I didn’t grow up in New York, so I couldn’t hear them Mike and the crazy dog. My most vivid memories of Chris “Mad Dog” Russo are of him working the lunch shift at a restaurant and watching his lips open and close at 3x speed on a muted bar TV playing MLB Network high heat without sound. By this time in the afternoon I was probably more concerned with whether it would be worth working through my break on a double or napping upstairs in one of the party rooms.
Then Russo showed up First take this year, and New York, I have to admit, if this is your sports talk radio, you’re doing better than everyone else. Russo now sits across from Stephen A. Smith every Wednesday at 10 a.m. EST, spewing hot takes with such anger it almost once was threw him out of his seat and he went on anyway. The man is a champion.
Watching him and Stephen A. go back and forth is like a flyweight title fight. They only exchange punches for 12 rounds. No pain felt, no reason to retreat, they hit until the bell rings, spit coffee into the bucket during the commercial break and get it right back.
This Wednesday, however, a new challenger entered the fray. Former NBA veteran and former punchable face of Duke champion JJ Redick (it’s clearly Gayson Allen now). on the set. He allows it to fly himself when it’s on the program, and he doesn’t swing wildly like these two legends of the hot-take game. Redick is patient. He seesaws and weaves and actually tries to set up the big animals.
He stung Russo early on when they were talking about Chris Paul. They discussed his poor performance in the semifinals series that the Los Angeles Clippers lost to the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2014. Russo kept ranting about a few missed free throws when Redick countered him with an “I was on the team” and informed him the mistakes were two turnovers and a foul. Russo would press the free throws again and was denied.
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Did he waver, hell no. He transitioned like a jump cut into a bad Paul game in last year’s NBA Finals. Was it the right game, no, it was Game 3, not Game 5. Did Paul score five points, no, he scored 10 and shot 38.5 percent from the field. Still, Redick couldn’t pull this off in a jiffy because Russo is right and won’t let up.
Redick said if the Suns win the title this year, Paul is in the running for best point guard of all time. Russo scoffed at such a ridiculous statement, but that wasn’t the best part. He immediately stopped Redick with a “he’s not Bob Cousy”.
Young Redick was stunned, I tell you. He actually turned his head in disgust, slammed his hand on the desk and blurted out, “Bob Cousy couldn’t dribble with his left hand.” Now the fight was on. “Bob Cousy changed the game.” “There were only eight teams in the NBA and two rounds when Cousy played.”
The back-and-forth continued as Russo scored a good hit, which startled Redick a little when he mentioned Cousy was the first All-NBA team when Oscar Robertson and Jerry West were playing. Redick had to pull himself together and couldn’t even fend off Russo’s ridiculous question about whether Paul ever made it to the first-team All-NBA. After pulling himself together, Redick attempted to come back with the hammer Cousy never shot 40 percent off the field in a season. It’s very true, Russo had to admit it, but then he slipped in, “He also had 29 assists in an NBA game.” All the dazed Redick replied was, “Oh, back when he got plumbers and firefighters was guarded.”
Round off Russo even though he was off by one – 28 assists.
In a discussion of the greatest point guards of all time, he didn’t go for Magic Johnson, John Stockton, Isiah Thomas, or even Jason Kidd. He went with the man drafted fourth overall by the Tri City Blackhawks in 1950. God bless the legend, he’s one of the original NBA superstars, but the best point guard of all time? I think Jamal Crawford would have asked everything of him.
Still, Mad Dog turned the clock back to the NBA’s Fort Wayne Pistons era and got the rising sports media star Wednesday as Stephen A. looked on. I would never say I wish I grew up in New York, but I wish I had a cousin to spend summers there if this was her sports talk radio in the 1990s.
