Fatherhood for Idiots: ESPN’s Mike Greenberg (Cont.)

A_P: Why My Wife Thinks I'm an Idiot is written like a journal as you’re becoming a father and going through fatherhood. Is the book pretty much what the journal was? Because without spoiling the narrative, there's one point where your shrink asks you about what you've been writing.

MG: The book is my journal, and my editor, a guy named Mark Tavani at Random House, helped me figure out how to turn it into a book. I'm not trying to say that every single thing in the book is faithful to the events of my life. I'm not pretending that it's an autobiography. Some things are changed around to protect people, and others are changed around to make them a little funnier, but generally speaking it is the story of my life.

A_P: At one point did you say, this has got to be a book?

MG: It was not even my idea. When my second novel got rejected, I was devastated, really crushed, because I thought that was the end of my dream of being a writer. I wasn't going to go through it again. I had lunch with my agent to talk about it, and I was just down, and he said, "Do you have any other ideas?" I said there was a time I started keeping this journal when my wife told me we were having a baby and I thought someday it would make an interesting book. He said, "Well, let me take a look at it," and I showed it to him, and he said, "This is the book, Michael, this is the book." And that was where it came from, so it wasn't even my idea.

A_P: But there are some times when you do talk about sports. Were you worried about the sports overshadowing the book?

MG: No, I wasn't. A journal is sort of about whatever is on your mind that day, and a lot of days, sports is on my mind in part because it's my job and in a larger part because I'm a fan. It was sort of a collective effort between my editor and myself to decide how much of the sports stuff we wanted to put in there because it was much much, much longer than what eventually wound up in the book.

A_P: I don't know if you ever read other humorists, but it seems there's a lot more female humorists writing about being a mom than there are male humor writers writing about what's funny about trying to be a dad. Is it necessarily harder to come up with material for trying to become a dad because there's a part in the book where you and your wife are at a dinner party, and it seems like you jokingly mention that pregnancy is harder on the father and everybody's forks just drop.

MG: That was not a good day.

A_P: Is it harder to try and find those moments? What's different about it?

MG: I don't think it's harder. It is just different. I think the association from children to a mother is always much stronger than the association from children to a father, but I think gender roles are changing. There was a time when men went out and made a living and women stayed home with the kids, but my wife doesn't stay home with the kids; she goes out and makes a living, and sometimes I stay home with the kids. I think there are more and more guys like that, so I think more and more people will write about it. I think sometimes guys have this idea that they want to be macho, and it doesn't feel very macho to write about changing diapers but it's what guys are doing. So I certainly think there will be many, many more guys writing like this.

And it's funny you should call it humor writing because that really was not what I meant it to be. There are some parts of it that I meant to be funny, but I don't consider it humor. You're not the first person who has suggested it to me. Obviously, I'm the one missing it.

A_P: Has your passion for sports changed? You talk about things in the book like the steroids scandal.

MG: My passion for sports has changed enormously. The biggest problem with covering sports for a living is that if you have to pay attention to the things about sports that you don't like, it really exposes the ugly side of it. When you are actually living in the world of sports, you recognize that what it is is a business like anything else. It's a business populated, in some cases, by a lot of guys who really aren't such good people, and there's a lot of ugliness, and that definitely changes your perspective. Definitely. While I still love sports, I certainly don't have the wide-eyed feelings about them I did before I got into this line of work.

A_P: Has it changed for your kids or at least how you share sports with your kids?

MG: Well, they're much too young. My kids don't know. My kids are 5 and 3. I took my son to his first football game, and he loved it and we had a great time. But they are far, far, far too young to understand any of this stuff. It will be interesting to me to see what they're perception of it is as they get older.

A_P: How do you think becoming a father has changed how you're a sportscaster or how you're a writer? Has it changed at all?

MG: It has in one regard. I've been a father for almost the entire time that we've had "Mike and Mike in the Morning." I was a talk show host in Chicago before I came here, and I definitely think there were topics and things I would say on the air before I had kids that I would not now because, you know, I do have the thought in my head that my kids could be listening, that someone else is listening with their kids and, more to the point, that whatever I say on some level is going to be a reflection on my kids. I actually even wrote that in the book at some point. I wrote, "I wonder how Howard Stern feels about his daughters listening to his show."

A_P: What about as a writer and a novelist?

MG: Well, I haven't written a novel really since my kids were born, so I don't know what I'm going to do next from a writing standpoint. Having kids affects everything in your life, so I'm sure it has affected my writing.

A_P: When they're old enough to read it, what do you think they'll think about? I talk to a lot of writers who are sometimes a little scared of being too personal with their writing or going too deep into their own life to share it with somebody else.

MG: I think they will think exactly as they do now, that Daddy is so silly. That's the reaction I'm hoping for.
 

Danny Gallagher is a freelance writer, humorist and reporter living in Texas where Dads wear their hearts on their sleeves and their family portraits on their belt buckles. He was recently published in the Backstory section of the Christian Science Monitor. His Web site is http://www.dannygallagher.net.
(Email to a Friend)