Keith Olbermann

You know, like in prison.

The heartlessness of baseball’s threat to Christiansen — and by extension its disgracing of Kile’s memory — is underscored by the fact that as an injured member of a World Series team, Christiansen is not permitted to appear, on the field, at any time, wearing a uniform or a cap. In other words, baseball decided to become the schoolyard bully to make sure nobody could possibly see a cap worn by a player who would never be seen unless caught by accident by a TV camera.

The “DK 57″ tribute was, as anyone who watched Christiansen’s Giants advance to the Series, a standard part of the St. Louis Cardinals’ caps after the stunning death of their teammate Kile in June. Kile was one of what is estimated to be less than 100 people aged 33 who will die this year of a heart attack without any prior symptoms. Christiansen was his teammate for only one year and one day, ending with his trade from St. Louis at the end of July, 2001, but in that short time he had developed the kind of deep, transcendent friendship with Kile that was typical of the late pitcher’s life, and which multiplied the impact of his sudden passing. After Kile’s death, Christiansen had a bracelet made bearing his friend’s initials, and he has worn it constantly.

The Cardinals had to apply to the baseball politburo for permission to adorn their caps with a tribute to Kile, just as the Cleveland Indians, and several former Indians players now with other teams, had to apply before adding the initials “JW” to their uniforms in memory of the late beloved Cleveland trainer Jim Warfield later in the summer. Even a year ago, even as the pyre of the World Trade Center still flamed high just miles from the commissioner’s office, the New York Mets had to get special permission to wear caps during games that honored the city’s firefighters, police officers, and EMS workers — and there were those in that office who tried to talk the Mets out of doing it for more than just one night.

Before Tuesday night’s Game 3, Giants manager Dusty Baker said that the commissioner’s office had offered one bare crumb of compromise: Christiansen could keep the hat with him. “They talked to him, they talked to me. That particular hat will be off his head but in the dugout. He’s been forced to wear a hat without a ‘DK’ on it.” In short, Selig’s stooges felt the tiny chance someone might see a private tribute that would bring nothing but honor and good publicity to the World Series and the sport, had to be reduced even more — and that the matter was vital enough to merit a conversation with, and a warning to, the manager of one of the teams playing in the World Series.

As if this could possibly get worse, the crackdown on the humanity represented by Christiansen’s gesture became widely known at almost the same hour that it leaked out from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America that Darryl Kile would be added to this year’s ballot for the Hall of Fame election. Only three times previously has the standard five-year wait between the end of a player’s career and his initial eligibility for Cooperstown been waived — for Lou Gehrig, Roberto Clemente, and Thurman Munson. All three died young and are still mourned. Munson was not elected and Kile is not likely to be. But the writers’ decision to honor his memory by including him in their vote this winter stands in stark contrast to the commissioner’s cruelty in trying to expunge any trace of his memory from the World Series.

No one from baseball would talk on the record about the Christiansen rebuke, nor the invoking of the “standard uniform code,” but the rule has evolved — or devolved — over time. Originally instituted so that pitchers could not wear half-sleeve undershirts that would flap as they threw the ball and thus visually confuse the hitter, it has instead become a way of insuring that players’ uniforms would be the exclusive merchandising domain of the commissioner’s office. It is Bud Selig’s band of marketers who have permitted manufacturers’ logos to appear on shirt sleeves, and have publicly floated the possibility of selling similar spaces to the games’ corporate sponsors — and who have threatened to banish Jason Christiansen to the clubhouse because what he wanted to advertise was how much he missed his friend.

The goal is to control and direct all publicity and images of the World Series in such a manner as to squeeze every dime imaginable, no matter how much psychic coin had to be spent. Forty-eight hours after Alderson and Watson strong-armed Christiansen, commissioner Selig canceled a news conference scheduled by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. The Rays were merely going to confirm that they’d made an offer to Lou Piniella to become their new manager, and to, sources told me, give a small voice to Piniella’s belief that his previous employers, the Seattle Mariners, were trying to manipulate where Piniella next worked. This announcement — which would have been trivial outside of New York, Seattle, and Tampa — was deemed to be too much of a threat to the well-oiled World Series publicity machine to be permitted.

Instead, Selig’s leg-breakers managed to instead overshadow the World Series by bullying Jason Christiansen and giving the lie to Selig’s pronouncements last summer about the tragedy of Kile’s passing. Baseball is, of course, always worried about the wrong thing. How, and how long, players can wear their uniform pants was actually a part of the bargaining for the new union agreement that averted a strike.

At times like this, one wishes there had been a strike, and that men like Selig, Alderson, and Watson had gone out of business, and to hell.

The man who said those 17 words — improbably enough — was the actor John Wayne. And Wayne, an ultra-conservative, said them when he learned of the hair’s-breadth election of John F. Kennedy instead of his personal favorite, Richard Nixon, in 1960.

“I didn’t vote for him but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.” The sentiment was doubtlessly expressed earlier. But there is something especially appropriate about hearing it, now, in Wayne’s voice: The crisp matter-of-fact acknowledgment that we have survived, even though for nearly two centuries now, our commander in chief has also served, simultaneously, as the head of one political party and often the scourge of all others.

We as citizens must, at some point, ignore a president’s partisanship. Not that we may prosper as a nation, not that we may achieve, not that we may lead the world, but merely that we may function.

But just as essential to the 17 words of John Wayne is an implicit trust, a sacred trust: that the president for whom so many did not vote can in turn suspend his political self long enough, and for matters imperative enough, to conduct himself solely for the benefit of the entire republic.

Our generation’s willingness to state “We didn’t vote for him, but he’s our president, and we hope he does a good job” was tested in the crucible of history, and earlier than most.

And in circumstances more tragic and threatening. And we did that with which history tasked us. We enveloped our president in 2001. And those who did not believe he should have been elected — indeed those who did not believe he had been elected — willingly lowered their voices and assented to the sacred oath of nonpartisanship.

And George W. Bush took our assent, and reconfigured it, and honed it, and shaped it to a razor-sharp point and stabbed this nation in the back with it.

Were there any remaining lingering doubt otherwise, or any remaining lingering hope, it ended yesterday when Mr. Bush commuted the prison sentence of one of his own staffers.

Did so even before the appeals process was complete. Did so without as much as a courtesy consultation with the Department of Justice. Did so despite what James Madison — at the Constitutional Convention — said about impeaching any president who pardoned or sheltered those who had committed crimes “advised by” that president.

Did so without the slightest concern that even the most detached of citizens must look at the chain of events and wonder: To what degree was Mr. Libby told, “Break the law however you wish — the president will keep you out of prison”?

In that moment, Mr. Bush, you broke that fundamental compact between yourself and the majority of this nation’s citizens, the ones who did not cast votes for you.

In that moment, Mr. Bush, you ceased to be the president of the United States. In that moment, Mr. Bush, you became merely the president of a rabid and irresponsible corner of the Republican Party.

And this is too important a time, Sir, to have a commander in chief who puts party over nation. This has been, of course, the gathering legacy of this administration. Few of its decisions have escaped the stain of politics. The extraordinary Karl Rove has spoken of “a permanent Republican majority,” as if such a thing — or a permanent Democratic majority — is not antithetical to that upon which rests our country, our history, our revolution, our freedoms.

Yet our democracy has survived shrewder men than Karl Rove. And it has survived the frequent stain of politics upon the fabric of government. But this administration, with ever-increasing insistence and almost theocratic zealotry, has turned that stain into a massive oil spill.

The protection of the environment is turned over to those of one political party who will financially benefit from the rape of the environment.

The protections of the Constitution are turned over to those of one political party who believe those protections unnecessary and extravagant and quaint.

The enforcement of the laws is turned over to those of one political party who will swear beforehand that they will not enforce those laws.

The choice between war and peace is turned over to those of one political party who stand to gain vast wealth by ensuring that there is never peace, but only war.

And now, when just one cooked book gets corrected by an honest auditor, when just one trampling of the inherent and inviolable fairness of government is rejected by an impartial judge, when just one wild-eyed partisan is stopped by the figure of blind justice, this president decides that he, and not the law, must prevail.

I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war. I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. I accuse you of firing the generals who told you that the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient. I accuse you of causing in Iraq the needless deaths of 3,586 of our brothers and sons, and sisters and daughters, and friends and neighbors. I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but sincerely motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but to stifle dissent. I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people, of creating the very terror you claim to have fought. I accuse you of exploiting that unreasoning fear, the natural fear of your own people who just want to live their lives in peace, as a political tool to slander your critics and libel your opponents. I accuse you of handing part of this republic over to a vice president who is without conscience and letting him run roughshod over it.

And I accuse you now, Mr. Bush, of giving, through that vice president, carte blanche to Mr. Libby to help defame Ambassador Joseph Wilson by any means necessary, to lie to grand juries and special counsel and before a court, in order to protect the mechanisms and particulars of that defamation with your guarantee that Libby would never see prison and, in so doing, as Ambassador Wilson himself phrased it here last night, of becoming an accessory to the obstruction of justice.

When President Nixon ordered the firing of the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre” on October 20th, 1973, Cox initially responded tersely, and ominously.

“Whether ours shall be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and, ultimately, the American people.”

President Nixon did not understand how he had crystallized the issue of Watergate for the American people. It had been about the obscure meaning behind an attempt to break in to a rival party’s headquarters, and the labyrinthine effort to cover up that break-in and the related crimes.

And in one night, Nixon transformed it. Watergate — instantaneously — became a simpler issue: a president overruling the inexorable march of the law, insisting — in a way that resonated viscerally with millions who had not previously understood — that he was the law.

Not the Constitution. Not the Congress. Not the courts. Just him. Just, Mr. Bush, as you did, yesterday.

The twists and turns of Plamegate, of your precise and intricate lies that sent us into this bottomless pit of Iraq; your lies upon the lies to discredit Joe Wilson; your lies upon the lies upon the lies to throw the sand at the “referee” of prosecutor Fitzgerald‘s analogy, these are complex and often painful to follow and too much, perhaps, for the average citizen.

But when other citizens render a verdict against your man, Mr. Bush, and then you spit in the faces of those jurors and that judge and the judges who were yet to hear the appeal, the average citizen understands that, Sir.

It’s the fixed ballgame and the rigged casino and the prearranged lottery all rolled into one, and it stinks.

And they know it.

Nixon’s mistake, the last and most fatal of them, the firing of Archibald Cox, was enough to cost him the presidency. And in the end, even Richard Nixon could say he could not put this nation through an impeachment. It was far too late for it to matter then, but as the decades unfold, that single final gesture of nonpartisanship, of acknowledged responsibility not to self, not to party, not to “base,” but to country, echoes loudly into history.

Even Richard Nixon knew it was time to resign. Would that you could say that, Mr. Bush. And that you could say it for Mr. Cheney. You both crossed the Rubicon yesterday. Which one of you chose the route no longer matters. Which is the ventriloquist, and which the dummy, is irrelevant. But that you have twisted the machinery of government into nothing more than a tawdry machine of politics is the only fact that remains relevant.

It is nearly July Fourth, Mr. Bush, the commemoration of the moment we Americans decided that rather than live under a king who made up the laws, or erased them, or ignored them — or commuted the sentences of those rightly convicted under them — we would force our independence and regain our sacred freedoms.

We of this time — and our leaders in Congress, of both parties — must now live up to those standards which echo through our history. Pressure, negotiate, impeach: get you, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney, two men who are now perilous to our democracy, away from its helm.

And for you, Mr. Bush, and for Mr. Cheney, there is a lesser task. You need merely achieve a very low threshold indeed. Display just that iota of patriotism which Richard Nixon showed on August 9th, 1974.

Resign.

And give us someone — anyone — about whom all of us might yet be able to quote John Wayne, and say, “I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.”

Now, as it turns out, Sandy Koufax, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Hall of Famer, is the subject of the only recent best-selling baseball biography written by a woman (Jane Leavy’s “Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy”). It also turns out that Koufax has quit as a special instructor for the Dodgers because the team is also owned by the News Corp.

The Post’s blind item ran Dec. 19, but it was virtually unknown among legitimate sports media outlets until news leaked out about Koufax’s resignation. And Koufax’s resignation — after 48 years as a Dodgers pitcher, minor league coach, spring instructor and unofficial pitching guru — apparently took place over a month ago. Yet it was not discovered until this week, when sportswriters arriving from Los Angeles for the Dodgers’ annual spring training in Vero Beach, Fla., asked where the Hall of Famer was. The team revealed that Koufax told Dodgers senior vice president Derrick Hall that “it does not make sense for me to promote any” of Murdoch’s companies, and that he would “feel foolish to be associated with or promote one entity if it helps another,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Koufax has long been one of sports’ truest enigmas. After two years as a little-used “bonus baby” with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and four more as an often brilliant, often lost starting pitcher with the team, he turned, seemingly overnight, into the most dominant left-hander baseball has ever seen. He broke all extant strikeout records, threw a no-hitter every year from 1962 through 1965, and in the last six seasons of his career won 111 games and lost only 34. His retirement at the age of 31 — as abrupt as his transformation into an unhittable pitcher — only added to the legend.

The childhood friend of an extraordinary array of Brooklyn characters running the gamut from Larry King to current New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon, Koufax was married twice, the most recent union ending in divorce about five years ago. For her part, author Leavy denies both the Post’s insinuations about the blackmail and Koufax’s sexuality. In fact, what’s interesting is that so far, Koufax’s sexuality is the McGuffin in this story. The not-so-blind Post item may as well have been about his actually having been a gentile all these years (Koufax was an observant Jew who refused to pitch on Yom Kippur). The point is the News Corp.’s journalistic and ethical malfeasance, and this time around, reporters seem to get that.

It is the New York Post, of course, that published another piece of homophobic baseball gossip last spring that led the New York Mets’ Mike Piazza to feel he had to publicly announce he was not gay. Besides the Post, the News Corp. also owns Fox Television, Fox News Channel, and other companies that produce products structurally similar to “news.”

And in what is perhaps the most subtle twist of this serrated knife, the News Corp. also owns HarperCollins — the company that published the biography about Koufax in the first place.

Read the Post’s December item about the “Hall of Fame baseball hero,” then, in that context. Koufax, the Post wrote, “cooperated with a best-selling biography only because the author promised to keep it secret that he is gay. The author kept her word, but big mouths at the publishing house can’t keep from flapping.” So here’s how it worked: The same corporation that published the rumor is actually the source of the rumor. It also profited from the alleged blackmail and employed the victim.

Their book. Their tabloid. Their team. Their scandal. It is a spectacular example of synergy, working at its most efficient (when all moral, ethical and professional standards have been eliminated from the process and thus cannot gum up the works).

Finally, though, on Friday, after the news of Koufax’s principled resignation made national headlines, the News Corp. apologized — sort of. Here’s the press release.

The following will run on Page Six in tomorrow’s New York Post:

A two-sentence blind item we ran here on Dec. 19 about a “Hall of Fame baseball hero” has sparked a series of unfortunate consequences for which we are very sorry. The item said the sports hero “cooperated with a best-selling biography only because the author promised to keep secret that he is gay.” Two weeks later, the Daily News’ Michael Gross, after finding “Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy” by Jane Leavy on the bestseller list, named Koufax as the player and ran a photo of him. Koufax himself, an intensely private man, was deeply offended by our item. The author has denied making any deal with Koufax and called our item “erroneous.” We apologize to both Koufax and Leavy for getting it wrong.

Note that even the supposed “apology” tries to blame the scandal on a competitor at the Daily News. That’s typical. I worked for News Corp. — for its Fox network and one of its cable sewers, Fox Sports Net, for three years. They were swine. Many companies are swine. But the Koufax episode is something extraordinary. This is the triangulation of swine — three bullies beating up one kid called decency.

Early in 2001, as a show of good faith with the company, I signed a contract with the News Corp.’s publishers, HarperCollins, to write a sports book. Its production was tabled after the terrorist attacks. Now I will not write the book. I’m sending the money back. My reasons are ethical and practical.

Practical?

Though the advance was only five figures, I think the News Corp. can use the dough. It might let Rupert Murdoch and his employees buy their souls back.

The night after the awards, David Letterman’s “Top Ten List” consisted of “Top Ten Things Best Supporting Actor Jim Broadbent Did Today.” The digs, felt perhaps a little more keenly than usual that night, included:

EBay and its rivals have brought not just the collections, but also the collectors, out of the closet. Thirty years ago I was one of literally half a dozen kids involved in the definitely grimy card-collecting game. Devotees met almost in secret until the advent of twice-annual “conventions” in the basement of a New York union hall beginning in 1973. The scene — table after table stacked with old cards, books, photos and occasionally equipment; buyers and sellers, nearly all of them wizened adults, spending literally tens of dollars on this junk — never failed to bring out gawkers. At least one local television news crew attended each of the first eight or nine shows, at which point the novelty, and the suspicion that we were all nuts, began to fade.

The extraordinary appreciation of the value of sports stuff no doubt hastened the newfound respectability of collecting anything and everything. Only within the last decade or so — more or less since the Jackie Onassis auction — have the quirkier fields burst into prominence. This transmogrification almost parallels the journey of the Montgomery, Ala., city bus that Rosa Parks boarded in 1955 on her way to history. The vehicle remained in service for a time, then sat unused in a garage, and was finally junked. Last year, a company called MastroNet, which runs Web and phone sports and “Americana” auctions almost monthly, sold the bus — complete with its “Cleveland Ave.” destination sign — for a mind-boggling $492,000.

The political auction has taken off, too, to the point that one almost expects to see influence being sold not in smoke-filled rooms, but being offered, with a money-back guarantee, on the Web. Two unused tickets to the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson in 1868 have been sold in the last six weeks alone. The first fetched nearly $5,000. A campaign pin from the woefully underfunded 1920 Democratic presidential ticket of James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt sold for $27,000. Over the years, a series of copies of the note by which Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon — authentically signed by Ford for an undisclosed fee — have been sold for several thousand apiece. One of the actual Broward County, Fla., voting machines that helped make the 2000 election linger so long in everyone’s consciousness has been put up for bid. “This fascinating item,” the catalog breathlessly reads, “is the perfect keepsake from the ‘electile dysfunction’ of 2000, ideal as a conversation piece …”

And, of course, there’s Abraham Lincoln’s hair.

Strands of the martyred president’s mane have appeared in several auctions, accompanied by labyrinthine explanations as to their legitimacy, and muddy photocopies of 19th century newspapers explaining the veritable hedge-clipping that must have gone on in the sad little boardinghouse across from Ford’s Theatre the night Lincoln died. The oddest part of this is not the ghoulishness it seems to represent (saving the hair of a loved one or prominent figure was, 150 years ago, considered a compliment to the manufacturer), but that there is every reason to believe that it really is Abe’s hair. Somewhere deep inside each bidder — and I confess to having been one of them — is one simple thought: cloning.

More prosaically, a hunka-hunka Elvis Presley’s hair sold at auction last month. The explanation of provenance was even more complicated than the ones accompanying Lincoln’s locks. The 3-inch-wide hairball had been shorn by the King’s own barber, then turned over to one of the earliest of the Elvis disciples, who had for a time in the ’70s operated a souvenir shop across the street from Graceland. This was what was left of his stock, vacuum-sealed in an apothecary jar and looking very much like all that was left of a victim of the proverbial explosion at the goiter clinic. Somebody paid $115,000 for it. Again, if cloning wasn’t the idea, what was? Very small toupees for balding Elvis impersonators? Celebrity merkins?

It’s odd, considering that sports memorabilia was the seminal point for all this buying and selling, that when his former girlfriend Greer Johnson attempted to auction off locks of Mickey Mantle’s hair, only then did somebody step in. The Mantle family, their lawyers straining at the leash, convinced Ms. Johnson and the auction house to withdraw the item on a pretext long since seemingly eliminated from the equation: good taste.

The mainstream auction houses have gotten into the act. Christie’s sold 312 lots of NASA and Soviet Space Program items in 1999, much of them obtained directly from the astronauts or their families, ranging from the infamous dimes Gus Grissom sneaked onboard Mercury 4, to the NASA patch from Jim Irwin’s suit from Apollo 15, complete with a few smudges that just happened to be moon dust. Next month, Sotheby’s offers a series of Harry Potter lots, including a 93-word preview of the next book by author J.K. Rowling. Bidding between Potter aficionados and British tabloids is expected to goose the price past $10,000. And last month, Butterfield’s of San Francisco sold $250,000 worth of the cream of the knickknacks of the late Eppie Lederer, including an IBM Selectric typewriter on which she wrote her advice columns, for $400. A second Landers-used model went for $200 to Seattle Stranger editor Dan Savage who also writes — what else? — an advice column.

Still, there are not enough marquee items to explain a craze, nor feed its participants’ hunger. There must be a market for tapes of long-forgotten TV series like “Name of the Game,” or a toothpick found in the jacket of baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver, or gum discarded by various athletes, to keep all this going.

And to become part of American culture, the auction process must become an arena for protest. Just this week, the members of the varsity swimming teams at Dartmouth were informed that their programs would be eliminated after this season as part of a budgetary cutback at the Ivy League school. How did they lash back, and seek to publicize the lashing? They posted themselves on eBay – offering a corporate sponsorship and just happening to mention how odd it seemed that an institution of higher learning with an endowment of about two billion dollars needed to save 0.02 percent of that by dropping swimming. A minimum bid of $211,000 (and it hasnt happened yet) would get you all the Dartmouth swimmers you could ever want – just add water.

And the final evidence of the growing auction mania is the appearance of the hoards. When one toothpick shows up, it’s a collector’s item. When a thousand do, it’s a seller’s market. The next MastroNet auction features a collection of 103 different canceled checks made out by baseball immortal Ty Cobb, and given a minimum bid of $20,000. That there was a Ty Cobb collector, or investor, who wanted, or needed, to have 103 checks in the hand of baseball’s dark prince, should be no surprise.

That another lot in the same auction offers a collection of 100 different canceled checks made out by Sal Maglie — best remembered, if at all, for being the losing pitcher in the Don Larsen perfect game in the 1956 World Series — should testify to just how far the auction madness has really gone.

This story has been corrected.

This began to become evident weeks ago when the deputy mayor of Indianapolis attacked Chris Mortensen, one of my reportorial role models. I once watched Mort protect a source who not only publicly denied what he’d told Mort in private but also questioned his ethics. Just this month, Mort went on the air and criticized the thoroughness of his own reporting on a story. Mortensen is the gold standard, and this hack politician slashed him and said ESPN was “a sports channel first and a news organization fifth.” I was amazed to find my hackles rising and myself rushing to defend my old employers on my radio sportscast.

It all became remarkably clear after that. This isn’t about my skeletal freakiness, or Chris Mortensen, or even, particularly, the primary area of wounded feelings for my former bosses and colleagues, Mike Freeman’s book about the network. This isn’t even about specific events or people, although nearly everybody at ESPN merits an apology from me, and I give it willingly and with great sadness, but with some hope that it will explain if not erase my actions, and might even be of some inspiration to any who might be afflicted in the same curious way I’ve come to learn I am.

This is about not knowing why you do things — literally, not knowing for years and years — and then suddenly beginning to scratch the surface of understanding. That earlier imagery about the gauzy haze is almost factually precise: It feels as if I’ve been coming out of a huge fog bank.

Enough preamble. After five and a half years there, I left ESPN at the end of June 1997. My decision inspired a lot of head-scratching, everything from graffiti on a wall in a syndicated comic strip, to shouts of “traitor” from a viewer at a World Series game. There have been a lot of explanations conjectured, by myself and others, but heretofore I have never definitively stated why I left — in large part because until recently, I didn’t really know. In point of fact, I couldn’t handle the pressure of working in daily long-form television, and what was worse, I didn’t know I couldn’t handle it.

Not the broadcasts themselves, mind you — I’ve rarely had as much fun in life as I used to during those hours on the air with Dan Patrick. I’m talking about an inability to digest all that led up to those hours, about which I had no clue at all. And unless somebody at ESPN had the insight to look for a big-picture pattern, nobody else had any clue at all. I think some executives, most notably John Walsh, had a sense that something was wrong. But whatever any of them said about “insecurity” or “perfectionism,” I know I just took it as an attack and stiffened my extra-long spine.

On top of everything else about it that can destabilize the soul, television is fraught with a million commonplace things that can go wrong. A surprisingly large number of things can go wrong even when everybody involved is giving their all. It’s the nature of a medium so complex it would’ve made Rube Goldberg blanch.

But I didn’t see it that way.

I have lived much of my life assuming much of the responsibility around me and developing a dread of being blamed for things going wrong. Moreover, deep down inside I’ve always believed that everybody around me was qualified and competent, and I wasn’t, and that some day I’d be found out. If you think that way, when somebody messes up, you can’t imagine that it just “happened.” Since they’re so much better than you are, how could they not complete a task successfully? They have to be not trying hard enough — and when they don’t try and the show goes to hell, who gets blamed? You do.

In other words, you start thinking like George Steinbrenner, circa 1977.

Mix that in to the very public nature of the field, and especially the high-profile nature of a job like hosting “SportsCenter,” and you have a combustible combination.

The results can probably be summarized by this conversation I recall from the weeks after the infamous launch of ESPN2 in 1993. After three hours of live shots failing, news breaking, entire 20-minute segments of the show being swapped during commercial breaks, tapes physically falling apart, and production assistants wiping out as they ran through the snow to try to get us information, the producers, my co-host Suzy Kolber and I somehow managed to cover Michael Jordan’s first retirement professionally and entertainingly.

Afterwards, the coordinating producer, Norby Williamson, greeted us like the survivors of a World War I foxhole at Ypres. “Great job. Great show,” he said.

“The hell it was,” I said.

Wrong answer.

You suspend — no, let’s be exact about this, I suspended — the whole human part of the equation. It never occurred to me that most of the problems were the result of mere events. Even the chaos that surrounded the entire launch of the experimental show “SportsNight” was merely the inevitable result of the fact that it was experimental.

And it never, ever occurred to me that if it failed, I wouldn’t be found out, fired, banished, finished.

The oddest thing about all this, is that even when I left — and in six weeks I will have been gone longer than I was there — executives like Walsh and Howard Katz underscored that I was welcome to return at some distant future date, despite all the Sturm und Drang. And, man, I was usually producing both the Sturm and the Drang. Months later, Katz even approached me about contributing to ESPN Classic, shortly after the company had bought that network.

Of course, I could not know that the major bone of contention, the veritable sixth lumbar vertebra of contention, still awaited: Freeman’s book. I should herein point out that none of this should reflect on Mike: He did an exhaustively thorough job, and more to this point, he didn’t misquote me, not once, nor did he use anything I said out of context. Nor did he cajole or sweet-talk me into discussing topics I didn’t want to discuss. Also, this isn’t some kind of loudspeaker confession from George Orwell’s “1984.” I’m not going to renounce most of my criticisms of the place. I did not consort with Goldstein. I don’t think I was wrong on the issues — I think my methodology was wrong. Outstandingly wrong.

My answers to Freeman constituted the ultimate act of somebody who lived in terror of being blamed. After I left for NBC in 1997, I was unprepared for a question I would literally hear daily — on the street, at events, even on the air on MSNBC: “Why’d you leave ‘SportsCenter’?” If you make a decision in your life, even one as eminently logical and self-improving as “Why’d you start washing your hair every day?” and you start getting questioned hourly about it, you’re going to start second-guessing yourself. I eventually got up to about my millionth guess.

So. The logic was impeccable. To answer that question, I couldn’t take the blame (responsibility) for the disaster (career growth) about which I was being persecuted (sympathetically asked about). Why did I leave “SportsCenter”? Obviously, because it was a medieval torture chamber (fairly typical television workplace providing a high level of ego gratification and creative freedom).

There’s a lot in Freeman’s book that I regret. I won’t inundate you with details, but a few require specificity. Referring to ESPN’s executives, I told Freeman that “other than Steve Anderson, I don’t think any of them are any good.” Well, that was ridiculous then and it is ridiculous now. Without even judging how good they were, just to keep a monolith like ESPN on the air every day requires as many good executives as they have at NORAD.

As suggested earlier, I don’t regret my stances on the work environment there, but to say that some actions management took were merely “covering their ass legally” was to subtract the humanity from the equation. It never dawned on me that some of these guys had been thrown in at the deep end of the pool, or would have to expose, prosecute and fire friends and colleagues who themselves had done things that until a decade before had been standard operating procedure at every corporation in America.

I now read with horror of my ESPN2 co-host, Ms. Kolber, sequestering herself in the women’s bathroom and weeping over how I treated her. She told Freeman that as things deteriorated, I wouldn’t talk to her. She’s wrong: I couldn’t talk to her. I pumped up some small-scale complaints into a scenario in which she was at fault for everything ESPN2 hadn’t become. I wasn’t completely obtuse back then, and if anything would have cut through my neuroses, it would’ve been a colleague’s tears. If I had known, I think I could’ve jumped over the fence I’d built around myself and said what the inner guy always knew: No TV show is worth crying over. Suzy: I’m sorry.

There are lots of little gratuitous shots in there that also reflect an insensibility to parts of reality. I get queasy at all of them, but one stands out as representative. Freeman accurately quotes me as complaining about how a labor-intensive participatory field piece I did in 1996 about what the first-base coach does and says during a game, got little airtime. A year later, ESPN ran a similar piece in which the coaches of the Anaheim Angels wore microphones. I complained to the relevant coordinating producer, Jeff Schneider, and he replied that the new ESPN-Disney-Angels connection explained why one piece ran and the other didn’t. It is almost certain that Schneider was joking, or tweaking me, or, most probably, protecting me from a fact I could never have admitted to myself or have survived hearing from him or anybody else: My coaching piece just wasn’t that good.

Several ESPN folks suggested to Freeman that I was trying deliberately to violate the rules — appearing on other networks and writing for publications without notifying them just to tweak management. That was almost right on the money. But it wasn’t as simple as merely trying to annoy ESPN or John Walsh or whoever else. It was me trying to give myself an excuse to get out from under the pressure of working in an environment of my own creation in which I daily expected the blame ax to fall. It was prepackaged sour grapes.

Oddly, I did figure some of this out then, which is why, even after we’d finalized my departure I went back and proposed to them that I do one show a week. That really was instinct cutting through all of these neuroses. That was, should’ve been, and remains my ideal TV schedule: one or two days a week, and the other five or six to remember that I’m not going to be blamed for everything by anybody — even myself.

So, I’m sorry. It should have been done differently. It wasn’t. Then again, I’m only finding out now about that extra vertebra and the extra steps I have to take to learn how to be, well, flexible.