Mike Wise & the OG West Coast sojourn

You know him from NBA reporting and getting the Washington football franchise's name changed. I know dude from a bus ride to Fresno

It takes significant effort not to make these sessions feel like college reunions. Thing is, I was a 19 year old Sacramento City College student when I met 21-year-old Mike Wise, so there’s not a lot to be done about that vibe this time.

Where to begin with this famous sports reporter? I like the time in the late nineties when I walked up on him, absolutely unannounced, near the pre-game dinner buffet set out for the Madison Square hoops press. Over the years we’d lost track of each other, as he was doing his daily sports press thing and I was getting deep into the West Coast alternative press.

I just sidled up to him like, “Hey, what’s up, Mike?” As though our paths were passing on the quad back at Fresno State.

Wise did a double take for the ages.

When I say that we lost track of each other, what I actually need to be sayin’ is that Wise had lost track of me; it was hard for a hoops nut like me not to follow the guy’s career. Wise covered the NBA for the New York Times. He co-authored a book with Shaquille O’Neal. You would see my college friend on TV.

While I was at Sac City, Wise attended American River, out in the northern suburbs. We met right before the bus ride down to the state journalism conference, my first trip to Fresno.

When you read this week’s conversation, keep in mind that Wise is a 6-6 guy from Hawaii who back then had shoulder-length, already-thinning hair. Both of us were our paper’s sports editors, and we hit it off immediately. We hung out a bunch a Fresno State. After college The Wise Guy and I went our separate ways.

The New York period was a fantastic blur. We would marvel over our having zero business being so high up in the mix. At that level of journalism it’s mostly Michigan and Northwestern if not Columbia or Harvard. We fought about Latrell Sprewell. God, did we fight about Latrell Sprewell. We watched a shrimpy, just promoted assistant coach named Jeff Van Gundy find his voice. We followed Jordan on The Last Dance. When I did my little talk at the Smithsonian back in 2014, I crashed at his beautiful home in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Good fuckin’ times.

Despite all of the hoops stuff, you might best know this character from the movement to change the Washington NFL franchise name from the Redskins. I watched Mike Wise from the bus ride down to Fresno and the fucking Hacienda spearhead that movement on Twitter. Amazing!

My rule is to keep these talks to 35 minutes and a brisk 35 at that. But this one was tricky to manage. A lot’s happened to Wise—formerly of ESPN, formerly of the Washington Post. He now dwells in Mexico City with his wife and three children, ages 13, 8, and 5. When we Zoomed on Monday, my man was actually in The States.

Where are you exactly?

I met these guys through the Oneida Indian organization, during that Change the Mascot thing. And then this guy called me up and he asked if I could come up to the reservation and do a written history of the reservation, an historical document for them.

We might try to turn it into a book, we might try to turn it into a screenplay. Bottom line is we’ll give you a percentage if it works, and I’m like… Alright! All I’ve got is this book that I’m working on right now. If you want me to come up for a week and interview your tribal elders, I’ll do it.

Where were you?

I flew up from Mexico to upstate New York, so I’m going to be here for like five or six days. Then I’ll go see my sister in Sacramento and go back to Mexico.

I want to ask you about Mexico, but I’ve got to ask… how and why in the world are you still playing basketball?

[Laughs] Part of it is that in Mexico the players aren’t as good. They don’t understand that I have only three words now: I got that. I call every foul. [Laughter] So I’m constantly getting the ball. Stuff like that. On my best day I’m Jokic, on my worst day I’m like [Paul] Mokeski.

I could swim, I could run a little. I’m not very fast anymore. But there’s nothing that replaces basketball for me. So, as long as my ligaments hold up a little bit I feel like I can still move just a little bit. I can still pass. I’m going to play at least a couple more years, until my body breaks down.

Good for you. Anybody I see playing over 40 I give all the props in the world. It just gets so painful after a certain point. I don’t know if you’re playing an especially stationary game.

Oh yeah. You can measure my verticals with, like, a Discover card.

[Laughs] I saw on social media that you were in Mexico with your son on Take Your Kid to Work Day and I thought, What’s the difference, except that the kid’s older. The crowd might have been a little browner. What was going on there? Why are you in Mexico?

I was doing this thing for CBS DC. I had a contract at a TV station for like a year and a half, and I was kinda getting tired of it. Then the pandemic hit, and for the first time in forever I didn’t have any office to go to or anywhere to be. My wife had been a career US Department of Agriculture person. She was like, I’m going to apply for a post overseas. I was like, whatever, that’s fine. You’re not gonna get it, but that’s okay. All of a sudden, she gets Mexico City, which is kind of a big get—an administrative officer. It’s a big gig. She’s like, “Let’s go!”

You’ve been to my house. We live on a cul de sac, it’s 20 minutes from DC. I was happy with my life and I’m like, why are we going. She says, The kids will learn Spanish, it will be a life experience and the State Department’s going to pay for everything. So, alright.

It was like, Boom! We rented out our place for a couple of years to some embassy family from Australia. We go to Mexico and I fall in love with it. We’ve been there for two-and-a-half years almost and the people, the culture, the food… the vacations are just cheaper, the beaches. Everything has just been great.

‘Where’d you get the job? The New York Times. ‘Did we know you were talking to them? I want you to occasionally send your clips here. We’ll monitor.’ I looked at him—and this is the most satisfying day in journalism for me— and I said, ‘Dave, you get the fucking New York Times on your doorstep every morning.’ And I made him shake my hand and I walked out.

I think it’s been nice to be out of The States because it’s been so frickin’ polarized right now. And I’ve really just been working on this Billy Mills book, about the last Native American to win a gold medal, at the ’64 Tokyo Olympics. He’s still alive. He lives in Sacramento, of all places. He’s 85 and I’m trying to get this book done before he dies, so that he can help me promote it. [Laughter] So that’s what I’m doing in Mexico.

Nobody’s beating down my door to give me $500,000 to be their next columnist or voice of whatever right now. So, I could say that I’m my own boss, but my wife’s getting tired of me not having the money I used to have. I need to sell this thing, quick.

I was thinking back to when I first met you. We were kids. We took that big bus ride to Fresno and JACC. There have been a number of turns in your career. What did you think your career was going to look like, back then?

Do you remember Greg Wuliger?

Of course.

I think he did journalism ethics and a couple of other courses.

Media Law.

Just a really smart guy and I remember asking him, What kind of job do you think I could get? He said well, if you’re lucky you can get in at the Tulare Register. Some of the top editors there make about 40 grand a year. And I’m thinking, Whoa, okay. Forty grand a year. I could buy a house some day!

I didn’t have a job after I graduated. Somehow, the only job that was out there was the Sanger Herald, 30 miles southeast of Fresno. I applied for a sports editor job there, and I was just thinking, I’ll work my way up and I’ll get to, like, a paper as big as Tulare’s. [Laughter] I dunno, I liked journalism. I liked writing, and I just remember thinking, This is shit money, but it’s what I want to do.

Of all people… remember The Arsenio Hall Show? Up in my apartment on Maple Avenue, it was my senior year. I was watching The Arsenio Hall Show and he had Eddie Murphy on. He and Eddie were really tight and they always joked around, but at some point Eddie got serious. Arsenio said, “Hey, what would you have done if you hadn’t made it as a comedian. What was your backup plan?”

Eddie goes, What do you mean?

“What was your backup plan?”

And Eddie goes, Backup plan? And he looks at the camera and goes, “All of y’all that got a backup plan? Y’all fucked up.” He goes, “Do what you want to do and don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.”

I think I was waiting tables. I was working security for Fresno State concerts or something. I had all of this spare money on the side and I was like, Fuck it. I’m just going to throw it all into writing. If it pays off great, if it doesn’t, fuck it. This is where I want to be right now. Of all people, Eddie Murphy inspired me to just go all-in on journalism.

You hear that story and think, And then he lived happily ever after. But you got started and, you like, worked for the Sacramento Union. That was no picnic.

Yeah, I got out of the Sanger Herald. Whoo. Two-fifty a week, Twelve thousand a year. I remember one of the guys on the staff saying you gotta blow this taco stand. [Laughter] It really is a taco stand. [Laughter] But they were good tacos.

I ended up in Sacramento. I got a job at Sacramento Bee Neighbors for not very much money and within a year the Sacramento Union gave me, like, the prep editor job. I thought, Oh boy, I’m in heaven, I’m covering 45 high schools in the Sacramento area. I’m sending out stringers and I’m going to games in the middle of nowhere, plugging phones into acoustic couplers to send four lines on my Tandy fricken laptop. [Laughter] But it was a job and now I’m at $375 a week!

That was a weird job because, as crappy as it was at times, we kept losing people—because everyone made more money than me—and they kept firing people. It was the erosion of a once-great paper. It was the oldest daily west of the Mississippi. It had a big Mark Twain bust in its lobby because Mark Twain wrote for it. And the last five years I was there, I folded with it, it went downhill. Different owners.

But every time someone would get fired, they’d go, “You’re not only the preps editor Mike, you’re now the Kings backup writer.” Wow? I get to go to the NBA games? Alright? “Your also the boxing writer. You’ll be covering all of the big fights in Sacramento. And maybe we’ll send you to Reno for a change, once in a while. You can get a cheap rate at The Hampton. I was like, This is friggin’ great!

As bad as it was, I was still doing journalism. I wasn’t getting a lot of help, but I was still doing journalism. But then it went out of business, and I was really screwed.

Did you overlap with Joseph Farah? What was that like?

Joe Farah was what I call a faux conservative, ya know? I think he liked the fact that people thought the Sacramento Union was the big conservative paper. He’d gotten some deal with Rush Limbaugh. He had Rush Limbaugh write a column—

It’s important to remind people that Rush was still local then.

No, no. Rush had gone national by then, but he was still tethered. He didn’t even write the column. I think somebody at the paper wrote the column for him and they would fax it to him and see if he was okay with it. It was a total racket. It was a joke and we were all kind of embarrassed by it.

I remember when Michael Jackson was arrested or went to trial for the child sexual abuse stuff, that was like a party for them. It was like they’d won the Pulitzer. I look back at it and I go, What a bunch of sick bastards.

Farah’s daughter pops up a bunch. She was in the Trump White House as a communications specialist.

Really?

Yeah, but she’s turned against him. So she’s on TV a lot.

I’ve got to email her, tell her I worked for her dad. He just never struck me as someone who was down with the movement as much as, “I make money off of redneck conservatives.”

I’d never heard that assessment of him. So, you go to New York and you wind up the NBA writer for the New York Times. I think I remember that leap, but in retrospect it still seems like a pretty big one. Was it that you’d been going to those Kings games? How did you do that?

It’s actually got, like, Disney script on it. I can’t really do it justice.

When the Union went out of business, there was a bunch of people that did stories on it, because it did have a history. I had all of these quotes in this Sacramento Bee story and the person who was head of copy editors at the San Jose Mercury News saw the story and said, “All of your lines are funny. Would you like to interview for a part-time copy-editing job at The Mercury?” It paid like 55 grand a year, but that was if you worked the whole week. They called it casual copy editor, so you could work one day a week or for five. Bottom line is, I was like, Yeah! I think I was just a disaster on the desk. This woman, her name was Cher Wollard, she either felt sorry for me or she just gave me a couple of shifts.

My dad, when he was that drinking, carousing journalist in the sixties and seventies, the pinnacle of his career was working at the San Jose Mercury News as a general assignment reporter. He covered one of the first heart transplants at Stanford, covered some serial murders in Santa Clara, and he was sort of this up-and-coming reporter. Of course, he was just drinking himself out of a job. When my mom and him were splitting up, he’d bring us to the Mercury at night. Ridder Park Drive, in the parking lot. Me and my sister would sleep in the back of the station wagon and my mom had left for Germany. The people on the staff would check on us in the night to make sure we were okay in the parking lot. And my dad would get off work. At some point my grandparents would pick us up and take us and my dad would try to work things out.

Eventually, apparently, he threatened some editors with a machete, on the top of the desk, and was basically like, “I’ll cut you if you cut my story!” It was all dramatic. This is something that nowadays would be on CNN and there’d be helicopters. Back then, it was like, “Rog is drunk, send him home.”

I’m talking about this cavalierly, and I know somewhat about your own childhood. But this was very traumatic. And me and my sister ended, I remember, in the cafeteria at the Mercury, eating Dinty Moore Beef Stew out of the vending machines and chocolate milk for dinner. Swear to God, I was 30 years old and I was having that same fucking dinner one night at the Mercury going, “Oh my God, this fuckin’ life has gone nowhere.”

[Laughter]

You know? It’s the site of my family’s breakup? My dad drank himself out of a job here, and nobody knows it at The Merc. There was one guy who kinda knew the story of my dad, remembered him. Everybody else, I didn’t tell them. What was I going to say, “Yeah, my dad worked here before he tried to cut one of the editors with a machete.” It wasn’t like I was going to get a bigger job.

But I do remember this. And for anyone out there that’s thinking “my career’s fucked” or “I’m done,” I was at wits end and I’d won some small paper writing competition in the APSE. Best column writing in the country for papers at, like, 50,000 and under, the last thing I did. And the managing editor came over to me, his name was David Yarnold. This guy’s tie was worth more than my car at the time. He was wearing power ties. He was kinda like everything that made me ill about journalism at the time. He was all showy and there wasn’t a lot of substance to him.

I said, Dave, I’d love to have a sports writing job here. I’ll cover high schools, I’ll do anything. He says, Alright, give me your clips. So I gave him my stuff and the next three months, Donnell, I saw him in the hallway and he looked right through me. Like, Hey, did you see my clips? And he’d walk right past me. It was hurtful.

This isn’t the uplifting part of the story.

No, it isn’t. But out of nowhere I literally got a call out of the blue. Talk about a higher power, unknown forces in the universe. I get a call out of the blue. It’s seven am. I was renting an apartment in the same neighborhood where my parents split up, where the ambulance came to pump my mom’s stomach because her and my dad did LSD and other drugs. A block away in South San Jose I’m renting a room from a divorced copy editor at the Mercury—you can’t make this stuff up. The other guy was a guy named Bob. He was a bouncer at the Kit Kat Lounge in Sunnyvale and he would brag about bringing home Penthouse Playmates at night and he would take care of them when they vomited all over the place after they were done stripping at the lounge. He would show me pictures of it and I’d be like, My life has hit the fucking nadir here.

All I’m thinking is, This is fucked. I remember this guy calling and saying, “Is this Mike Wise? This is Neil Amdur of New York Times. Swear to God I thought it was my friend Pete La Blanc in Sacramento. I was like, “Pete, what’s up dude? Quit fucking with me.” No, this is Neil Amdur. And I was like, “Hey, what’s up! How are you? How did you get my number?”

Turns out, he was a judge in the small-paper column-writing competition! He said, “I saw your clips. You can write. And I saw your paper went out of business. Do you want to do a freelance story for us on this guy who’s in Vancouver, Canada right now? He’s gonna play the Rangers in the Stanley Cup and our West Coast correspondent can’t do it. His name is Pavel Bure. I want a feature on him.”

I went up there and I can tell you the story of how I lost my computer disc and I thought they were never going to hire me. Then I talked my roommate into having someone bring the disc to me in Vancouver, but the bottom line is that I stayed up all night after having this guy drive me around Vancouver. They loved the story and it was in the front section of Sports. It said, “From Russia with Flare—Pavel Bure.”

And that day I was going to Mississippi to interview for a job covering the Saints for the Biloxi Herald. Like, thirty thousand a year. I got to the San Francisco airport and I thought, If nothing else, I have a clip from the New York Times. How many people can say that?

That turned into another stringer thing. And that turned into another and then, all of a sudden, I was in the middle of New York. Mr. Hayseed Sacramento guy, with an empty briefcase because he doesn’t have anything in it and two Men’s Warehouse suits that I bought that week. And I fuckin’ talked those guys into hiring me. I still don’t know how.

I can tell you that all of the managing editors I worked with, one was Carolyn Lee. I was told there would be no way that she’d be in favor of my hire. I go, “Why?” She doesn’t want another white guy in the newsroom. I can understand that, there’s a lot of white guys in this newsroom. We got to her and I didn’t know what to do. She says, “I like your clips, but you’re not exactly a traditional Times hire. You didn’t really work at the Miami Herald, the Boston Globe. You don’t really have the pedigree. What have you been doing with your life?” I said, “You know Carolyn, that’s the thing about the New York Times, they don’t need someone else to validate them. They decide that you’re good, and they take a chance on you.”

That’s a good one.

She looks at me. Donnell, she rocked back in her chair, looks back and she says, “You know what? You’re right. That is us. That’s who we are.” I’m like, “Fuckin’-aye, she went for it!”

[Laughter]

So you’re a world-class panderer, that’s what this is.

I didn’t have anything else going. What was I going to tell her, that it took six years to get out of school and I worked at the Sanger Herald and… I don’t have a pedigree, but I fuckin’ want this job and no one wants it more than me. Long story short, I got the job there. You talk about one of the greatest days of my life, I’m in the same newsroom where our father blew up our lives. I’m ready to start my copy editing shift and I think I’ve got leverage because the Santa Rosa Press Democrat has offered me a job to cover the 49ers, which you know—

Good gig.

Mike Silver had the job before me and it was like fifty-five grand and that was a ton of money back then. I remember calling up Neil when there was no movement on the job and I think they were going south on me. I said, “Neil, I just think you should know that just got a prestigious offer from a West Coast paper. [Laughs] To cover the NFL.”

And he goes, “The LA Times?”

“They told me not to say anything.”

What I didn’t know Donnell—and this is sad—is that the New York Times owned the Press-Democrat. I thought I had leverage, but he goes, “Well, good luck.” Click. Oh my god. The next day, right at the start of my shift, I go to this lonely corner of the same newsroom on Ridder Park Drive and I’m going, What a fucking life I’ve got. This was the time when you checked your messages still, and all of a sudden it’s Judy Masselli, Neil’s secretary. “Neil wants you to call him right away. It’s very important.”

So, before I take the Santa Rosa job I get on the phone and he goes, “Can you go to Seattle this weekend?” What for? “Well, our beat writer’s mom is really sick—Jack Curry—and I want you to cover the Yankees and the Mariners for us. Can you do that for the weekend?”

“I think so. Is this another stringer gig?”

“No, no no. This is our way of welcoming you aboard.” And—who tells you this, by the way—”you’re going to be a star in New York.” I’m not saying anything. My jaw’s hit the ground. He’s like, “We’ll talk salary negotiation tomorrow.” Salary? I’ll work for free. He goes, “Are you there?” “Yeah… thank you. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” I was ashen and when I come off of the phone and this weathered, probably fifty-ish woman that had been working at the Mercury all her life—I don’t know her name—she looked at me and she goes, “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.” I said, “I just got a job at the New York Times.”

She goes, “That’s great! Who are you?” [Laughter] And I’m like, “I’m a causual copy editor?”

She said, “That’s the problem with this place. You probably wanted a writing job and they compartmentalize people and screw them over. You should tell Dave Yarnold right now that you got that job. Just walk into his office.” And I said [pitched high] Okay.

I walk right into Yarnold’s office and say I really wanted to work here, but I got a job. Where’d you get the job? The New York Times. “Well, Jeeesus Christ! Did we know you were talking to them?” Yeah, I told the sports editor. He goes, Are you going to be doing copy editing? “Actually, no. I’m going to be covering the NBA. And they’re sending me across the country to do features. Boxing, the Tiger Woods story at Stanford. It’s really a cool job.”

And he goes, ‘Jesus, I want you to occasionally send your clips here. We’ll monitor.’ I looked at him—and this is the most satisfying day in journalism for me— and I said, Dave, you get the fucking New York Times on your doorstep every morning. And I made him shake my hand and I walked out.

And my life changed. My desk, my laptop and my bed were all put into an 18-wheeler in the way back and I met them in Jersey with my Honda Civic. They put me up in fricken’ Manhattan— you know, it was kinda like when you got the job at the ESPN magazine. It didn’t just change my career, it changed my life. I was somebody all of a sudden, in a weird way. And it was like, Fuck you. I can do this. Man, it was cool.

When I was at ESPN, you came to lunch for the first time. One of the low-level writer reporters—who didn’t respect me very much—said (awestruck): Mike Wise is here to see you. And I thought, What has Wise become?

At Fresno State, I remember there was always a lot of controversy over whether Mike Wise was actually good. You had the Wise Guy column.

That’s right!

And I was always going, “Mike’s actually good. You’re wrong.” You were always unfashionable, if you don’t mind me saying that. There was always that debate, which I thought was… interesting.

I knew I could write. I think I was a little more idealistic and sappy than I am now. I wasn’t as skeptical. At the time I was just happy-go-lucky. I mean, I worked at Sports Information. That was PR pretty much. And I was trying to break out of that mold of, “I’m not just a PR guy, I can do this.” It was hard.

Remember Scott Johnson?

Of course.

Scott’s had this coming for years. I’ve been meaning to tell someone about it, but he not only opened my mail once to see that I was writing to my former journalism advisor, but at one point he put me on the spot and asked if I would write a paper for an athlete. He was like, “You can make $400.” And I was like, “I’m not going to keep any athlete eligible. I just feel weird about that, but you can have somebody else…”

“Nah, nah… it’s somebody else. It’s Kevin Sweeney.”

“The star quarterback?”

He had graduated and was playing as a scab for the Dallas Cowboys. He had six months to get his degree in and they wanted me to help write a paper. So I think, Kevin Sweeney’s out of school, big deal. “I’m not going to keep him eligible. It can’t be an NCAA violation, can it?” I’m sure it is. So, I write this thing. His wife Karen Sweeney gives me $400 at the athletic department and I’m thinking, “This is kinda shady.”

I’m going to go back to Fresno one day, I’m gonna find Kevin Sweeney and Karen Sweeney and I’m going to give them a $400 check and say, “Take this fuckin’ thing and cash it. I don’t want it anymore. It’s dirty money.”

[High-pitched, Burt Reynolds laughter]

How about the fact that the Sports Information Director basically passively aggressively held my job over myself to do that?

Pretty terrible. Another tough area: Woj.

[Pause]

The other person who would come to lunch from Fresno. Woj would come over to ESPN. I think he had a job at a paper in Jersey.

Yeah, he was working at the Bergen Record.

And I didn’t know he was climbing. I didn’t know he was starting his ascent there. And I don’t mind being a stepping stone, but I’ve learned a lot about how people feel about Woj. What was your whole deal with him?

It was a hard one for me. He was… I don’t want to say a great friend, but he was more than a peripheral friend in the business or in the press box. He was one of those people who would ask… I don’t want to say I mentored him, but when he left Fresno and got to New York there was an in-crowd of beat writers who would always sorta see what was going on… and I remember Bill McEwen of all people—former Fresno Bee columnist—

I wrote for Bill last year.

Talk about salt of the Earth, right? I said to him once, What do you think of Woj? He said, “I’ll tell you one thing about Woj. Tremendous talent. But if there is one cab and it’s raining like crazy, he’s getting in that cab and leaving you out.” [Laughter] I always remembered that. That guy has a great take on people, because that’s what Woj became.

While I’m blown away that anybody in our industry is making $7 million a year to be a newsmaker, and I’m proud of that fact, it sucks that he and that guy Shams have become the miserable human beings of the sports journalism world. I’m jealous of Woj’s money, but I would never take a phone call in the shower to get that money. And he will. God bless his work ethic, I just know too much about him, heard too many stories where I can’t be close to him anymore. If he sees this he’ll never talk to me again. I don’t give a shit at this point in my career. I’m going to have a best-selling book in a year and he’ll still be fucking miserable covering the NBA.

That’s brutal. I can’t get off the phone without talking to you about the in-season tournament.

The courts are funny. It’s almost comical. It’s a new way to get people involved in the NBA. I didn’t tell Adam Silver personally, but I told one of the people who are close to him, If you have something like this… you’ve got to come up with a name for it. A real name. In-season? Like, The Baller Cup or something. Something fun.

You know, anything that gets people interested in the league before Christmas I’m fine with. At some point it will take off, but right now it seems like a marketing gimmick for new stuff. I think the NBA has proven to be pretty frickin’ recession-proof, of all the leagues right now. Even if this thing doesn’t work out, they’ll find something else.

I’m going to let you go, but you have to tell me the thing you miss most about living in America.

It’s a little humbling, being off the sports journalism grid. Even though I saved enough money and we’re saving money now because we’re renting our place. Even though you can write from anywhere now, I don’t feel very useful. I feel like there’s a lot to say, and while NBC News Now will call me up and pay me a very small pittance to have me on for a take or I’ll write a piece for the Washington Post op-ed’s Sports Culture thing every now and then, it’s not regular. And not that I miss being a regular columnist, but I liked having a regular platform. It’s sad, but that’s about it. I miss some of the neighbors and the people in our world, but I don’t miss a whole lot, other than the professional stuff. It’s crazy, right?