My Day At Disneyland With ESPN's Colin Cowherd

Part 1, Disbelief
On April 1st The Machine got an e-mail from ESPN Radio's marketing department asking if I'd be interested in coming down to Anaheim to attend a live broadcast event at Disneyland and conduct an interview with their star radio personality, Colin Cowherd. I cannot begin to articulate to you just how random this e-mail was. Here I am writing this little nothing Bay Area Sports blog, getting no more than 100 hits a day, spending the bulk of my energy cracking jokes on how lame Dodgers fans are, commiserating about the Giants, and wondering if Stephen Jackson will be able to finish the season without shooting somebody, then out of nowhere I'm getting contacted by ESPN to interview a guy who reaches a million listeners in 300 markets everyday and from what I understand has an open disdain for any and all things blogger. I wouldn't be able to get an interview with the homeless guy who pees all over the backsteps of our apartment every morning. Hell, my mom won't even return my calls half the time. How does an interview with Colin Cowherd make any sense? Naturally, I thought the whole thing was just one of my buddies trying to pull an April Fool's joke, but then I remembered that my friends are idiots and have enough trouble tying their shoes, let alone think of anything this elaborate or creative.

And sure enough, the very next day I got a phone call from the Marketing Director at ESPN's Southern California affiliate who confirmed the details of the trip and assured me that it was not an April Fool's Day joke, despite my unwavering incredulity. I hung up the phone before the guy figured out that someone had made a mistake and that I was just some loser who sits in his apartment all day in sweats not showering and watching baseball games. Still completely uncertain why ESPN was printing out press-passes for the Bay Area Sports Machine or what in the hell exactly I was supposed to do once I arrived, I booked my flight, packed my bags, and I was off for some good old Southern California sunshine.

Part 2, Disneyland at 6am
The Machine and The Machine's #1 Fan arrived at Disneyland at 6am Friday morning. We got our free passes from some guys working an ESPN tent at the front of the park and made our way into the dawnlit Magic Kingdom. Disneyland has never been so serene. The place was entirely empty – no screaming kids, no throngs of camera-necked tourists snapping photos at every turn, no smelly Germans, no teen-age girls walking around in tight shorts making me feel like a pedophile, no churro carts, no long lines stretching out from the front of a ride that will never come, no Mickey, no Minnie. Just The Machine and The Machine's #1 Fan slowly ambling across the cobbled stones of Main Street USA, the Orange County sun making its daily ascent of the Matterhorn’s candy-white slopes, basking in that soft pink alpenglow, at long last two men fulfilling some impossible childhood fantasy. I have only been so at peace perhaps in the feverish washes of an opium half-dream.

(Sorry, sometimes my literary impulses get the better of me.)

Main Street USA, 6am.

After attending to some business at Space Mountain, where we rode by ourselves on 3 straight trips through the roller-coaster cosmos, getting nauseous and completely domed for the rest of the day, we high-tailed it to the front of Tomorrowland where Cowherd’s show was already in progress. We sat and enjoyed ESPN’s catered breakfast, watched for 3 hours as the Herd did their thing, and witnessed as fans rushed to meet Colin and shake his hand at every commercial break – guys in NASCAR hats and beards down to their bellies, teen-age girls and their boyfriends, a dad and his two sons wearing matching Lakers jerseys, old men, husbands and wives, and everything in between. When it was all said and done, the ESPN Radio producer introduced me to Cowherd and we sat down for a 1 on 1 interview. This is what I got out of it:

But first. The Machine's #1 Fan stands in front of a deserted Space Mountain in one of the gayest poses you will ever see.

Part 3, Running With the Herd: A Blogger’s Interview With Colin Cowherd
Colin Cowherd is a divisive personality. There was this incident in 2006 in which Cowherd was charged with ripping material straight from the M Zone and then failing to credit his source. Then there was this incident from a year ago in which Cowherd incited his listeners to simultaneously go to thebiglead.com in an effort to overwhelm its servers and knock the site out. Along with those transgressions Cowherd has also been faced with the opprobrium typical of almost every major radio host in the country. He’s been called a sexist. He’s been called a racist. And he’s been called an asshole. All more than once. It’s safe to say that the blogosphere as a whole does not think highly of Mr. Cowherd.

To be perfectly honest, I am not the biggest fan of Colin Cowherd’s radio show either. I tend not to like loud, off-the-cuff opinions (unless their mine). I rarely watch college football (Cowherd’s main area of expertise). I don’t like the Yankees, I don’t like Notre Dame football or Duke basketball, and I absolutely despise the Cowboys, all organizations that Cowherd finds fascinating. I also don’t like the fact that Cowherd’s analysis of most things aside from college football stays pretty much on the surface. You’re not gonna hear Cowherd break-down a Pitch F/X chart or discuss how an NBA trade affects salary cap exemptions.

But there’s a whole lot of people out there, in every corner of the country, who think Cowherd is the most insightful, funny, and engaging sports commentators there is. Period. The Machine’s #1 Fan thinks Cowherd is to sports talk radio what Jews are to the bagel industry. The Machine's #1 Fan appreciates the fact that Cowherd is a straight-shooter who will say whatever he goddamn well pleases. He loves the passion. He likes that Cowherd will talk openly about race and other controversial topics – even if his only motive for making a particular argument is to get people riled up. He thinks Cowherd’s riffs on Roger Clemens and college sports in the South are downright hilarious. He doesn’t give a shit if Cowherd occasionally contradicts himself, or that he’ll resort to cheap name calling (“message-board idiots” being one of his favorites) if one of his outrageous claims gets soundly rebutted. He even likes Cowherd’s unabashed and over-the-top egotism. For The Machine’s #1 Fan, like so many I would guess, listening to Colin Cowherd every morning is not about being educated, it’s about being entertained. And really, if we're honest with ourselves, that's all that sports is anyway - entertainment.

But why does this divide exist? How could sports bloggers be so adamantly opposed to this guy when such a large majority of the sports watching public think of Cowherd as their spokesperson? The majority of the interview went into trying to figure these questions out.

“I have no problems with blogging as a medium,” Cowherd told me, “I don’t share Bob Costas’ belief that you guys are all a bunch of basement-dwelling losers without a voice that deserves to be heard. A lot of blogs are reasonable and fair and provide good insights. I personally skim over blogs like Deadspin and The Big Lead before every show.

“But what the blogosphere in large part fails to consider is that I’m an entertainer. My radio show is entertainment. Indignation and criticism over misstating a few facts, or when I come up with wild theories that bloggers think are ignorant, is misguided. The point of my show is to create conversation and give the audience something to get passionate about, for or against me.”

Cowherd makes a good point. We bloggers can be a pretty sanctimonious bunch, believing ourselves to be the torch-bearers of worthwhile sports journalism. Bloggers have in some sense christened themselves the new intellectual elite of sports-commentary, a label that a lot of bloggers might dismiss behind a smoke-screen of crass and juvenile humor, but is nonetheless blatantly apparent. And while I personally frequent sites like Fire Joe Morgan and Kissing Suzy Kolber, places in which mainstream media is incessantly poked at for being proletariat and burdensome, it bears mentioning that not ALL sports fans are interested in that world of relentless pop-culture referencing, holier-than-thou lampoonery, and too-cool-for-school hipsterdom. That whole shtick can be as tiresome as any loud-mouthed radio host.

“I don’t mind fair criticism,” Cowherd told me with sincerity. “But when do bloggers start holding each other accountable? The whole David versus Goliath thing is weak.”

Again, Cowherd makes a strong point. There is no question that bloggers have adopted a gang mentality. We can be like piranhas. Maybe there was a time when the blogosphere was a David to the MSM’s Goliath, but it’s disingenuous to say that a site like Deadspin doesn’t have a voice anymore, and a powerful one at that. The fact is, it’s a lot easier to attack big guns like ESPN and print journalism than go after someone your own size. It’s like when my little sister used to kick me in the shins knowing that if I retaliated I would be the one who caught all the flack. At some point bloggers are gonna have to stop playing the “Little Guy” card. It’s bullshit. If you’re gonna enter the public space, you have to be willing to face down criticism, whether it’s coming from a big shot like Cowherd or some pissant like me.

As far as the incidents regarding The M Zone and The Big Lead that were mentioned in the first paragraph. Cowherd didn’t seem too interested in discussing either one, despite my attempts to lead him to it (I guess that’s what happens when an amateur like me is asked to do the interview). But The M Zone thing has been resolved for some time now with both sides apparently satisfied with how it turned out. The Big Lead incident didn’t end quite so amicably, with the blogosphere still unhappy with what they perceive as Cowherd’s trite and compulsory apology. But regardless of how you feel about it (for the record I thought Cowherd’s move was bush-league psyche-out stuff but I was never incensed about it) the incident was the best thing that ever happened to that site. I’m not gonna go as far as to say they should be thanking Cowherd, but shit, here’s to Cowherd simultaneously directing all his listeners to my site!

After spending the majority of the interview talking about the blogger stuff, we spent about 15 more minutes talking about various sports topics. A Washington native, Cowherd explained to me that he thought it was a shame the Supersonics would be leaving Seattle but that ultimately this is a football and baseball city and that the top left corner of the country wouldn’t go into crisis if the boys in green were moved to Oklahoma City. He reiterated his controversial opinion about Sean Taylor’s death and though he admitted that the facts ultimately disproved his initial view – that Taylor’s death was his criminal past coming back to roost – he made clear that his point all along had simply been that such a supposition was a reasonable one to make, not just some racist vitriol. He explained that Beano Cook was his favorite interview for the plain reason that cranky old men are interesting. I asked Cowherd to contribute to my compilation of quotes about how bad the Giants are this year and he gave me the following gem: “Ray Durham plays for the Giants.” I couldn’t have said it any better myself. We then shook hands, took some pictures, and that was that.

As the interview came to its end, it finally became clear to me my reason for being there. Colin Cowherd has done a handful of things in recent memory that have pissed off a lot of influential people in the blogger community. ESPN, eager to do something about his image in this regard, decided to contact a little nothing blog like mine, give me a free trip out to Disneyland, and an exclusive interview with one of their major personalities, then hope that I was impressed enough by the experience to write something nice about the guy. Something like Bill O’Reilly’s people inviting a Democrat onto their show and treating him like a prince. Not quite a bribe (ESPN paid me zilch to do this), but a nudge in a friendly direction. All of this crossed my mind. But here is the honest to God’s, unbiased truth:

Colin Cowherd is a freaking nice guy. He took time to talk with us, shake our hands, and answer our questions. He was genuine, he was funny, and even though he could’ve big-timed the shit out of me, he made me and The Machine’s #1 Fan feel like we were as worthy of his time as any of his pro-athlete guests. And I’m not just sucking this guy off. I have absolutely nothing to gain from it.

The upshot of all of this is the importance of separating Colin Cowherd the man, from Colin Cowherd the radio personality. The guy you hear coming through your car speakers every morning is a character, a vaudevillian, a voice whose purpose is to entertain. Yeah, the subject is sports, but that’s not really the point is it? I would say that the majority of sports fans are just after some common ground atop which they can share their passions and have some cheap fun. Politics is too somber and art is too subjectve. Guys like Cowherd, with all their off-the-wall antics, are the architects of that common ground. The minute we start holding them accountable for every ridiculous argument they make, we're undermining their very purpose, which is to give guys like The Machine's #1 Fan something to get passionate about.

And while personally I prefer the sports discourse that values intellect and reason, I can’t deny that the the kind of discourse that values controversy, offensive humor, brash opinions, abrasiveness, provocation, is high on attitude, and low on forethought, has its place too. And is actually a lot of fun once you stop taking yourself so seriously.

The Machine, Cowherd, and The Machine's #1 Fan

The Machine's #1 Fan hates snakes.