I’m was getting about as sick of this feud as you all were, but yesterday it took an awesome turn. Mike Francesa decided to go on a twenty plus minute rant about his former partner and goings on in the media and somehow Neil Best of Newsday transcribed the whole ordeal. Here is a small piece of the explosion….
“Frankly, I have taken a beating here for a month. And I said I never was going to say a word, not one, until the whole cycle was complete, and now the cycle is complete, because the promotional tour is over and Dog has begun his show, and the best to him. No ill feeling. I hope he does well. But as I said, not one time did anybody ask me my opinion of the breakup, just his. My opinion of the show or what happened or anything else, and frankly, I took the worst of it, which is fine. But really the worst of it.
“When the thing started in the summertime it was depicted that I was leaving and that I was the guy who was an ingrate and the guy who was bailing out on FAN after all these years when things weren’t going well and going to do TV and then that didn’t turn out to be the case. No one even asked me if I was leaving. Then it didn’t turn out to be the case. And then the story was that I ran him out. So it went from me being a guy who was an ingrate because I was leaving to me being the bad guy because I ran him out, neither of which was the truth.
“I wasn’t leaving, and I didn’t run him out. Never did. Dog chose to leave, which was fine. He wanted to leave, and again, he has every right to do that. The way it was depicted was ridiculous. I sat here and watched the interviews that went on and commentary and things I read. I read that I was jealous about how much money Dog made, which was never the truth. It mentioned what my salary was and what Dog’s new salary was and how irate I was when no one knew what Dog’s salary was or had any idea.
“You learn a lesson, folks. I hope you don’t get your information from the newspapers, because the stuff that has been written during this time about me has been so wrong. It has never been even remotely accurate, I mean not even in the ballpark accurate.
And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. Francesa goes on to call out just about every media member in New York City and even said that Bob Raissman of the NY Daily News has an agenda. Now I could really care less how this whole thing ends, but if you are the one getting “hammered” in the press, and then you go and complain about it on-air, you’re not ever going to get people to come over to your side.
For Francesa’s sake I hope he just drops the whole thing because the more he comments on it, the more people are going to think he’s just whining about Russo becoming more famous.
Mike Francesa gets quite a few things off his chest (Newsday)
