The dictionary defines "skeevy" as someone or something that is physically or morally repulsive. According to Michael Kay of ESPN Radio, "skeevy" is one way to describe how Mike Francesa wormed his way back into the afternoon drive slot at New York all-sports station WFAN.
The host of "The Michael Kay Show" on rival WEPN-FM doesn't begrudge Francesa his decision to return to the sports radio world he dominated for three decades, but Kay asks how the 64-year-old Francesa can bigfoot his successors — Chris Carlin, Maggie Gray and Bart Scott — only four months after his much ballyhooed "farewell tour" from WFAN.
Kay also blasted WFAN parent company Entercom for its "unconscionable" decision to quickly drop Carlin-Gray-Scott to an earlier time slot in favor of Francesa, the bombastic, know-it-all "Sports Pope" who's loved and loathed in the Big Apple.
PARTING SHOT: Francesa blast ex-Giants coach McAdoo
Francesa, armed with his familiar Diet Coke and a new contact that runs through 2020, should be back in his old WFAN chair by Tuesday, according to Neil Best of Newsday. His new WFAN show will air from 3-6:30 p.m. ET weekdays. Carlin, Gray and Scott will be bumped to 1-3 p.m. ET from their current 2-6:30 p.m.
Before leaving WFAN on Dec. 15, Francesa hinted he'd build a post-'FAN podcast empire, but he received a reality check when offers didn't match his ego and salary demands.
A "desperate" Francesa crawled back to WFAN, according to Andrew Marchand of the New York Post, who broke the news Francesa wanted back in on the Big Apple radio wars. When WFAN didn't jump at the opportunity to rehire him, Marchand reported, Francesa left cleat marks on the neck of station vice president Mark Chernoff by going over his head to Chernoff's boss at Entercom.
The controversial Francesa won't be welcomed back by WFAN's Boomer Esiason, who called him "pathetic" for "screwing" over his successors. And, no, Esiason won't be giving Francesa back his old office, either.
“I don’t care how you put it, [Carlin-Gray-Scott] have gotten screwed and they have gotten screwed by a guy who said he was never going to be on this radio station, who decided to come back because of some conspiracy to keep him off the air. I have no idea what the hell that means," Esiason said.
After years of playing catch-up, Kay and colleagues Don La Greca and Peter Rosenberg finally beat Francesa's show in the winter ratings. The Kay and Francesa shows will now go head-to-head. As the saying goes, if you want to be the man, you have to beat the man, and Kay welcomes the opportunity to beat the former King of New York.
Kay and Francesa have sparred frequently over the years. Sporting News interviewed Kay, who also serves as YES Network's lead Yankees announcer, about his looming battle with Francesa, and whether Francesa, like other aging sports legends, should have stayed retired. Here are excerpts from that interview:
SPORTING NEWS: Mike, I liked your reaction to Francesa coming back on your radio show this week: Bring it on, and bring him on.
MICHAEL KAY: I look forward to it. We came very close to beating him in the fall book. It was during his goodbye tour. He had all the attention on him from all the world. People were genuflecting toward him. He finished second — and we finished tied for third. So we all always felt that if he’d stayed around, we would have beaten him. That would mean a great deal to us. Now we get another opportunity. We’re excited about it. Let’s go. Let’s do it.
SN: Your colleague Peter Rosenberg on "The Michael Kay Show" had a more fiery take: We're going to war!
MK: Well, Peter certainly has a different view of the world than I do. I certainly understand his thinking. I usually try to take the high road on that stuff, but I understand Peter’s take on it totally and I’m cool with it. We don’t do anything on the show that the other ones don't want anybody to do. I just thought that my place was saying what I said, Peter was free to say whatever he said. Then Don held his hand out without shaking and said, "You know, nobody’s nervous about Mike coming back."
SN: You took the high road on your show, but you also noted there will be “collateral damage” at WFAN from Francesa's return. What are your thoughts on Chris, Maggie and Bart?
MK: Everybody seems to be criticizing Francesa for coming back. I have to tell you: You’ve got to do what makes you happy in life. He realized he made a mistake. He wanted to come back. I guess there were fewer options than he thought there were going to be, so he went back to FAN. Obviously, he didn’t have any regard to the collateral damage. I take real exception to the management of FAN and Entercom. For them to do that to those three people, to me, it’s unconscionable. It really is. It’s unconscionable.
You had Chris Carlin leave a really good afternoon drive job in Philadelphia. Brought him here. Maggie Gray left a job at Sports Illustrated. And Bart had been working some on ESPN. So you uproot them. Then this guy, who said he was never going to work for you again, never was going to do a radio show five days a week again, he comes calling and you just completely take the legs out of three people after four months? Why? Because they lost the first (ratings) book to us? I just think that was terrible. It’s a bad reflection on that company, it really is. I mean, who does things like that?
SN: You used the word "hubris" about Francesa. Who else would go on a farewell tour, accept all the hosannas and gifts, then come back and take the same job back four months later?
MK: Mike is Mike. That’s the only way to put it without being pejorative. He literally went on an 18-month goodbye tour (and) accepted all the accolades. The last show was an absolute love-fest. People (were) calling in (saying), "Oh, you’re great." I never understood the purpose of the going-away tour, because he did say he was going to do something else after he was done and on April 1 he would announce it, so he was just leaving a company. Who gets a goodbye tour when they leave a company to go to another one? He wasn’t retiring per se. It takes somebody with the hubris of Mike. Maybe this is the beauty of Mike and why he has been successful. I guess he doesn’t have the self-awareness of how this looks.
Again, I don’t begrudge him coming back, but boy, to come back to the same place after you accepted all the accolades, it’s very uncomfortable. It’s kind of skeevy. I don’t know if you can spell that word, but it just doesn’t seem right to me. Along the same lines, is (retired Yankees closer) Mariano Rivera going to come back after accepting all those gifts? It just doesn’t look that right. It’s a bad optic, it really is.
SN: You used the Mariano example as a joke on your show. Do you have to have a sense of humor about a radio soap opera like this?
MK: Yes. First of all, I take my job very seriously, but we are in the entertainment industry. For the job that we’re in, it’s great that [Francesa is] coming back. Never in the last couple of years have I ever seen more interest and more coverage on radio ratings in the afternoon. I think that’s awesome. I’m going to have fun with it. It’s us against Mike Francesa. He’s coming back. It's Michael Jordan wearing No. 45. Let’s go. Let’s go, let’s see who wins. If we do beat him, I wonder if he’s going to regret coming back. If we don’t? Well, then I guess we just didn’t beat him. But we’re going to have fun trying.
SN: Do you think Mike got a reality check after he left? He was hinting for months about building a podcast empire, etc. Did he discover the demand for his act nationally wasn’t as great as he thought?
MK: Mike is in the perfect place for him. He is a singular New York talent, so that then is going to limit his attractiveness to any national entity. ESPN, I guess, is happy with us. They aren’t moving (our time slot). There aren’t any other sports stations in New York. I knew when Mike, when he hired that powerhouse agency (CAA), that he wasn’t able to get the traction that he thought he was going to get, so he was smart and hired this agency. I guess this is where the road led back to. It led back to FAN. I felt at the time, and you can look back at the things I said, he never should have left. He’s still young. He was obviously still doing well, making a very large paycheck. I just didn’t understand going away. But the landscape has changed in sports media. The money’s not the same as it used to be. The opportunities are completely different. I think that Mike probably realized that after a while.
SN: Mike, don't we see the same thing with a lot of athletes who can't stay retired? You know they retire to "spend more time with my family," then they realize they don’t want to drive the kids to karate and soccer practice and they end up coming back, a la Brett Favre.
MK: I can’t speak to why Mike is coming back but I’ve kind of always half-joked about athletes. They want to "spend more time with their family," then the year that they’re out, you see that they’re away on golfing junkets all the time. Be careful what you wish for, because sometimes the family doesn’t want to spend time with you. After all those years away . . . as an athlete, 20 years away, the (family) gets into a routine. All of a sudden dad’s there. It’s kind of weird. I’m not saying that’s Mike’s case at all, but certainly with athletes I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it over and over again. Do they really want to spend that much time? I mean, they’ve had this singularly different life for their whole existence and now they’re going to come back and be Mr. Mom? It’s a tough transition.
SN: So what's with this alleged "campaign" to keep Francesa out of FAN? Did that comment by Francesa make sense to you?
MK: No, but Mike is really smart. He’ll always spin things to make it look in his favor. He’s great at it. He’s got people in the media that will help him spin it as well. I wonder what the "conspiracy" is. Now, if he came back simply to spite somebody who said he couldn’t come back, well, that’s pretty sad. If he came back because he wanted to come back? I’m all for it, but that takes a certain sort of personality to take a job just because somebody said you can’t take the job. If you weren’t happy in that job in the first place, what does it matter if somebody said it? It just seems pretty sketchy to me. Maybe it was the somewhat profane texts that Chris Carlin sent Mike and Chris (Russo) after their appearance on MLB Network. Maybe that’s what he’s saying, but that’s a bad reason. Just say, "Hey, I missed it, I wanted to come back."