YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Wilbon

lines on the record: 74
first: 2023-06-01
most recent: 2023-06-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Summer is 79. Yeah, all I wanted to do, David, I delivered. I was a paper boy growing up. I don't know how many people listening to us will know what that means anymore”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He and the great Sam Lacey, among others, but those, you know, I got Sam Lacey worked and lived in Washington, D.C. So I got to know Sam Lacey and being his company as an adult and as a writer for the Washington Post over decades, he and Wendell Smith. They would be in a car driving from somewhere north, and I bet that trail, if Wendell started in Chicago and picked up Sam Lacey in Washington, they drove because they had to know where they could go and where it was safe to be and where they could stop and get gas. And lay their heads if they did it on the way to spring training. And so, yes, they. Helped integrate baseball. They were very large in that branch, Ricky, as you just mentioned, leaned on them heavily for their intimate knowledge of Negro League ball players and who was going to be that right person.”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a northwestern person Know more than just to sort of idle in a role model to me now, a friend, but I grew up, it never dawned on me that I couldn't do that. Wendell Smith was doing it.”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never So people that I grew up. And then, yes, later, as I got to be a teenager and I thought I have some sort of talent for this, the two people that I grew up watching and reading and not knowing, and now I got to know one of them, or Wendell Smith and Brent Mussberger.”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I tell you what is at the time even more important, and this is going to sound weird, but this is more important. It wasn't that I thought I could do it because he did. It was that I never thought I couldn't do it.”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, Wendell Smith was both a columnist. And at the time that I was growing up, that column was in the Chicago Sun Times. And he was also on WGN. Means people come up to me and say, You're a pioneer. And I'm like, please stop. Please stop. Because there have been people. 50 years before me, 60 years before me that did this that looked like me. So I grew up, I didn't grow up with the very real reason that many people who looked like me grew up saying I didn't see anybody who looked like me. I did. I didn't know I was following him. I wasn't following him, but I grew up, he was on.”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't have a little, I don't think we have our little league program, David, without Ernie Banks, which I have. Him forward to his face. I got to do that.”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like Jack Johnson and Joe Lewis before him. You lived where we all lived, which was the south side of Chicago, which is why it's not a coincidence the South Side of Chicago produced Carol Mosley Braun and Barack Obama. There's no coincidence. Know that the south side of Chicago probably still hasn't been studied appropriately, thoroughly. I'm 65 years almost of that history in the making. I love the place, but so they lived with us. The Cubs players lived on the south side. I know where they lived. Firgie Jenkins has put us in his car and said, Get in the car, what are you doing walking around and drop guys at home? And Ernie Banks and Billy Williams said, hey, what are you doing?”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We weren't living in Northbrook. They weren't living in Evanston, but they were living on the south side with the rest of us. And so did Muhammad Ali”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the sports in America. So, my father was a White Sox fan. And what made it for a guy from Georgia would crystallize it for him was he tried to go to Jackie Robinson's first game at Wrigley Field in 1947 and was turned away. My dad was turned away and he vowed that day in whenever it was April or May or June of 1947 that he would never set foot in Wrigley Field. He would never go. And I was a cup fan because, again, Chicago was the most segregated city in America. Certainly the most segregated big city in America, a city so virulent in segregation that Martin Luther King talked about it publicly in disbelief. But my heroes lived with us, David, Ernie Banks and Billy Williams and Fergie Jenkins. They weren't living in the city.”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and I came home one day when I was, I don't know, eight or nine years old, maybe a little older. And there's a guy sitting on my front steps talking to my father. Which in segregated Chicago then was a fairly big deal. And he didn't have his leg on. Bill Vick.”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. My father was different than other fathers at the time in that he said it was okay to argue back with him. I get you a beatdown in a lot of households. The 1960s, when I grew up, my dad said, You could argue with him. You could even do it at the dinner table, but your reasoning better be backed up. So, if you were going to say that Ferguson Jenkins was as good as Bob Gibson, his favorite pitcher. You better bring it. You be told to shut up only if you had nothing to offer. And so, yeah, so we argued about sports and politics from my earliest memories of sitting at dinner with my parents and going back and forth with my father. Seven years old, eight years old.”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We got a couple of first cousins. I have a couple now cousins of the children of theirs who are producers at CNN and ABC and some smaller local stations. So this has become storytelling became as close to the family business as anything.”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was always the kid who didn't want to be at the kid table. I wanted to be listening to the people who told the great stories. And I know it comes from that. And those great storytellers and none of them, the family business for those of us in that next generation after that grandfather I told you about and in our parents, lots of journalists. Carol Simpson.”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And that's what you call it employment in the Deep South for my grandfather because I don't think he was allowed to hire. And my grandfather was the son of slave and slave owner. My grandfather was born in 1886. The generation stretch a large way for my family in a hurry. And my mother was one of 11. And you get those big families and you got great storytellers in those”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disciples and all of that I said, Don't make this sound new because that's Chicago's, that's what we've always had. We've always had 1919 when the riots broke out. They broke out because somebody hit a kid with a rock who was out in Lake Michigan. That's how it started. In Chicago was diverse enough, diverse enough. There were enough black folks in Chicago where people weren't acquiescent, where there was going to be violence in return. It's a violent place. I know I love my hometown. I know what it is and what it isn't, but it's not new.”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, so it all started on the south side. You know, David, I hear about the dangers of Chatham and West Chatham even and Inglewood. Know here's one thing I do know it makes me sad, but I know it's not new, it ain't new. The Chicago, you and I know was always violent. It was violent. Before Capone, it's always been violent. And I tell people when they're on the way there to write stories or do stories and broadcast part of the business. And I tell my friends, they say, what can you tell me? I got to go through the story in Chicago in violence. I said, whatever you do, understand that this ain't new. Was bad then. It's bad now. I grew up dodging not literally, but navigating the streets of Blackstone Rangers and.”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Market Addison. It's light years. So, yes, yes, for my parents, light years. And so, yeah, so they moved to the south side. They worked. My mother was a teacher. She went to Loyola to get her master's. She went to teachers college undergrad, what was called teachers college now Chicago State. My father did not finish high school. I don't know that they would even meet each other today. Dad didn't finish high school, but he was a hundred times smarter about math and science than his son, the journalist Help me get through it and had no academic decoration at all, you know?”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, David, it was, and I've been, you know, I've been to Washington, Georgia in my life in the car where you're just driving and I got relatives to point out where I was supposed to exit. And yeah, it's like being on the south side, growing up on the south side. I'd never been to Wrigley Field. My father refused to take us to Wrigley Field, but it was light years. From 82nd in Wentworth, where I grew up.”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chicago on the south side in Bronzeville. 47th in Langle 29 South Lang Remember my mother's address. And so my father came, he was more like 19. So he came five years later. But they both were seeking this life that millions of people like them sought. Millions. They came to Chicago and stayed there and met there. She from Tennessee, a little town called Trenton. He's from a little town in Georgia called Washington. You drive past his hometown, the exit fort on the way to Augusta National. But it's small town Southern people. Parmers, sharecroppers. You know, they grew up in Chicago was heaven.”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, God knows where else to the big cities in the north and the Midwest, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Chicago, New York too. But in my family's case, Chicago, they each took the train north seeking to get out of away from worse than the Jim Crow south. Because we're talking, my mother was 14 the same age as Emmett Till. He got on a train and she went to Chicago because one of her uncles had said she could live with him and the aunt and go to high and go to school, go to school all the time. Not drop out for planting season like my father had to.”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To Dan Ryan, you can hear the L in the middle of the night and early in the morning. You can hear it, even though it's two blocks away. And my parents are typical of parents of that. Age born during a depression. Well, just before the depression, both 1925 and 6. Typical in that they fled the south as part of black folks' great migration.”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is. It is. I like the early rounds of the playoffs just because of what you said, doubleheaders every night and sometimes doubleheaders in the second round.”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't put the pressure on me Being that good, but it is. Know it is to carry the analogy to a preposterous length. It's a religious time for basketballs. Know, in terms of getting up on the finals and when the penultimate series sort of starts, it's great. It's just great to.”
2023-06-01 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 536 — Michael Wilbon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source