2: It was at.
00:20:35
Speaker 1: Vanderbilt in Nashville. And I will never forget this. There was this enormous power forward for Auburn named Charles Barkley. And Charles Barkley got, you know, he was subbed out sitting on the bench in the second half. And Charles Barkley is there on the bench eating Goo Goo Cluster candy bars.
00:21:00
Speaker 2: And I just said to myself, man, this is great. In college basketball, you've got to eat in candy bars. It's unbelievable. But I don't know.
00:21:11
Speaker 1: I felt like that was so fantastic, those five years I spent in Cincinnati. Loved every minute of it.
00:21:19
Speaker 4: You could maybe maybe that's your next book, you know, just write about your time here in town. You'll be here Saturday night. Joseph Beth, seven o'clock. Paul Doherty joining you. And it's going to be awesome. I can't thank you enough for doing this. I'll never forget the first time we got you on the show. I had my producer at the time, Lindsay Amble, up to you at a Bengals training camp practice. And I'm like, Linz, if you get him on, you'll be my hero, and you join me that afternoon. And I've never forgotten. So I can't thank you enough for doing that. Hey, no problem, Mo.
00:21:51
Speaker 1: Thanks for carrying on the mission, Mo.
00:21:53
Speaker 2: Really appreciate it.
00:21:55
Speaker 4: You got it. Peter King, the legendary Peter King. The name of the book is The Game. And I'm telling you, fantastic read. Saturday night, Joseph Beth, 7 p.m. Go see Peter King. Listen to him tell stories. you will not be sorry. We are way late, 26 after four. We're broadcasting today from the transept downtown on ESPN 1530 Cincinnati Sports Station.
00:22:19
Speaker 1: Cincinnati's ESPN 1530. Traffic.
