Mike Lupica's Got A Busy Day Ahead of Him
Call him what you’d like: America’s preeminent sportswriter, beloved children’s author, star of ESPN’s “The Sports Reporters.” Mike Lupica wears many hats, all of them well. But Imus will stick with calling his best pal other names, like “Shrimpboat” and “Frodo.”
“That’s like the birthday greeting you gave me the other day,” said Lupica, who just turned 50-something but looks about 12. “What a magical beginning to my day that was.”
Before Imus got to the real nut of this interview, he and Lupie talked shop; namely, last night’s NBA playoff game between the Boston Celtics and the Cleveland Cavaliers.
“What an odd game,” was Lupica’s keen observation. Though it looked like the Cavs, led by LeBron James, were poised to make a comeback, they ultimately went down, were eliminated from the palayoffs.
“So now the silly season begins,” said Lupica, referring to the speculation about where LeBron James will go when he becomes a free agent in July. “Very few athletes at his age, with what they’ve accomplished so far, ever become free agents.”
In fact, Lupie pointed out that LeBron, who many New Yorkers believe is headed this way, is the same exact age Babe Ruth was when he was traded from the Red Sox to the Yankees in 1920.
The I-Man’s reply: “I’ll be darned.”
More important than where LeBron winds up is where Imus’s stage manager Nat winds up. After being blown off by “that recovering drug addict” Keith Hernandez at a spring training game last year, Imus feels Nat deserves some retribution from the Mets organization.
“I think we gotta set the bar higher for Nat than firing those t-shirts into the stands,” said Lupica, who is friends with Mets owner Jeff Wilpon and therefore charged with the task of finding something for Nat to do.
Lupica promised there’d be closure on this issue by the end of the day, once Wilpon, as Imus put it “can tear himself away from his nine-hour lunches.”
In conclusion, Lupica made one final sports-related point about former New York Giant Lawrence Taylor, who was accused of hiring an underage hooker and has now adopted the defense that no intercourse took place. Except for between Taylor and, well…Taylor.
Accurately termed “onanism” by wordsmith Charles McCord, Lupica observed, “You don’t even want to get to a point in your life where that’s your get out of jail free card.”
When silence came on the other end of the line, Lupica (and likely much of the audience) assumed the inevitable had happened. But no, not this time. Though even Imus owed there will be a day, probably not in the too distant future, “where I just keel over.”
And chances are, he’ll be on the phone with Lupie when that happens.
-Julie Kanfer
Mike Lupica 
Reader Comments (1)
Dear Mr Lupica:
You gotta bite the bullet...hire Bo D...to find the photos Imus is holding over your head.
Then when he ask's for Met favours you can tell him to GET LOST cowboy