Friday, April 13, 2007

My run in with Imus

I remember having the TV on the background and stopping by on a Sunday evening as the Ladies Final Four was on and watching Rutgers put a thumping on LSU. Vivian Stringer was the head coach of the Iowa Lady Hawkeyes when I started my on-air TV career and already had an immense respect for her program. I knew that Rutgers was a very young team and they enjoyed a trip to the championship game losing to Tennessee. Outside of the niche audience, no one really paid attention to Tennessee, Rutgers or anything from the world of college basketball female style. Then Don Imus made the remarks he did on a national radio show. What happened from there certainly transcends sports. Rather than explore the freedom of speech issue or the obvious offensive statement on a racial and female equality level, I truly feel bad for the girls on the team. They should be looking back on an amazing season and enjoy the fruits of their labor. Instead, they led the national news with their press conference responding to comments made by someone they never met. The reason I write about this is because I did have one confrontation with the infamous Mr. Imus. Following my freshman year in college, I was an intern at WFAN radio in New York City. I commuted 90 minutes from New Jersey Monday through Friday and worked as an intern on the 10am to 1pm shift manned by Ed Coleman and Mike Francessa. At the time, Chris "Mad Dog" Russo was an update guy and just starting to become a fixture on New York sports radio. Mike and the Mad Dog is one of the biggest sports radio shows in the nation now. I was 19 years old and thrilled to be working in such a big time environment. The lead in to the show was Imus in the Morning. One of my duties was to bring in carts into the studio for the board operator prior to the show. Normally, I would do this in the minutes before the 10am show went on the air. For some reason, Ed Coleman asked me to bring the carts in early one day. Imus was in his second to last break and I went into the control room. The studio is seperated by glass and I walked in to the control room and stacked the carts where I usually did. I never said a word, but Imus who was in commercial and 20 feet away seperated by glass freaked out asking "What the hell is that geek doing in our studio?" He wouldn't let it go. He was like a tyrant demanding that I leave the area. I was shocked. I have walked this earth for 36 years and there has been only one time in my life that I wanted to physically harm a human being and Don Imus gets that honor. I kept my head down and walked out of the studio. The guys I interned for told me to just laugh it off as they shook their heads. If there is one thing I took out of that day it was that I would never make an intern feel like I did on that day. There was a scene in the Howard Stern Movie Private Parts that showed Stern getting the door slammed in his face by Imus when he first came to WNBC. I always said that was an accurate portrayal. I will not pass judgement on his suspension and the road ahead, but as Don Imus is in the eye of a pretty vicious storm, I wish I could go back in time to the other side of that studio glass and pick my head up and look him in the eye now.

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