FrancesaCon II: Mike Francesa Has A Posse
By Mike Cardillo
“I can’t believe this many people devoted their Saturday to Mike Francesa. I love it.” — FrancesaCon II attendee, looking at the sold-out marquee above Irving Plaza circa noon Saturday
“I’ve been doing this a long time. This is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. You’re all nuts … this is a thousand people with nothing better to do.” — Mike Francesa on the stage inside Iriving Plaza about two and half hours later.
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For reasons that defy most human strains of logic, Mike Francesa — the longtime WFAN radio afternoon host, the man who “invented” radio row at the Super Bowl, the man who came up in Bill Parcells “system,” the man who once laid claim to three “No. 1” shows, the man who can “mush” anything from football games to blizzards with a simple proclamation — is an unlikely social media star and the namesake of a now-yearly convention held in his his honor. A thousand or so souls attended FrancesaCon II Saturday afternoon at Irving Plaza in New York to pay homage to the Sports Pope and kiss the ring, so to speak. The big man himself even graced his flock with his papal presence, but we’ll get to that.
Francesa, as always, remains an acquired taste and polarizing figure. Either you get it or you don’t — there’s little middle ground. It probably helps, too, if you live in the Tri-State area or happen to be someone who works for a sports blog since his show’s running time (1 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., five days per week) falls right into the time many editors are looking for fresh content, so long as it’s actually simulcast by Fox Sports 1 that day. Francesa remains one of the most unlikely benefactors of social media, blogs, YouTube, Vines, etc.
These continually changing new media platforms are a reason the 60-year-old Mickey Mantle fan remains relevant to a younger generation. The irony here is that throughout his existence, Francesa continually laments changes in technology. Years ago, when Twitter was first gaining traction, circa 2008-09, he asked one of his then-producers if it was like, “textin’ a message.” Later he groused why anyone would want to read what a pro athlete — or Joe SixPack — ate for lunch?
Call it timing, but Francesa’s rise to unlikely social media star coincided with his break-up with longtime partner, Chris “Mad Dog” Russo. The duo — often cited as the pioneers of modern sports talk — went their separate ways in the summer of 2008. There are certainly plenty of clips on YouTube of the pair, notably this clip from March 2008 where the Sports Pope declared, in no uncertain terms, how much he liked then-Tigers third baseman Brandon Inge.
That clip explains why someone wisely wore an Inge shirsey to Irving Plaza Saturday. Still, at that point, Francesa and Dog remained an inside joke — mostly — for denizens of themikefrancesa.com — a message board where fans of the show would meet in the pre-Twitter days and chronicle the show. Before the split, Francesa played a stern-faced, know-it-all provocateur to Russo’s wild, fan-like cackling. May 27, 2009–with “Joba-Mania” still fresh in the minds of New Yorkers, to borrow from the intro to GZA’s Liquid Swords–was the (day) everything changed.
A caller, Alex from Bedminster, asked about Joba Chamberlain’s role as a starter or a reliever. Poor Alex had the temerity to mention Andy Pettitte, one of Francesa’s all-time favorite Yankees. The result lives on in YouTube infamy:
If you’ve never seen it, or if you have a thousand times, rewatch it. A normal, adult human being — let alone sports radio talk show host — shouldn’t get this mad or angry over something so trivial as Joba Chamberlain’s starter/reliever splits. The way Francesa’s anger slowly bubbles and then finally erupts at the mention of Andy Pettitte either makes you laugh or it doesn’t.
Call it the moment — forget about the wildly remembered incident when he fell asleep on-air talking to Sweeny Murti in 2012– when for many Francesa forever morphed from man to meme. A man who’d five years later have a convention named in his honor where fans gathered to drink Diet Cokes and wear slicked-back graying wigs to pay homage to the Sports Pope. The moment that helped spur on the creation of a fake Twitter account in his name with 34.7K followers — many prominent media members included. The moment an entire Francesa language where a simple term like “the NFL” becomes “Deanna Fell” came into being, and gave us the birth of the so-called “Mongo Nation.” The moment that resulted in a much larger collection of people across America who collectively wonder “why do I care a single iota about a pompous New York radio host?”
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Like him, hate him, ignore him … whatever your opinion of Francesa you have to credit the man’s longevity. Francesa’s been a fixture at WFAN since 1987 and as he’ll point out, he’s been No. 1 a long time. Forget about radio ratings for a second. Who else in the media does what he does, a five and a half hour talk radio show, without a co-host for five days a week along with a Sunday morning NFL show during the season? To think how many hours Francesa’s spoken into a microphone is staggering. By conservative estimates — factoring in his breaks during the summer — Francesa does at least 1,200 hours of live radio a year. Before the rise of YouTube and the rest of the Internet, most of these moments were in one ear, out the other. Forgotten as intended, since talk radio — like live television — is a temporary medium.
Francesa demonstrates how there is still something to be said for familiarity, a familiarity that prompted one person to show up at the Con dressed up as the “Diet Coke Pope” with a staff made from 12 bottles of Diet Coke — sans label — melted together. DC, naturally, is Francesa’s drink of choice. (There were too many people dressed up with round glasses, gray wig, stethoscope headphones and puffy windbreakers — the de facto Francesa costume — to single anyone out.)
Generations of sports fans in the New York area know that every day in the afternoon, Mike will be there talking sports or broadcasting the election of a new Pope in Rome. Francesa himself has addressed this on-air many times, about the relationship between a host and audience, the comfort level. For better or worse, the comfort level helped him become part of the City’s sports fabric — except for hockey (1994 Rangers notwithstanding) or soccer or anything else fringe that isn’t baseball, football, basketball, or (ugh) horse racing. How many other media types could attract a crowd of 1,000 or more to an event/convention held in their honor? Howard Stern? Oprah Winfrey? Maybe Bill Simmons? It’s a short list that Francesa sits on.
As one attendee remarked, the FrancesaCon certainly had a Twilight Zone quality to it, especially when there’s a cover band on stage belting out the “Mike’s On” radio theme song — a god-awful rock jingle that would probably drive most humans insane if forced to listen to it more than a dozen times. The irony, of course, is the song lyrics boldly proclaim that Mike will “get you the sports any way that he can,” when in actuality there is only one way: Mike’s way.
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Back in 2004, the New Yorker profiled Francesa and Russo in a piece fittingly titled “The Boys” by Nick Paumgarten. It’s worth excerpting one portion to describe Francesa, as it says a lot about what makes him tick:
You don’t sit in the big chair for parts of four decades without that unwavering sense of self-image and belief, apparently.
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No werries worries, Francesa did not disappoint. He could have easily walked up onto the stage, waved a white glove, and gone on his merry way. Instead Francesa was at his best — zinging Mike and the Mad Dog impersonators Bill Buchanan (aka Bizaro Zaun) and Mike Benevento, basically telling the crowd, with love, that they were a bunch of weirdos for coming instead of staying home to watch college basketball. In old ECW-type fashion, the crowd also voiced their displeasure about Fox Sports and Michael Kay, as you can see in the video below.
The shot at Kay — “nobody cares about him” — certainly stands out and makes for blog fodder, but the surprising thing about the FrancesaCon was how gracious Mike was among the fans after he left the stage. Instead of quickly handwaving the crowd, which his papal on-air persona would lead you to believe, he stuck around for pictures posing with whomever wanted one and shaking hands for close to two hours — for what it’s worth Francesa’s always been helpful toward good causes, and the FrancesaCon raised money for charity. The fans were as gleeful as a five-year-old meeting Santa for the first time. Truthfully, the often stern-faced Francesa seemed blown away by the outpouring of support and promised to bring the real Mad Dog to next year’s event.
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One of the stranger aspects of FrancesaCon, perhaps the only part that can apply to life outside the New York sports media bubble, is how much of it is driven by social media interactions. Whenever a team loses in the playoffs, the great @fkaWFANAudio starts #CityZaun where Francesa fans suppose he worked in, for a recent example, Green Bay. It’s funny. The usual fans chime in, many of whom attended the Con Saturday, so there were name tags set up for people to list their Twitter handle.
Make no mistake, it is certainly strange to walk by a person and introduce yourself as hey, “I’m @whateveryouTwitternameis” or whatever. But that’s a part of modern life that isn’t going away. We all find connections, like-minded people and strangers we’ve never met yet consider friends via the Internet. Given the 24/7/365 nature of connected web life, often we interact with people we never have or will never meet directly in real life more than our families. The rise of Francesa as social media currency wouldn’t have happened if not for strangers getting together on a message board years ago to dissect why the host once thought Red Sox scrub reliever Hunter Jones could become the next Mariano Rivera.
The FrancesaCon allowed many attendees to put an actual human face to an anonymous, digital avatar. That’s going to apply to our lives more and more going forward, saying nothing of Francesa. Thanks to the web, many people have become more tribalized, more focused on their little niches, or living inside their little bubble. In a lot of ways, Mike Francesa (the meme not the actual human) is just that: a little something people took a rabid interest in, an inside joke that developed into a little bit more, if only as an outlet to make homemade t-shirts and have a laugh.
Of course Francesa shuns social media to the point he made threats toward the people running the @MikeFrancesaNY account for using his name. Little did he know that those accounts come mostly from the heart. To appreciate the inside joke, the daily gift that keeps on giving that is Mike Francesa you have to laugh with the joke, laugh at all the idiot trade proposals, laugh at all the times Mike nearly has an aneurysm over something so minor as a starter vs a relief pitcher, or when his microphone isn’t working properly.
If you spent any time inside a major city — or elsewhere — in the late 20th Century there’s a decent chance you ran into a little sticker, likely while waiting at a crosswalk that told you “Andre the Giant Has A Posse.” Maybe a few stickers of street artist Shepard Fairey’s creation exist, or haven’t been covered up. Perhaps, given time, in the future we’ll start to see stickers in a similar vein that read, “Mike Francesa Has a Posse” with the New York radio icon’s White Cliffs of Dover teeth glaring back at you instead of the grim, imposing mug of the late André René Roussimoff.
Indeed, Mike Francesa has himself a posse. On Saturday the man known as the Sports Pope got to see the people behind behind the Twitter handles and the prank calls, too. Given the blindingly white smile affixed to his face all afternoon, it appears he liked what he saw.
Next year he better bring along the Mink Man, too.