Fatherhood for Idiots: ESPN’s Mike Greenberg
By Danny Gallagher
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If you've never heard of Mike Greenberg, then you probably don't read or get up before noon. He's half of the host team of ESPN Radio's popular morning show, "Mike and Mike in the Morning" (along with former NFL defensive tackle Mike Golic) and is an anchor on the weekday evening Sportscenter.

But "Greeny" also has a longtime love for writing. He wrote two unpublished novels before Villard Publishing picked up Why My Wife Thinks I'm an Idiot: The Life and Times of a Sportscaster Dad, a funny and touching memoir that he originally wrote as a journal about his perspectives on being a husband, a father and a sports fan.

He spoke to Arriviste Press on being “a little famous," how covering sports can change your passion for it, and why his wife still thinks he's an idiot even if he made the New York Times and the Boston Globe best seller lists.

A_P: You've been a nationally renowned sportscaster. You host one of the most popular morning shows in the country. Now you've got a New York Times best-selling book, and I heard [on your show] that you won an Emmy. (The online animated adventures of Greenberg's radio show, "Off-Mikes"  by Animax Entertainment won the Sports Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Content for Non-Traditional Platform.")

MG: That's right, we won an Emmy. The book [also] just made the Boston Globe best seller list.

A_P: Congratulations, so now that you've done all this stuff, has your wife decreased your Idiot Quotient?

MG: No, I would say she still definitively thinks I'm an idiot.

A_P: Why is that?

MG: Well the idiot part of it comes from the complete disconnect between all husband and wives. It doesn't make any difference how successful we are, it doesn't make any difference how smart we are, it doesn't make any difference how much money we make or anything else. That does not change the fact that once every four and a half days, our wives will look at us and think to themselves, "My God this guy is an idiot."

A_P: So it is something they are naturally attracted to it or is it something that develops after they get married?

MG: It's not even an attraction. It's just a gender thing. It's just the way men and women deal with one another. The sentence in the book that summarizes it best is when I said to my wife, "Your need to deal with our problems is interfering with my need to pretend they do not exist." It's unavoidable, I guess, is the best way to put it.

A_P: Has she read it?

MG: Oh yeah, my wife read it. She was reading it every step of the way while I was writing it.

A_P: In ESPN the Magazine, there was the section that you wrote [that you learned] about one of your friends whose wife had just left him and I noticed she had put comments in there and Golic did the same thing. Did she do that for the whole book?

MG: No, that was just the excerpt for ESPN the Magazine. The executive editor, Gary Belsky, a brilliant guy, wanted to run an excerpt of the book but wanted to do something a little different with it. So the idea was that my wife would be commenting on it as it went along. They put Golic in there as well, and I thought it was very funny.

A_P: You talk about being “a little famous” from your standpoint, and I liked how you compared it with someone like Bo Jackson who has to deal with fame 24-hours a day. Is fame necessarily a bad thing in your mind when it comes to sports?

MG: Well, as I said in the book, being a little famous is great. Being a little famous is the best. The level of famous I am is terrific. People come up to you and say nice things. You get a table in a restaurant. You get tickets to things. That part of it is great. But I've been around really famous people. A better example than Bo was when I covered Michael Jordan and traveled with him at a time when he very well may have been the most famous person in the world -- and I would not have traded places with him. I absolutely would not, for all of his money and all of his adoration and for all the wonderful things about being Michael Jordan. I would not have traded places with him. Enormous fame, really overwhelming fame, is suffocating, and, in the scheme of things, I think it is not worth it.

A_P: But when it comes to your show, when you deal with sports fans, you're dealing with people.

MG: Right, the beauty of sports is investing everything into something that means absolutely nothing. I really meant that more from my perspective as a sports fan than as a sports broadcaster.

A_P: What's worse, your wife thinking you're an idiot or your listeners?

MG: Oh well, you should read my mail. You put your work out there on display and you have to be prepared for the fact that a lot of people aren't going to like what you do. That just goes with the territory. When it first starts happening, and when you first have a show, it's very tough to take the criticism, [but] you become somewhat immune to it. Being criticized, whether it's by media critics or by fans, it's difficult in a totally different way. It's not like having my wife call me an idiot.

A_P: That it reminds me of the point in the book when you're at the Italian restaurant and you hear your own voice [on the radio] and one of the cooks says, "That guy is such an idiot."

MG: And actually I still go there by the way. It's right near my house.

A_P: Did they eventually know?

MG: Well, I don't know that any of them have read the book. I never told them about that story. They have subsequently figured out who I am, and they're very nice to me.

A_P: And you probably changed the name of the restaurant.

MG: I did change the name of the restaurant, but they would know if it was them because I go there all the time.

A_P: So did you always have aspirations to be a writer?

MG: Yeah I did. From the time I figured out I wasn't going to be the point guard for the New York Knicks, I always wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a real journalist at one time, and I told the story in the book about how I changed over to sports.

A_P: Well I meant not necessarily a reporter, but did you want to become a novelist or a writer or a humor writer?

MG: I actually have written two novels, this is the third book that I've written. It's only the first one I can prove because no one ever published either of the other two. I am hopeful that at least one of the other two will get published now as a consequence of this have done so well.

A_P: Can you talk about the novels at all?

MG: The first is sort of a fairy tale, and the second is sort of a fictitious look at the seedy underbelly of the sports world. It's meant to sort of be an insider's look at the corruption at the heart of the world of sports, which I really thought with my background would have been an easy book to sell.