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Dan Jiggetts can't block out hit on his name
Phil Rosenthal | Media
June 24, 2009
For seven seasons as a Bears offensive tackle, and at Harvard before that, Dan Jiggetts made his name through his ability to move people out of the way.
Decades later and now a sportscaster, he feels that name has been tarnished because of someone he hasn't been able to shove aside so easily.
It's David Hernandez who has been called for illegal procedure, Jiggetts would like to point out, not him.
"It's not a great thing to wake up and pick up the paper and see your name alongside this guy for whatever reason," Jiggetts said Tuesday, a day after authorities caught up with Hernandez.
Hernandez had been on the lam since being accused of running a Ponzi scheme and using some of the proceeds to sponsor Mike North's show with Jiggetts on Comcast SportsNet Chicago and to fund an Internet radio site North developed.
North, who reunited with longtime WSCR-AM broadcast partner Jiggetts on the "Monsters in the Morning" program in January, has maintained he, too, did nothing wrong besides place too much trust in this free-spending fan with apparently bottomless pockets until the checks bounced.
The sports-talk host and would-be Web entrepreneur's chief regret is that he pulled so many longtime friends into Chicago Sports Webio with the promise of opportunities that proved as illusory as Hernandez's bankroll.
"It wasn't us," North said Tuesday before declining to be quoted further about Hernandez. "It was tainted meat, and we weren't the tainted meat."
Jiggetts said he can't shed light on exactly how Hernandez came to sponsor the show. He and North have said they met Hernandez as a fan during their days at The Score. He was one of those die-hards who would show up at station events and remote broadcasts.
"I guess he called shows and stuff like that," Jiggetts said. "No big deal. You know how many people we dealt with like that?
"But really the next time he resurfaced in any big way to me was when this [sponsorship of 'Monsters' and its simulcast on Webio] was proposed. So it's not like I had some long-term relationship with him or anything like that."
North and Jiggetts would paint Hernandez as a longtime pal on the debut of "Monsters" in a 10-minute chat with the man whose NextStep Medical Staffing had ponied up a six-figure amount to be title sponsor, but they've insisted they knew nothing of his convictions, his bankruptcies and so on in the decade-plus between the early Score days and when he put money into "Monsters" and Webio.
In other words, they just wanted to make their guest feel at home. "We did that for everybody," Jiggetts said.
Jiggetts, who worked in banking until becoming a full-time sportscaster in 1988, said he vaguely recalled that Hernandez had been a banker. Asked if they had ever done business, Jiggetts said, "Hell no!"
But one of Jiggetts' daughters went to work for Hernandez a month or so before the G-men came to the office.
"She was in between jobs, and this opportunity came up, and I said, 'You might as well take it rather than collect unemployment.' ... If I had known that this guy was pulling this, you think I would have involved my family in it? No way."
Jiggetts said the feds haven't questioned him.
"They don't seem to be very interested in whatever I have to say," he said. "They know what they want to go after. I had nothing to do with any of that."
Except in stories, like this one, that keep mentioning how a superfan used some of his allegedly ill-gotten gains to cozy up to his favorite sports-talk hosts, who took the money without sufficient curiosity about its source. These guys know more about fifth-round draft prospects than they apparently knew of their benefactor.
"All of a sudden you're jammed into a corner with a guy that's been up to allegedly dirty deeds," Jiggetts said. "My dad always told me that the one thing you have to protect in your life is your good name. ... That's what I've tried to do in my life, and then something like this comes up. I'm so mad I don't know what to do."
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Nozomi Kurahashi is an alias chosen by Yoshizawa Ayumi following her teen debut as a nude gravure idol in Japan.
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