As a kid in England, I had been mesmerized by any glimpse ever snatched of American sports broadcasting on British television. Back in the day, every American broadcaster wore matching brightly colored blazers when on air. Each network had a different hue. It did not seem to matter if the words they spoke made sense. It was as if the power of their blazer conferred meaning. As a kid, I had always loved Harris Tweed, and the fact that this name gave me the chance to wear it again sealed the deal. And that’s how we called our show Men in Blazers. I was honestly shocked how quickly our audience grew, and how connected and deeply devoted that audience was. The 2010 World Cup had made an enormous number of Americans fall in love with football, leaving an avid, curious, hungry new fanbase in its wake,.
We made it our mission to wire them together into a joyous community. The act of podcasting about the English Premier League on a weekly basis was central to that. Broadcasting directly into people’s ears and speaking so personally allowed us to develop an insider language for, and with, the listeners. A language that was rooted in the act of watching English football together across the United States with a spirit of exhilarated discovery.
The moment everything crystallized was the night of our first-ever live show. I had become friendly with Bob Ley, the ESPN broadcasting legend, who had long been the sole voice brave enough to talk with knowledge and love for the sport of soccer on the network.
Bob was in the midst of a contract renegotiation with ESPN. In one of many budget-driven belt-tightening moves by “The Worldwide Leader in Sports,” the broadcaster had made a series of demeaning, paltry offers to him. We had been toying with the idea of executing a live taping for a while I called Bob up and asked him if we could celebrate his career live onstage in New York City, making up the idea of a “Men in Blazers Golden Blazer” mid-conversation, in a desperate effort to make the occasion sound loftier and more thought out than it actually was. While I was on the phone, I clicked through Amazon to find a golden blazer we could afford, and found one at the discount price of $29.99. Mostly because it was garish, sequined, and on sale.
It was with that garb that we would spend a night honoring a man who had dedicated his life to growing the game in the United States. The show was booked for Joe’s Pub in NoHo, New York. The gig sold out inside 90 seconds.
Come showtime, we unfurled an act that was essentially a 90-minute Bob Ley tribute/infomercial, reliving the lonely and thankless path our guest had plowed, as the standard bearer for soccer, through the ’80s and ’90s wilderness when his attempts to talk with passion about the sport was to open himself to brazen mockery from his fellow cohosts. We published the finished product on our Grantland site, and within 24 hours, Bob Ley received the kind of respectful offer from ESPN that he should have been handed in the first place. Bob signed on for one more World Cup, safe in the knowledge he could retire in the wake with his dignity intact and on his own terms.
It was all so surreal to experience. I was still shocked that the powers that be listened to our show and took our opinions seriously, and so attributed the new contract to the mystical power of a $29.99 sequined blazer.
The other colossal outcome of the night was far more personal: the impact of meeting our audience face- to- face for the first time. It was shocking how many had flown in from all points.
I stood in the center of that bar, shattered by our onstage exertions, but also utterly enthralled by the scene going on all around me. Here was this very American audience, all clad in English football jerseys. They had been strangers when the night began but were now all drinking, talking, and forming friendships, bonded not only by the love of our show but also a shared hunger to commune with fellow travelers, fellow Americans who had been bitten by the soccer bug and fallen in love with the Premier League 3,000-plus miles away. A passion they had thus far largely experienced solo, watching early-morning kickoffs at ungodly hours in their pajamas, had now been ignited and given a place to grow through our giddy little podcast. This scene showed me that what Men in Blazers was about was less broadcasting, and more community building.
The pod was the heartbeat of everything we created, but I scrambled to be everywhere, maintaining an ESPN byline and making any documentary film I could. This was partly by design— I had seen a gap in the market and did my part to fill it.
Meanwhile, I kept appearing on Morning Joe. Football did not really belong on a show covering global and domestic politics in such serious form, yet Joe Scarborough had fallen hard for the game and insisted on being given the opportunity to talk about his growing love of Liverpool Football Club.
The segment was typically a rapid- fire four- minute crash through the weekend soccer headlines— a conversation between me and Joe— with the rest of the regular political pundits looking on in a bemused silence. This confusion revealed itself the third time I appeared. Former ad man Donny Deutsch interrupted my flow by cutting me off with a rant about how this American show should have no place for European soccer.
Live broadcasts are an eerie experience. The need to keep talking means the mouth often engages without passing the words through the required mental filters. Instinct just takes over. Without missing a beat, I cut Deutsch off by asking him if he had any grandchildren. “I do but what has that got to do with it?” he responded, sounding suddenly age- conscious.
“You are an old man, Donny Deutsch,” I heard myself saying. “Soccer is the fastest-growing sport for Americans under the age of 30 in America. You might have grown up playing stickball on the street in Queens, but today the young audience is following Premier League football. This is not for you, old man.”
Suitably chastised, Deutsch was silenced as if his battery pack had been ripped out.
Two weeks later I was on again. I charged into my opening with enthusiasm only to be interrupted again. This time
by Tom Brokaw. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” the veteran broadcasting legend interjected. “We are in America!” he exclaimed. “Where we care about ball sports like baseball and NFL football. Talking about soccer is simply anti- American.”
Brokaw’s rant went on and on, as he pronounced the word soccer with such scorn that I quickly became lost inside my own head. I thought about unleashing the ageist attack I had used to ensnare Deutsch, but this was Tom Brokaw who was steam-rolling me. Television royalty. Humiliating him would be like ridiculing the queen to her face. So I sat there silently for four minutes, dying inside as the man who wrote The Greatest Generation mocked me and the sport I loved on live television.
Utterly humiliated, and believing my television broadcast career had just been well and truly ended, I somehow crawled out of the studio. To my surprise the show producer said, “Same time next week, Roger?” as I headed for the door. I just about managed to stammer, “I will never, EVER go on live television when Brokaw is sitting at the desk.”
I did the show every week for two years without incident.
Brokaw was politely ushered off anytime he was on set before my arrival. Then in early January, I took to the set and, to my horror, Brokaw was still in place opposite Joe Scarborough as the clock ticked down before live broadcast resumed. “I am not going on with bloody Brokaw,” I hissed. “Don’t worry, he is a changed man,” said the producer, shoving me into my seat just in time as the last commercial ended.
The introductory music kicked in, my segment began, and I leaped into my opening. I had gotten roughly five words out and blow me down, if Brokaw did not lean forward and interrupt me once more. “Wait a minute . . . wait a minute,”
he said, using words that had populated my recurring nightmares ever since I had last heard him utter them. “I once said soccer is un-American,” he began, as I sat chilled, finding myself gasping for air. “Yet, since then, I have had the opportunity to travel to England with my sons-in-law to watch Premier League games, and I have to admit, I have developed a new appreciation for the game,” he said with a quiet pride while across the desk, the blood drained back into my face. “We even fly coach,” he concluded, handing the conversation back to me so I could charge through the Manchester United–Sunderland highlights package.
The second the segment was over, I was overwhelmed by a greater sense of shock than after Brokaw’s first attack. If even Tom Brokaw had fallen in love with Premier League soccer, the game had well and truly arrived in the United States. Soccer was America’s Sport of the Future no more.
The Morning Joe gig gave me a distinctive platform and voice. It may not have been the most-watched breakfast show in the world, but pound for pound, none had a more influential viewership. Producers from NPR and PBS started to flock my way whenever they needed an expert, not because I was necessarily good. More because I was the only one they knew. My cell phone voice mail became cluttered with requests for “the Morning Joe soccer guy.”
The show also gave me a unique place apart from the rest of the press pack. A status that became cemented in 2011 when the United States Men’s National Team announced a German, Jürgen Klinsmann, would be their next manager.
Jürgen was an enigmatic life-force. A legend as a footballer. He had been a feared striker with a dyed blond mop top, who won both the World Cup and the Euros as a player. Tenacious enough to win over the suspicious jingoistic English media when he arrived at Tottenham in 1994, late in his career as a 30-year-old. A Guardian writer welcomed him with a feature entitled “Why I Hate Jürgen Klinsmann,” describing his cunning, flopping gamesmanship as everything the British game stood against. Within a couple of months, Jürgen had lashed home 29 goals and won everyone over with his ethereal talent, forcing the English scribe to recant with a second feature, “Why I Love Jürgen Klinsmann.”
Klinsmann had become the German national team’s coach in 2004 and oversaw the Nationalmannschaft’s transition from a cold- blooded, robotic winner into something the world never thought was possible: a German team the rest of the world could admire and root for. His career in the wake had been admittedly erratic. Klinsmann had relocated to live in California and fused a helicopter- flying, management- consultant- speak LA vibe to his natural Teutonic meticulousness. He lasted less than a season as manager of Bayern Munich, a disastrous spell that undermined his status as an elite coach. Yet a combination of his availability and proximity on the West Coast meant he became coveted by the powers that be at US Soccer, and when he agreed to lead us into the 2014 World Cup as the first globally renowned footballing personality to coach the US boys, it was hailed as a real coup.
I ran down to witness Klinsmann’s opening press conference in person. It was held at Niketown in New York, and I
arrived with a genuine sense of excitement and watched him enthusiastically hold court on his footballing theories, which were a strange mix of fearless optimism and psychobabble. “I think, yes, the youth teams should reflect the mixture of your culture, it should reflect what’s going on in this country,” Klinsmann began, proceeding to hypothesize that the way a football team plays should reflect the nation’s mentality.
It was bold and compelling, but the idea that the United States men should play in a certain “American style” sounded all the crazier because he punctuated every sentence with his signature laugh. A half cackle, half shriek that the transcription service who typed up my recording, perhaps heavily influenced by Christoph Waltz’s work, would later describe as “Loud German Laughter.” Jürgen capped the press conference off by quipping, “I hope we find a way to discover a Lionel Messi in the United States. That would be awesome.” I wrote the following in my notes: “You can’t fault him for optimism.” Jürgen’s appeared as wildly deluded as my own.
Not everyone was as welcoming as I was, though. Watching Klinsmann’s first year with the US team was akin to witnessing a donor organ rejected by the host body, as he attempted to foster a style of perpetual experimentation, tweaking personnel, positions, formations, and even nationalities. These demands, methodology, and tactics did not jive with the culture of the players he inherited, causing a swarming sense of uncertainty.
A nucleus of the American players still played in the domestic American MLS, a league he constantly belittled and disparaged, urging his team to strive to play in Europe, as if that leap was something they could just make happen of their own free will.
When Clint Dempsey, then by far the most talented maverick in the US player pool, secured a move from a mid- level team Fulham, to Tottenham Hotspur, an aspiring power, Klinsmann made the ill- advised decision to tweak his star player in the media. He told The Wall Street Journal, “Dempsey has not accomplished shit yet,” making sure the Yank understood there is always another level.
The bulk of the American press pack had never seen Klinsmann play and so did not truly appreciate the heights of his accomplishments, instead laughing at his flashy habit of helicoptering to work to skip the SoCal traffic, his Porsche SUV license plate that read FLYHELI, and the $2.5 million he made per year, which was an enormous number for a soccer coach at the time in this nation. I hoped I could act as a sort of translator here and flew out to California to spend an afternoon with Jürgen. My goal was to write a feature for ESPN that showed the arc of the coach’s journey via the management lessons he had learned from each of the legendary coaches he had played for, including Arsène Wenger and Giovanni Trapattoni. My goal was to give Jürgen’s eccentricity a backstory and some context.
I met Jürgen in a hotel coffee shop in Torrance. He had the unsettling habit of shrieking midsentence “Espresso!” in a slightly menacing Teutonic accent. A PR assistant would quickly and nervously appear to deposit a double shot in front of him, which he would then theatrically down.
In the hour and a half we spent together, it was never entirely clear to me whether the trim coach was suffering a perpetual caffeine rush or thriving off the challenge of infusing US Soccer with his philosophy and experience.
In truth, I found engaging with the man to be fascinating. He was the rare former footballing superstar eager to exchange freewheeling ideas about current events in the present rather than rely on personal achievements in the past as a crutch.
Before I left, I asked him what fears kept him awake at night. “I sleep well,” he snapped. “I stop drinking my espressos at 4 p.m.” With that, he looked at his watch, discovered it was exactly 3:50 p.m., and, giggling with delight, ordered one more.
The piece I wrote did huge numbers for ESPN. I never asked Jürgen what he thought about it, but from that point on he came to me whenever he wanted his viewpoint to be given a fair articulation. We were not exactly friends. Jürgen is a prickly, sensitive human being. A strange mix of arrogance and insecurity.
But it quickly became clear within ESPN that if they wanted to do something that involved Klinsmann, I was as close to a Jürgen whisperer as there could be. There were times when he was exasperating. Once he decided he was going to have the US team play in the tactically complex style of Pep Guardiola.
“I want them to attack with 10 players and defend with 10 players,” he proclaimed, “like Lionel Messi’s Barcelona.” A fantastical idea to which I could only retort, “Jürgen, just because I want to quarterback the Chicago Bears or date supermodels does not mean I can.” We just sat there in an awkward silence for a moment, which he shattered by turning in the general direction of his assistant and screaming “Espresso!”
As the World Cup neared, the time and energy I had devoted to my strange relationship with Jürgen Klinsmann began to pay off. SXSW launched their first sports conference and asked me if I could tempt Jürgen to appear with me on the main stage.
To my delight, Klinsmann agreed, and we spent a kinetic hour and a half thrashing out his leadership philosophy before a standing- room- only ballroom, with the young audience hooked on his every word, as the two of us argued about the sources of his eternal optimism. “The glass is always half full,” he said.
“No, it is not. It is completely empty and cracked,” I replied. Jürgen snorted and said, “You just see the world like that because you are English,” to which I responded, “It is worse than that, Jürgen. I’m not just English, I am Jewish, too. I have a double dose of pessimism.” Jürgen stared at me, not quite sure what to say next. I expected him to shriek “Espresso!” but instead he elected to throw his head back and let out a very loud cackle like a German red- tailed hawk.
After the show, I was taken aside by John Skipper, who had spent most of the conference proudly parading data boy wonder Nate Silver around as ESPN’s splashy new acquisition. With taut jaw, he told me the network had a problem for which I was the solution. As World Cup broadcasters, ESPN longed to film a Hard Knocks style behind- the- scenes documentary of the US team’s preparation for the tournament. They had approached Jürgen with the idea. I was not surprised to hear that the manager had agreed, because he clearly adored the spotlight.
However, Skipper proceeded to tell me Jürgen had one condition. “He is demanding that the network allow you to direct it, Roger.”
This excerpt is reprinted with permission from Dey Street Books.
