Up Close With PSR:
Tony Kornheiser

Tony Kornheiser, columnist for the Washington Post, is also the co-host of ESPN's popular "Pardon the Interruption" (PTI) show, which he hosts with his Washington Post colleague, Michael Wilbon. A native of Long Island, N.Y., Kornheiser left the New York Times to join the Post in 1979. His radio show aired on ESPN Radio from January 1998 until this past spring. PSR editor Tony DeFazio spoke with Kornheiser recently.

PSR: Sports in this country have changed over the years, as have sports fans. How do you find fans are generally perceived by the media?

Kornheiser: I'm surprised at how much fans care about teams and how it has become so important for them - Really, to the point that they determine their own success or failure through watching a team. And I'm not talking about college kids, I'm talking about adults. It's a stunning thing to have seen those two incidents of people jumping over the fences in baseball games to get at the umpires. We tend to believe that that sort of stuff doesn't happen in the United States.

I've been watching and have been made leery of the emotional expenditure that fans seem to be willing to put out there more and more as time goes on. I don't get it, I mean, it's a game. And I suspect that the media is, in large part, responsible for this by things such as 24-hour sports coverage on ESPN. It just turns up the crescendo of emotional importance that's attached to these games. They're games, it's absolutely ludicrous. Every once in a while it becomes frightening - this mob mentality where you go to these games and it means much more to you than it should. But when you talk to these people, they think it should mean this much. And at least in my view, that's nuts.

PSR: How is the media being somewhat responsible?

TK: We aid and abet...I make money from the business of sports, so I want sports to be important to an increasing number of people so I can make my money doing what I love. We are always trying to make sports more important - so our jobs are safer and so that we feel we're reaching a wider audience.

PSR: Have you seen the fans' view of the media change over the years?

TK: I suspect that they have always hated the media because we're the bearer of bad news. As athletes have become more complex figures on the national stage, the media is seen as trying to tear them down.

Fans worship athletes and don't care about anything other than their performance. Sports writers are critical, and even if you praise 47 times and are critical three, fans concentrate on the three and believe that you are tearing down the fabric of the people they worship.

PSR: Why do you think "PTI" is so popular with fans?

TK: You can't overlook the elephant that's in the room, which is the fact that it's a white guy and a black guy who yell at each other and love each other - it makes people happy. Everybody can see himself in one of the two of us. White guys can root for Wilbon and black guys can root for Kornheiser.

Secondly, on a network that very rarely does any type of criticism, we're critical. Both Michael and I speak our minds and I think it comes across - Because of sponsorships and networks and those relationships, fans get leery of certain newspapers or sportswriters. But they see that we don't appear to be in anybody's pocket and they think of us more or less like real people, at least more than a lot of people who are just hair-do's anchoring the news.

PSR: Do fans in Pittsburgh deserve three pro teams?

TK: I don't like to talk about "deserve." For many, many years, Pittsburgh had the highest ticket prices in the NHL and still sold out an awful lot of games. Hundreds of people would drive from Pittsburgh to Washington because it was a cheaper ticket at the Capital Center and because they could get the ticket. So obviously they're good fans.

Baseball fans in Pittsburgh are fine fans, but the population base isn't as big in Pittsburgh as it is in other places. People prefer to see a winner, that's universally true, but when you can draw from 20 million people like Los Angeles, and you can draw from 1.5 million like in Pittsburgh, then you gotta have enough people with enough money to afford it.

The mistake is thinking that new stadiums make it happen when it's teams that make it happen. New stadiums make it happen for a couple of years; good teams make it happen no matter where they play.