I was a bit stunned watching the recent Donald Trump Madison Square Garden rally when Sid Rosenberg took the stage and proceeded to ravage Hillary Clinton. Having a fake tan in common with his presidential nominee, he continued the chain of embarrassment that sullied the so-called “World’s Most Famous Arena” that night. Much like the night William Monahan accepted the Oscar for best adapted screenplay for The Departed it sent me on a New York Press nostalgia trip.
Rosenberg’s stunning appearance harkened me back the media landscape of the mid-early-2000s and Manhattan was saying goodbye to print weeklies when I arrived at the former New York Press offices to check in on a sports weekly tabloid they’d launched called New York Sports Express. Matt Taibbi, a rising investigative journalist type obsessed with NFL football, was the editor of this new publication. He could see this wasn’t his future, so he kind of called me in to help out and eventually hand over the reins.
At the time I’s just been dismissed from the nascent College Sports Network over at Chelsea market, so the timing was right. After a few hangouts on 6th Ave., Matt went on to slay vampire squid giants and left me at the helm of what would become a very alternative-sports weekly that would take on many of the traits of my baseball/punk fanzine Murtaugh which raged in the early-1990s. I called in a bunch of fanzine buddies as regular freelancers who kind of got paid to check in with offbeat stuff for New York Sports Express. But there were a few regular writers already ensconced and one of them was the annoying FM radio personality Sid Rosenberg. I think he knew one of the dodgy owners and they thought he had sports cred and therefore gave him a weekly outlet. His copy arrived late in all caps, and it was horrible pablum much like his radio banter. After two weeks as editor, I decided my readers didn’t need to hear crappy descriptions of Sid dancing to “Rosalita” at Springsteen’s show in the upper deck aisle at Giants Stadium.
His copy was bro-heavy NFL crap with the usual buzz words and FM radio linguistics designed for channel-changing bravado. It didn’t translate to print, and I hated it and couldn’t wait to get rid of it.
I’d never fired anyone before, so I had no Trump creds. But freeing up space in the sports weekly by dismissing Rosenberg was an easy task. I don’t recall the exact transaction, but he seemed relieved not to have to come up with 900 words a week to entertain Manhattan sports fans picking up the free weekly.
I think I replaced him at the time with coverage of the ignored Major League Soccer New York/New Jersey MetroStars, written by New Jersey native and now bigwig at Oxfam Bob Ferguson. I felt good about that as soccer began a surge in NYC. As I reread Sid’s columns in previous issues of the paper, I began to break out in hives. The Sports Express owners asked me about his absence in the paper a few weeks later, and I told them he didn’t fit in with my plans and his copy was late, and crap, etc. They didn’t object. How he ended up as a speaker at the Trump MSG vomitorium is beyond me. A blue light special K-Mart star amongst Walmart professionals?
In his classic malaprop style, Rosenberg called Hillary Clinton a “bastard” and a “son of a bitch” within the same sentence. His schtick with Don Imus and the NYC FM radio beyond has always had an awkward right-wing slant with bad timing and slightly off the cuff and degenerate. I guarantee there were rednecks in Mansfield, Ohio, watching the Trump rally and turning to each other during Rosenberg’s obscure and pathetic 10 minutes on stage and asking, “Who is the hell is this Jew?”
Rosenberg is the reverse-Midas of wit. He predictably opted for the necktie-less shirt and blazer look for his appearance at the Garden and went for the jugular on the “illegal immigrants get everything they want” angle with plenty of obscenities thrown in, because, you know, he’s a pissed-off white guy from Brooklyn. He was down pretty low on the warm-up list, as he should’ve been.
It was a pleasure to read his vapid copy and then decide it should no longer be exposed to readers of the publication I was suddenly in charge of. It was one of the easiest decisions of my life in terms of journalism and creative dialogue.
Here’s what Sid told Barrett Media prior to his suck-up appearance for Trump at MSG a few days ago: “I mean, come on, I’m a Brooklyn kid going to the place where I’ve gone a million times to see Mark Messier and Patrick Ewing, and I’m going to speak before Donald Trump? This is above and beyond. It’s surreal, it’s magic, it’s a great ride, and it’s a lot of fun. It’s a very nerve-wracking couple of weeks coming up, I can tell you that, but certainly, yes, it’s been fun.”
Glad Sid’s having fun. But his white sports privilege is showing, apparently. Hopefully, Messier and Ewing, taking a page from my own playbook, would tell this douche to go fuck himself.