Tall Midget wrote:
Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
good dolphin wrote:
Tad Queasy wrote:
Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
Tad Queasy wrote:
JORR also said:
David Anderson is bigger than Michael Jordan.
Jim Harbaugh is better than Troy Aikman.
Dewey defeated Truman.
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Who the fuck is David Anderson?
He's a New York City sportswriter. Bill Gleason, in the early 90s, stupidly said that he was bigger than Michael Jordan.
You really don't remember this?
I referenced it in the Sox section about Time Anderson.
It seems vaguely familiar now that Tad explained it.
That was a classic moment in early Score history. Jordan had a poor game in the 1993 conference finals against the Kinicks, and David Anderson wrote a NYT column about how Jordan had been gambling in Atlantic City until 3:00 AM the night before the game. As I recall, he implied Jordan had a gambling problem that was tangibly undermining his play. North brought Anderson on the Monsters show to rip him apart; I think he eventually dropped Anderson from the broadcast in mid-sentence. Anyway, a few minutes later, Bill Gleason called in to defend Anderson, who was one of his friends. Gleason's most (in)famous line from that exchange was "David Anderson is bigger than Michael Jordan," a drop that North and Jiggetts played endlessly through the rest of the 90s.
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It shouldn't be lost that the point Gleason was trying to make is that, even beyond Anderson/Jordan, the writer had more power, reach and impact than the player. I suppose that might have been true in an earlier era but Jordan never had a problem getting his message out. He had too many powerful parties invested in him to be silenced. So what if the NYT won't report on him? Kid's are singing the jingle to his commercial!
The subtext of this fight was that sports radio was viewed as a lower form of art than sports journalism at that time. Sports talk was an emerging medium and it had the crusty old writers frightened. It turns out that they were frightened for good cause AND they were a higher form of art.