Longtime friend of Desipio, TJ Brown sent me this link to a Chicago Reader story about the tensions between Sun-Times columnists Jay Mariotti and Rick Telander.
The article leaves out Mariotti’s doughnut fetish and Telander’s addiction to one sentence paragraphs, though. But there is a lot of great stuff, including a near fistfight in the Wrigley Field pressbox on June 22.
Here’s the article.
I remember when Telander quit Sports Illustrated to come to the Sun Times. Mariotti had given up his column for that horrid talk show he did when AM 1000 first went all sports, and then suddenly, he was back at the Sun Times. Now we know what really happened.
But how sad is it that the Tribune can’t find a pair of columnists better than these two? It’s not that hard to write a sports column, especially in a sports crazed city like Chicago. Just have an opinion, find a way to make it funny or poignant and write it.
Telander tries to do it that way, but his writing has become so scattered you can hardly follow it. Mariotti just bellows in print every day. He’s a farce unto himself. The worst days I have are days (and they’re rare) when I write the Dose and then get to the part where I need to link to his column and find out I agreed with him on something. I’m so used to being comfortably on his opposite pole that I can’t fathom when it doesn’t happen.
The big loser in this whole article is Al Gore. Imagine how many more votes he’d have gotten from the entire Midwest had his Secret Service goons roughed up both Mariotti and Telander when they had the shot?
And…I’ll never forgive Chris DeLuca for not letting Telander make Mariotti a smudge on the wall of the Wrigley press box.
Sigh.
This was the best line:
"Mariotti was beside himself. By various accounts, not to mention personal experience, Mariotti beside himself is given to picking up the phone at any hour of the day or night and leaving messages that sometimes don’t end until the voice mail gives out."
Any chance we can get Jim Tocco and Jay Mariotti angry with each other?
I don’t know what you are talking about.
I don’t have a rift with old whatshisname.
I’m a professional journalist.
Did I mention I played football at Northwestern?
I have my own Web site!
I played football at Northwestern!
I used to write for Sports Illustrated.
I played football for the Wildcats of Northwestern.
What, you mean you can string multiple sentences together in paragraphs?
Really?
Hello? Hello?
Oh, this must be the machine.
Hey, this is Jay from the Sun-Times and I just want to say that this Web site is an adolescent collection of half-wits, and that the writing is terrible. It’s so bad that I hardly find things to rip off and use in my columns here. And about this doughnut thing, I don’t eat very many doughnuts. Sometimes I only have five or six in a day. That’s not that much. Besides, when I go out and pretend to buy replica jerseys and wear them around Indianapolis, it helps to have a neck with a fatty turky gobbler hanging off it.
About the fact that I supposedly don’t like Rick Telander. It just goes to figure that two aborted fetuses of journalism, whatever this crappy Web site is and the Chicago Reader would team up to display an article that is completely false. Telander and I are buddies. In fact, we carpool to work together most days. He doesn’t like the bucket seats in my Datsun that much, so he usually drives.
As for the rumor that I once had sex with Carol Slezak in a janitor’s closet at the Sun-Times, well that’s mostly false. It was a supply closet…and it was John Jackson.
Have I mentioned that the Sox need to fire Jerry Manuel yet?
Well, they do. And I don’t like Jerry Angelo either. I mean what is with this guy. He’s like…Italian or something. And he’s really tan.
I was telling my friend Max Kellerman the other day (BEEP!)
I must say, if I may, that Rick and Jay certainly give me the time of day, whenever I stay, in this fine cit-ay, to pursue tall cash-monay, for my client Linda Will – hey! hey!
I must say, if I may, that Rick and Jay certainly give me the time of day, whenever I stay, in this fine cit-ay, to pursue tall cash-monay, for my client Linda Will – hey! hey!
This just in…
Johnny Cochrane can’t use a computer!
I concur. The sports journalists in this town are incorrigible. At least we have the best announcers in the country. I am not only including the Cubs announcers, but I also give a tip of the hat to my counterparts of Hawk and DJ. Of course, the White Sox fans need someone to describe what they should be feeling and seeing. We know that most of them can’t read.
He gone.
Too bad you not gone.
Too bad you not gone.
Let’s face it. Nothing historic had ever happened at Wrigley Field.
So I felt like a good, old-fashioned brawl would at least give Chicago fans a memory to cherish at Wrigley Field.
I regret that it has been necessary for me in this lecture to administer a large dose of four-dimensional geometry. I do not apologise, because I am really not responsible for the fact that nature in its most fundamental aspect is four-dimensional. Things are what they are… by texas hold’em