Mike and the Madness: Francesa Rages Amid the Coronavirus
In a tragedy that’s both local and personal, an iconic sports radio growl locates a raw nerve
By Jason Gay / WALL STREET JOURNAL
April 8, 2020
Mike Francesa was steamed.
“That’s what’s wrong here—there’s a disconnect,” he said. It was March 30, as the coronavirus exploded in New York.
“We’re watching people die—and now we know people who died. And we’re not seeing one or two people die now in our neighborhood—we’re seeing them die by the 10s and the 20s, by the day. They’re bringing people out of the hospital in Queens in body bags. Five minutes from where he grew up.” The he was President Trump, whom Francesa had voted for, and had long spoken supportively of on his eponymous radio show.
“We here know this isn’t right,” Francesa powered on. “Ask the cops in New York if it’s right, right now. Ask the firemen in New York—who are answering all those police calls, answering all those ambulance calls—if it’s right, right now. Ask the nurses and the doctors in that hospital if it’s right, right now. They know it’s not. They don’t have the supplies they need.”
“So don’t give me the ‘My Pillow’ guy doing a song and dance up here on a Monday afternoon—when people are dying in Queens!” There was a pause long enough to stir an egg cream. “Get the stuff made, get the stuff where it needs to go, and get the boots on the ground! Treat this like the crisis it is!”
It felt like a thunderclap. If you’d ever listened to Francesa, aka The Sports Pope, aka the polarizing Godfather of New York sports radio, you’d heard his dramatic admonishments of franchises, general managers, coaches and players. Francesa blowing his stack was amusing theater—he could make a midseason Giants loss sound worse than an asteroid collision—and there was that famous Long Island baritone, which the New Yorker’s Nick Paumgarten once wrote made names like Giambi sound “dunked in onion dip.”
In the digital era, Francesa’s throne had wobbled—his bombastic style made him a target for social media ridicule, and his radio domain was smaller than in its heyday. Still, Francesa’s rumbly voice remained part of the din of the city, like the jackhammers on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, or the subway PA belching “Bowling Green.”
And now: coronavirus. This wasn’t sports. This was much bigger—and personal. The pandemic was overwhelming hospitals in New York City, also Long Island’s Nassau County, where Francesa lives in the leafy hamlet of Manhasset. Francesa knew people who were dying. Everyone did. The pain was inescapable, and yet, to Francesa’s mind, the White House—a White House he’d defended—hadn’t figured out the proper tack. On the air, he sounded locked in, focused. In the tragedy and outrage, Francesa, 66, had found a fresh groove. He couldn’t think of anything he should be talking about more.
“We’re right in the middle of it,” Francesa told me in a telephone interview the other day. “There are hotbeds that are incredibly hot, nowhere hotter in the country than it is in Nassau County right now.” He repeated for emphasis: “Nowhere hotter.”
Francesa does a 6 to 6:30 p.m. weekday show on the sports radio station WFAN, and now a four-hour program on Sunday mornings; you can hear more of him on Radio.com. The pandemic has turned his show into something immediate and raw, but also weirdly comforting, a cri de coeur from a crabby uncle. Talking sports is largely kaput, as there are no sports, though Francesa managed a thoughtful appreciation the other day of the departed Al Kaline (“a classy, classy player”), and, if you need to call in and decompress over a lost March Madness for Rutgers basketball, he’d permit the detour. (“Rutgers had a nice year. They were good at home.”)
Mostly, he was locked in on the virus: the treatments, the economic impact, the inertia from Washington. The segue to seriousness felt natural. Francesa’s never been a cut-up or schticky hot-taker; since the old days, when he’d been paired with the jumpy Chris “Mad Dog” Russo, he’d been the solemn one, suffering few fools. He’d been on the air for 9/11, Hurricane Sandy. Pivoting to this was not hard.
“One thing I can do is turn the microphone on and talk,” Francesa told me. “I can do a show about business. I could do a show about politics. I can do a show about current events. I always prided myself on being able to do stuff like that. I have a lot of interests.”
On his most recent Sunday show, he did an extended interview with Dr. Richard Shlofmitz of St. Francis Hospital, who talked about the battle facing patients and doctors. Later, Francesa blasted the price-gougers profiteering on masks and protective equipment (“Sub-humans,” he called them.) He also heard from a caller who praised his turn in the recent Adam Sandler movie “Uncut Gems.” But mostly he talked about the pandemic.
“This scares people,” Francesa told me. “I’ve had guys say to me…they’re doctors, they’re guys who are my age, and they’re like: ‘Hey, don’t get this. Stay home. Don’t get this because you don’t know whether you’re going to fight this or not.’ You just don’t know.”
He’d been at home. He had a studio inside the Manhasset house; his daughter, Emily, a high school freshman, was helping with the production. He’d had ventured out only to the pharmacy, the supermarket, or for walks. On his show, Francesa had said he’d gone for a walk on the golf course, which got interpreted as he’d gone out and played golf, but he’d clarified that he’d just brought a couple of clubs out, hit a few balls, stayed socially distant, no big whoop. His children (Francesa also has two sons, Harrison and Jack) had been thumping him in the card game spit. He’d watched “Ozark,” which he enjoyed, a bit of the N.C. State-Houston 1983 title game, and there was always his beloved “Blue Bloods,” with Tom Selleck. (“I have 10 years of that on Hulu, so I can go to those if I need them.”)
“We’re all bored,” he acknowledged. “No question. I’m probably driving my wife nuts.”
Francesa’s March 30 rant about the president had gone viral, in part because it had surprised people, given Francesa’s known affection for Trump, but also because it sounded close to home, New Yorker to New Yorker, like he was yelling from a cab. Back in the day, a young Francesa had parked Fred Trump’s limousine at the Atlantic Beach Club, and he still had admiration for Fred’s son. “The President is brilliant at branding…brilliant at marketing,” Francesa told me. But he didn’t back down from his critiques: “I steadfastly stand by that. I think the federal government has not done a great job because I feel like they haven’t connected with the people.”
The day after Francesa’s rant about the situation in Queens, the president talked publicly about Elmhurst Hospital, and I wasn’t the only listener to wonder if the Pope had somehow gotten through. “I don’t know,” Francesa told me. “I have no way of knowing.” He said he’s not talked to Trump since Trump had become president. The last time he’d spoken to him was before he became a candidate. “I sat with him at a Ranger game—a Ranger playoff game—right before he decided to run,” he said. “We had a nice conversation that night. Never mentioned it.”
This week, there’s been optimistic talk about the possibility of sports coming back—Augusta National was now targeting the second week in November for the Masters; baseball was reportedly mulling a quarantined launch in Arizona with players sitting six feet apart in the stands. The Pope sounded unconvinced of the latter plan. “I think golf does work,” he said. “I think basketball could work in a small gym with just TV cameras and the teams…I think the NFL could come back for TV only.”
But there was so much to overcome. “The first part of this, how do we stop dying? How do we stop the deaths?” he said. “Once we do that, we can get to the second part, which is digging out from an economy that has been really damaged severely now, no question.” Mike Francesa noted that the Masters had been originally scheduled to tee off on Thursday. “We need it in the worst way,” he said. “If we had the Masters coming up Thursday, I’d be thrilled. I really would.”
