Playboy Interview: Keith Olbermann

To some he is a smirking, left-leaning smartass, MSNBC's answer to Bill O'Reilly. To a grow­ing number of others he is all that and more: the truth teller in chief a modern Edward R. Murrow. Either way. the 48-year-old star of Countdown With Keith Olbermann—a mix of news, talking heads, wacky video clips and stern, often eloquent opinion—is riding high. Olbermann's ratings were up 72percent in the second quarter of 2007. Presidential candi­dates now vie for his attention. Opinion makers quote his Murrowesque "special comments." His book The Worst Person in the World: And 202 Strong Contenders comes out in paperback this month. Any day now People magazine may name him the sexiest pundit alive.

Not bad for a guy who began as a shrimpy baseball-card collector in Westchester County, New York, the son of an architect and a school­teacher. He was always precocious, so smart he skipped first grade and went into second at the age of five. A punching bag for playground bul­lies, he escaped to Cornell at 16. After gradu­ating, Olbermann landed sportscasting jobs in Boston and Los Angeles, where his wit and sharp writing won eveiy sports-TV award in sight. In 1992 ESPN hired and paired him with Dan Patrick for SportsCenter. Thus began the hey­day of sports TV, with Patrick's catchphrase "En fuego!" matched by Olbermann's sly "If you're scoring at home or even if you 're alone...." In the next five years they reinvented the sportscast.

Patrick thought the gig was paradise, but Olbermann chafed at the limitations ESPN imposed: living in backwater Bristol, Connecti­cut; getting paid less than he thought he was worth; sticking to sports when the real world was more interesting. In 1997 he bolted, flee­ing ESPN for MSNBC. When that didn't work out he spent three bumpy years at Fox Sports, followed by stints at CNN and ABC Radio. In 2002, at the age of 43, Olbermann was reduced to writing a blog for Salon.com and serving as a substitute host on MSNBC. He seemed lost in the media wilderness, fod­der for a "Where Are They Now?" segment. But in 2003 the network gave him Phil Donahue's old time slot. At fast The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News trounced him night after night. Then, due in part to Olbernuinn's rants against George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Rudolph Giuliani, Countdown gained steam in a hurry. Now its host's rapid rise is one of the media stories of the year.

We sent Kevin Cook, author of the popular golf book Tommy's Honor, to talk with Olber­mann about his sporiscaster past and liberal-hero present.

"I knew Keith a little and had always found him to be a great conversationalist, sharp and sarcastic," reports Cook. "But after one quick chat, he ducked me for two months. 'Keith's busy closing on a condo,' his publicist said. True enough—/ saw a newspaper item on the

$4.2 million, marble-trimmed, three-balcony place he'd bought on the 40th floor of one of Donald Trump's towers. So we rescheduled. Then he hurt his foot and didn 'tfeel up to talk­ing. Aw, poor Keith. Then, just as I was writ­ing him off as the worst person in the world, the phone rang: 'Keith will meet you.'

"We ate at his favorite upscale lunch­room in midtown Manhattan, where he got a better table than Damon Wayans, who was also there that day. Keith hobbled in with a protective boot on his broken foot, and I felt like a jerk for doubting he'd really hurt it. Over the next few hours, he proved he's still a hell of a conversationalist."

PLAYBOY: After years as a cult favorite, Count­down is on the march, racking up enough ratings to worn' Bill O'Reilly. Why now? OLBERMANN: We had been building steadily, but Hurricane Katrina was the start of our rapid ascent. A lot of people joined me in seeing the Bush administra­tion in the light of a line often attributed to Abraham Lincoln: "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." Lin­coln never said that, but it's true.

Another tipping point came last sum­mer when I began doing my special comments. There was a confluence of

disillusionment with the administration and plain old disgust with its tactics. Bush's crew kept pressing the terror button until Americans started reject­ing what Barack Obama calls 9/11 fever. It got harder for Bush to capitalize on 9/11—some of us were calling him on it. PLAYBOY: Have you finally hit the jack­pot with Countdown} OLBERMANN: In the game of Scrabble that television is, our show is a long word with a Q on a triple-letter score and the whole word on a triple-word score. We've hit our moment. PLAYBOY: You've been pegged as a lib­eral. Are you?

OLBERMANN: Many of my opinions coincide with liberals', but I have con-

servative opinions, too. PLAYBOY: Want to trash a lib­eral position for us? OLBERMANN: I believe Ameri­can history teaches us that we should do as much as we can to get immigrants to speak English. For the melting pot to work, we need to understand one another. So after two or maybe three years of bilingual education, you say, "You want to live here? School is gonna be in English." This is an ultra-conservative opinion. You've got Minutemen hunting illegal immigrants in Texas, saying, "I'm happy to shoot 'em on the way over, but make 'em all speak English? No way!" PLAYBOY: So why are you tarred as a liberal? OLBERMANN: There's a false concept of balance that Rupert Murdoch and Fox News have successfully pushed: Every­body has to be left or right; every argument has to be countered. That's "fair and balanced." It's really the moral relativism they always complain about, applied to journalism. If you say a fall­ing coffee cup will shatter on the floor, that must be "bal­anced" by someone saying

no, it will ily upward into the hand of God. Nonsense! But if you put this nonsense on television, it gains cred­ibility. You can say TV is crap, but the most authenticating thing in the world is "I saw it on TV."

PLAYBOY: On Countdown this past April, after Rudolph Giuliani made a speech saying Democrats would make us more vulnerable to terrorist attacks, you went off on him for eight solid minutes. You seemed truly offended by what he'd said. OLBERMANN: Giuliani tried to out-Bush Bush. He tried to get votes by talking about casualties as if another attack like 9/11 were inevitable, suggesting that vot­ing for anyone but him would lead to more people getting killed. That's about

an inch from saying. "If you don't vote for me, you'll die," which is another inch from saying, "If you don't vote for me, I'll kill you." And that, to me, is not America. In fact, it's not Earth. I don't usually single out candidates for praise or brickbats, but if they're going to politicize terror, to do the work of the terrorists by terrorizing the populace, I'll come down on them like a ton of bricks. That's my job. PLAYBOY: In your "Worst Person in the World" bits, you discuss which villain is "worsei ' than another. Is Giuliani worser than Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney? OLBERMANN: They danced around the same idea without coming right out and saying it. Bush doesn't know how to say what he wants to say. Rudy basically said.

"There will be more deaths if you vote Democrat." In that respect he's worsen PLAYBOY: Do you really think Giuliani was doing the work of the terrorists? OLBERMANN: Not just him. Other politi­cians have a rooting interest in keeping people scared. Newt Gingrich would like to suspend parts of the Constitu­tion. That may save money: You don't need a counterterrorism budget if you're the terrorists' enabler. PLAYBOY: How would you assess the threat of another attack? OLBERMANN: Michael Bloomberg said, "Your chances of being injured by a ter­rorist are significantly less than of being hit by lightning." He was right. I mean, if you want to go around worrying about

something, worry about hereditary dis­ease. Lose some weight. Stop smoking. But people think we're in a constant state of threat from terrorists, with the world more dangerous every day. There's not a shred of evidence for that. PLAYBOY: Your fire-breathing was kin­dled last year when Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense, gave a speech comparing those who opposed the Iraq war to Nazi appeasers. OLBERMANN: I was furious, but nobody else seemed to be.

PLAYBOY: You targeted Rumsfeld in your first special comment. You said, "The man who sees absolutes where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning is either a prophet or a

quack. Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet." We heard your decision to speak out had something to do with, of all people, James Gandolfini. OLBERMANN: It did. We were sit­ting in the lounge at LAX, and we quickly exhausted all conversational possibilities. "How ya doin'?" he said. His interests appeared to be Rut­gers football, community the­ater and that's about it; he waxed on about doing summer stock in Rhode Island. But his assistant was a politics junkie. So we were sitting at LAX, Gandolfini was nodding off, and the assistant and I were reading the Rumsfeld speech. Finally, I said, "Are you as pissed off about this as I am?" He was. But nobody in the media was reacting. Then it came to me: I have a TV show. I could pro­vide the reaction. So I did. PLAYBOY: Along with fiery special comments, you've made news by racking up viewers in the 25-to-54-year-old demographic. Why is that such a big deal? OLBERMANN: Advertisers love them. The premise is simple: People under 25 have no money; people over 54 are set in their wavs and understand

that advertising is largely bullshit. It's fine to have viewers outside that group, but they don't count as much. They're like people who got free tick­ets to a ball game.

PLAYBOY: There was evidence of voting ii regularities in Ohio in the Bush-Kerry election. Was there a fix? Do you think the election went the wrong way? OLBERMANN: Possibly. It was academic once Bush was sworn in, but if you brought all of Ohio's voters together today, they'd look around at one another and say, "I didn't vote for him. ll must have been a fix!" PLAYBOY: Who has impressed you in this year's debates? OLBERMANN: The Democrats have a lot

of good speakers. I think Joe Biden scores highest on the three keys: pas­sion, detail and eloquence. PLAYBOY: Why is most public discourse so lame? What happened to speakers like JFK and Martin Luther King Jr.? OLBERMANN: Lincoln used to give 30-minute answers in debates; today we expect 30 seconds. You can't hold an audience spellbound for 30 seconds. And sadly, for the most part the best speakers today are broadcasters and actors. Our politicians should try speaking more like Charles Osgood and Charles Kuralt and less like Charlie the Tuna. PLAYBOY: What about sites like YouTube? Have they helped Countdown? OLBERMANN: Enormously. It's a live show, but a huge part of the audience sees it in clips. My first special com­ment on Rumsfeld had about a million live viewers for two airings. The num­ber of YouTube viewings was two or three times that. The clips get e-mailed over and over. They reach people who have given up on television. PLAYBOY: Do you know who's watching your clips?

OLBERMANN: Hillary Clinton, for one. I was at a 60th birthday party for Bill, and Hillary's mother came up to me. "I watch you every night," she said, "and I e-mail clips and links to my daughter." Now, I had met Hillary several times, and she had no idea who I was. The next time I saw her she said, "Keith, my mother's been e-mailing me. I don't watch much TV, but I've seen you now!" PLAYBOY: Some TV people see YouTube as a menace. Viacom won't let YouTube carry clips of The Daily Show, for example. OLBERMANN: They have a point—it's copyrighted material. But I don't care, because it's the best advertising we can get. Broadcast and cable networks never figured out how to make money off the Internet, so here's the next-best thing: We get new customers from the Internet. It's funny that the web is couched as this antiestablishment, do-it-yourself, viewer-takes-over thing when it is, simply put, the greatest advertising mechanism yet. Word-of-mouth for the electronic age. PLAYBOY: Does the hard-right tilt of the Supreme Court worry you? OLBERMANN: The Court is on the edge of becoming a clean-shaven version of the religious courts of Iran. But it could be worse—you get the feeling that even this crew would have decided Dred Scott in favor of Scott, not in favor of slavery. PLAYBOY: Do you think Bush and com­pany plan to invade Iran before next year's election?

OLBERMANN: They might like to. These guys would love to do something dramatic and panoramic. "Shock and awe!" But they don't have enough soldiers. We're stretched too thin. Invading Iran would be like playing football with 23 players: 22 starters and one guy to handle punting, kicking, holding and punt returns—he's

the special teams. Well, you'll need more players because some will get hurt. It's that simple. But our military may run bombing missions—and Lord knows what the Iranians might do then. PLAYBOY: Describe President Bush. OLBERMANN: Nixonian. The difference between Bush and Richard Nixon is that Nixon sent draftees to Vietnam. If draftees instead of volunteers were dying in Iraq, I think Bush would have been impeached by now.

We will see a draft if the Republicans win in 2008, because they've got a plan to invade every country except Liech­tenstein but not enough soldiers to do it. To get enough soldiers, they would need a draft. And that would be interesting. You'd have rioting in the streets within 48 hours. And it wouldn't be the kids rioting; it would be their parents. PLAYBOY: How does the rest of the world see Uncle Sam? OLBERMANN: From what I can tell, they view us as some old, formerly reliable uncle who has suddenly started to wear a tinfoil hat and shoot up the house. What do you do when there's one

superpower and he goes crazy? The world's keeping its fingers crossed, waiting for this time to pass. PLAYBOY: What would you like to ask Osama bin Laden? OLBERMANN: 'Would you please die?" PLAYBOY: Who's worser, Al Sharpton or Don Imus? Sharpton still stirs up racial debates, and Imus, whose show was on MSNBC, your network, was Fired for calling the Rutgers women's hoops team "nappy-headed hos." Are they both racists?

OLBERMANN: Sharpton is an opportunist with a saving grace: He draws attention to actual wrongs. Imus had been doing stuff like that for years without being called on it. MSNBC management had promised a lot of us, "Yes, eventually we'll stop simply trying to discourage him and actually stop him." The rank and file there called in those promises, and people outside NBC did the same. PLAYBOY: You're old enough to remem­ber Vietnam.

OLBERMANN: It is tragic—breathtaking— to think about the thousands of draftees who went to their death in Vietnam. Our

government killed them for the stupid­est, most mismanaged war until Iraq. And to me, the ones who didn't go are heroes as much as those who did. PLAYBOY: The conscientious objectors? OLBERMANN: The draft dodgers too. I was 16 years old in 1975. If the war hadn't ended, I would have been one of them. I would have found a way not to go. PLAYBOY: Let's switch to a less serious conflict: your feud with Bill O'Reilly. He started an online petition to get you fired from Countdown, saying MSNBC should bring back Phil Donahue. OLBERMANN: That was manna from heaven. O'Reilly has been almost as good for my career as Dan Patrick and George W. Bush. Fox News is a joke, and O'Reilly is one of the most buffoonish, laughable characters in broadcasting history. PLAYBOY: He allegedly harassed a Fox producer. She said he'd made a slobbery phone call saying he wanted to take a shower with her and rub her with a loo­fah, which he called "the falafel thing." OLBERMANN: If you don't know the dif­ference between a loofah and falafel, you shouldn't be showering with a woman. PLAYBOY: O'Reilly has been Countdowns "Worst Person in the World" more than anyone else. Is he really worse than Charles Manson?

OLBERMANN: Well, it's not a legal definition. It's a gimmick. Obviously. I don't think O'Reilly is the worst person on earth. A killer could stab someone right now and pull ahead of him for 30 seconds.

One way he and I are different is that when he does his "Most Ridiculous Item of the Day." I'm sure he believes it really is the most ridiculous. That's the delusion of being Bill O'Reilly: If you have sud­den success after 20 years of failure, you become half Napoleon and half Stalin. PLAYBOY: What do you think of the Fox News slogan, "Fair and balanced"? OLBERMANN: I've suggested a more accurate one: "Fox, not facts." But they haven't adopted that yet. PLAYBOY: When a caller mentioned you on The O'Reilly Factor, O'Reilly sicced Fox security on the person. Paranoid? OLBERMANN: That may have been the moment when he segued from journal­ist with some influence to public hilarity. People started to laugh at him. He thinks he has his own police. PLAYBOY: He'd probably like to throw a punch at you.

OLBERMANN: We're both big—he's six-foot-four, and I'm almost as tall—but I'm betting he has no physical cour­age. Every confrontation he's had has been with small people. Think about it. Al Franken. Janeane Garofalo, who could stand under a coffee table. Maybe Janeane should sit on Al's shoulders and beat the shit out of Bill. PLAYBOY: Do you think bullies are usu­ally cowards?

OLBERMANN: I know they are. In 1967 in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York I was

eight years old and small. I felt an inch high. All year I was the butt of the school bullies, repeatedly punched. They actu­ally took turns: "Who gets to beat up Keith today?" Until one day when Ralph, the worst bully, stole my baseball cards. We were going downstairs for recess, and he was three steps below me, taunting me. I leaped on him. I fell on top of him, with my knees pinning his arms down. Then I punched him. Blood came running out of his nose. And the next day the other kids wanted to be Keith's friend. PLAYBOY: Your fight with Fox got nas­tier last year when a Fox spokesperson said, "Because of his personal demons, Keith has imploded everywhere he's worked. We wish him well on his inevi­table trip to oblivion." OLBERMANN: I worked there, remember? That company wasted a couple of years of my life, which is minor compared with its negative influence on society. Al Qaeda really hurt us but not as much as Rupert Murdoch has hurt us, particularly in the case of Fox News. Fox News is worse than Al Qaeda—worse for our society. It's as dan­gerous an organization as the Ku KJux Klan ever was. Fox News will say anything about anybody and accepts no criticism. Half the people there ought to be in an insane asy­lum. So I don't need advice on mental sta­bility from spokespeople for Fox. PLAYBOY: Do you have any demons? OLBERMANN: My personal demon is me. Back at ESPN, for instance, I saw stuff that needed fixing, and 99 times out of 100 I was absolutely right. The demons came in when I made my point public. Instead of saying, "Hey, I've got a sug­gestion about how we do highlights," I'd fire off an eight-page memo: "How dare you get this wrong?" It was a reflection of my own insecurity. PLAYBOY: Would you take those memos back if you could? OLBERMANN: Yes.

PLAYBOY: Why did you leave ESPN? OLBERMANN: Money was part of it. I told Dan Patrick we were underpaid. Anchoring SportsCenter wasn't a S300,000 job—more like S2 million. I remember standing in the mail room with Kenny Mayne, Reese Davis, Stu Scott and Rich Eisen. Those four guys might have been making $500,000, total. I said, "Listen, the price of sportscasters is going up." PLAYBOY: Did you just bolt, or was there a negotiation?

OLBERMANN: I gave ESPN an offer. I said I'd stay and do the Sunday-night SportsCenter.

PLAYBOY: For how much? A million dollars? OLBERMANN: For $50,000 a year. They said no.

PLAYBOY: That was 10 years ago. Since then you've stepped up from sports into the real world. Do you ever miss Patrick? OLBERMANN: Every night. When I go on to do my show, I think, It'd be great to have a partner—no, it'd be great to have that partner.

PLAYBOY: You and he may be responsible for dumbing down male voters. Wouldn't we be smarter about politics if we had been reading The New York Times instead of watching SportsCenter} OLBERMANN: No, I don't buy that. Sports fans aren't dumber than the rest of America. They're smarter. It's the rest of America that believes in crazy plots: "Some guy is going to blow up the moon with Coke and Mentos! Arrest him!" Too many people believe in Harry Potter stuff—threats with no reality—because they watch 24 or listen to Rush Limbaugh and Giuliani, who want us to be scared. But the sports fan is reality-based. You can't win your fantasy league on hope or ideology. You can't say, "My Devil Rays are gonna win the World Series because I'm rooting for them." Sports fans are sponges for information. So am I. Maybe that's why so many of my old SportsCenter viewers watch Countdown. PLAYBOY: What other TV shows do you watch?

OLBERMANN: Family Guy and The Simp­sons are marvelously subversive, state-of-the-comic-art. It's just a coincidence that I guest-starred on Family Guy last season and I'll be on The Simpsons this year. I never miss Entourage; Jeremy Piven's character is one of the absolute best in TV history. And I try to watch Prime Minister's Questions on C-SPAN, which reminds me that we're evidently not paying our politicians as much as the British do.

PLAYBOY: We pay network news anchors $7 million a year and up. Yet Katie Couric, who was an institution on the Today show, has flopped as the $ 15-million-a-year CBS anchor. What went wrong? OLBERMANN: It should have been obvious to the people making the decision. Some of us pointed out beforehand that some primal rules of broadcasting were being ignored. One, if you break up a team, the individuals don't necessarily succeed on their own. Two, day parts matter; some­one who succeeds in the morning won't automatically succeed at night and vice versa—I'm unbearable in the morning. Three, you don't take somebody who is only a fair-to-average Teleprompter reader and give her a job that is 90 per­cent reading a prompter. PLAYBOY: Things are looking up. You recently bought a $4.2 million condo in one of Donald Trump's buildings, where you're cohabiting for the first time. Your girlfriend, Katy Tur, is 23. OLBERMANN: I've been ready to live with someone for years. I just didn't have the right person to commit to. And I've been flexible: I cleaned out two closets when Katy moved in. A great many baseball cards went into storage.

But she also wants me to take down my wall full of Spalding's and Sporting News baseball guides, which stretch back to the 1880s. "They're not very stylish,"

she says. No, but I like having the entire history of baseball on my wall. PLAYBOY: You'll lose that one, won't you? OLBERMANN: That remains to be seen. I'm very reluctant to give up my base­ball wall. PLAYBOY: You're almost exactly twice

Katy's age-----

OLBERMANN: We're both actually about

nine.

PLAYBOY: Any older man-younger

woman issues?

OLBERMANN: There are good ones. She

shows me things that have happened in

the past five years that I didn't notice,

and I show her things that happened in

the first 5 million years.

We watch movies at home. We were eight minutes into Being Julia when I said, "For God's sake, it's a cheap knockoffof All About Eve." Now, Katy's one age-related flaw is that she won't watch movies on video—only a DVD has sufficient image quality. So I found All About Eve on DVD. We watched it, and she said, "You're right. The story's better, and Bette Davis was 85 times better than Annette Bening."

When you've been through as much tumult as I have, you learn that age is way down on the list of what's important in a relationship. The first question is, Can you stand being with this person? And the second is, For how long? If the answers are "yes" and "indefinitely," the rest doesn't matter.

PLAYBOY: You and Katy sound happy. Any plans you want to announce? OLBERMANN: [After a long pause] Yes...I'm getting a haircut this afternoon. PLAYBOY: Do fans still stop you on the street and ask about ESPN? OLBERMANN: Not as much. Dan had told me I'd never leave, because I couldn't deal with hearing "Why aren't you on SportsCenter}" I didn't believe him, and then it happened all the time. Hourly. "Miss you on SportsCenter] When are you going back to SportsCenter'?" So 1997 and 1998 were rough on Keith, but things have changed dramatically, mostly in the past year. Now they say, "Miss you on SportsCenter, but I love Countdown."

Much as I love sports, there's a big­ger world out there. I went to an ACLU dinner where 700 lawyers, 700 honest lawyers, stood up and cheered me and the attorneys for Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's former chauffeur, who was a prisoner at Guantanamo. And I'm just a guy on TV! That gave me a sense of contributing something to society, as opposed to giving Knicks highlights. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But that night I felt useful. PLAYBOY: The sportscaster's dream come true.

OLBERMANN: Want to hear a real dream? One night, in the time after ESPN, I had this incredibly vivid dream I've never for­gotten: I'm on a bus, and a guy in a wind-breaker and sunglasses gets on. I notice his head is held together with epoxy. He

turns around and says, "You're right. It's me." It's John F. Kennedy. So I ask about his assassination. "Was it Oswald?"

He says, "Could I see if it was Oswald? I was getting shot! But 1 know I got shot from the back and the front."

"Aha!" I say. "So there was a conspiracy." He says, "No. A coincidence. How many times do you read about two guys who walk into a bank at the same time to rob it? Same thing. Two gunmen, same moment. Coincidence." Then he starts talking about Monica Lewinsky. PLAYBOY: Really? She probably would have made him wish he were president again. OLBERMANN: "This is my stop," he says. And as JFK steps off the bus, he turns to me and says, "Miss you on SportsCenter." PLAYBOY: Ow!

OLBERMANN: That's when I woke up. PLAYBOY: Speaking of Lewinsky, which is worse: getting a blow job in the White House or taking the country to war under false pretenses? OLBERMANN: Taking us to war. PLAYBOY: How much worse? OLBERMANN: How much bigger is an ele­phant than a mouse? You calculate it and

I'll go with that number. PLAYBOY: Okay, an adult elephant weighs about seven tons, and a mouse about half an ounce. You're saying that misleading the country into Iraq was 448,000 times worse than a White House blow job. OLBERMANN: There you go. PLAYBOY: You're returning to TV sports this fall, co-hosting NBC's Football Xight in America with Bob Costas, Cris Collins-worth, Jerome Bettis and Tiki Barber. OLBERMANN: My main job will be high­lights. I'm the guy in this group who is used to looking at the camera and intro­ducing some highlight from a game that finished minutes ago, while my hand is out of the frame, reaching for the shot

sheet some kid is handing me-----

PLAYBOY: The shot sheet tells you what's on camera; if the highlight just came in, you haven't seen it yet. OLBERMANN: True. The first shot could be of a butter statue of former NFL com­missioner Bert Bell. Or a picture of for­mer New York Giant Ward Cuff. Then the game action. I've got to make those highlights work. That's where some SportsCenler training comes in.

PLAYBOY: Will you add any Olbermannic wrinkles?

OLBERMANN: We may liven it up with a "Worst Person in the NFL" bit. Some viewers may expect a weekly diatribe against George Bush or Reggie Bush, but that won't happen. PLAYBOY: You're also doing commentary for NBC Nightly News. OLBERMANN: That's mostly on pop cul­ture, sports, a little history. I may do some politics. But anyone looking for the fire-breathing dragon from Countdown will need to watch Countdown. PLAYBOY: You're a baseball expert and even a consultant to the Topps baseball-card company. Any perks to that? OLBERMANN: Topps is making a card with me on it. It will have a swatch of my tie in it—a collector's card with a piece of "show-used tie."

PLAYBOY: If you were baseball commis­sioner, what would you have done about Barry Bonds?

OLBERMANN: I would have banned him from the game.

PLAYBOY: To keep him from breaking Hank Aaron's home-run record? OLBERMANN: You have the most glori­ous record in sports history passing to a guy who shouldn't have it. You had fans hoping Bonds would sustain a career-ending injury before he got it. So yes, I would have tossed him. The commis­sioner has a "best interests of baseball" clause in his contract. If you're the commissioner, step up and throw your weight around. Put the players union in the position of defending him. PLAYBOY: Bonds would sue you. OLBERMANN: Let him. Meanwhile, he stays on the sidelines. By the time he finished suing, he would be too old to break the record.

PLAYBOY: Should Pete Rose be in base­ball's hall of fame?

OLBERMANN: Yes. I've changed my mind about Rose. Given what we know about players using steroids and human growth hormone, what he did doesn't seem as bad. I think he finally gets that it was bad—about 20 years too late. He's still lying to some degree, but now he's lying less. I would open the door to Cooperstown for him. PLAYBOY: How about Marvin Miller, who led the players union when ballplayers won free agency, leading to today's zillion-dollar contracts? His battles with then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn are baseball legend. OLBERMANN: I told Bowie Kuhn that he, Charlie Finley—the colorful Oakland A's owner—and Marvin Miller should all go in together. Bowie laughed for a solid minute, picturing that ceremony. Yes, Miller belongs in the hall. PLAYBOY: Are there Countdown groupies? OLBERMANN: There are chat rooms that get bawdy. One group of women will start analyzing the issues, but soon it will devolve into talk about my tie and what they'd like to do after removing my ue. That's a strange

thing about TV—it's like being on the wrong side of a one-way mirror. You don't know if it's a group of Jennifer Lopezes out there undressing you with their eyes or a bunch of Leona Helmsleys. PLAYBOY: We know you loved baseball cards as a boy- How about another touch­stone of boyhood: Did you sneak peeks

at PLAYBOY?

OLBERMANN: I remember offering some baseball cards for a playboy when I was 12 or 13, but the other kid wanted too many cards.

PLAYBOY: A pivotal moment. You had to choose between sex and baseball.

OLBERMANN: I caught up with PLAYBOY

later. 1 distinctly recall Victoria Cunning­ham, the first Playmate 1 ever saw. It was during a family vacation. I sneaked out to the hotel lobby and bought the maga­zine; there she was in all her glory. PLAYBOY: Miss April 1975. You were 16. Do you remember any other Playmates? OLBERMANN: When I got to college at Cornell, I suddenly realized, No one can keep me from buying that playboy! I remember Janet Lupo. She was from New Jersey.

PLAYBOY: Miss November 1975, the pride of Hoboken. James Gandolfini probably remembers her too.

OLBERMANN: I'm sure many of us have vivid memories of Janet Lupo. PLAYBOY: She would probably love to meet you. Has your stardom helped you meet other celebs?

OLBERMANN: One night Katy and I crashed in front of the TV during an Arrested Development marathon. We loved it—bought the DVDs, watched every epi­sode of the best situation comedy ever. Then, out of the blue, I got a call from Jason Bateman, the star of the show, who invited me into his fantasy baseball league. "I'm the biggest Countdown fan in the world," he said. On my last trip to L.A., I met him for lunch, and we went to a Dodgers game.

PLAYBOY: Does he really want you in his fantasy league? You'll destroy him. OLBERMANN: He regrets it. On the night of the most recent Democrat presiden­tial debate, I covered the debate and then punched up MLB transactions: The Astros called up outfielder Hunter Pence. I grabbed Pence, a potential Rookie of the Year.

PLAYBOY: You aced Bateman out of Pence? OLBERMANN: And Bateman was mad. So 1 traded him a third baseman, who was instantly sent to the minors. Now he's mad about that, too. PLAYBOY: Are you beating him? OLBERMANN: I'm in first place. Bateman is mired in fourth.

PLAYBOY: You never lost your baseball-nerd tendencies.

OLBERMANN: One of my favorite moments was meeting Jerry Coleman. When I was a kid listening to the Yan­kees on the radio, Jerry was on with Joe Garagiola and Phil Rizzuto. Those

guys basically made me want to go into broadcasting. So one day I was at Yan­kee Stadium; I'd agreed to be the PA announcer at an old-timers' game. It happened to be Jerry's first Old-Tim­ers' Day since he became the San Diego

Padres announcer 30 years ago------

PLAYBOY: He famously called a fly ball like this: "It's a long drive. Winfield back to the wall. He hits his head on the wall. And it rolls off toward second base!" OLBERMANN: Well, yes. And he never watched SportsCenter. had no idea I did sports before Countdown. So Jerry said, "Why is the best newscaster since Mur-row doing PA at an old-timers' baseball game?" I told him why: He and Joe and Phil were the reason I went into broad­casting. Jerry thought about that for a second and said, "Boy, you need better role models. We were terrible!" PLAYBOY: Is it true you have more back­bone than most of us—an extra vertebra? OLBERMANN: An X-ray showed I have six lower vertebrae, not the usual five, which may make my spine more rigid than most. Make of that what you will. PLAYBOY: You had a stalker a few years back. That must have been scary. OLBERMANN: It started at ESPN. A woman thought I had proposed to her in secret code during SportsCenter. She would call and call, leave 50 or 60 messages a night. I thought it was over after I went to work at Fox, then I picked up the phone and it was her. "Please don't call me," I said. "How can you think I want to marry you? We've had no contact for four years."

She said, "You needed time to make up your mind."

This went on for more than 10 years, until she got so sick she couldn't leave her house. Couldn't continue it. PLAYBOY: Any other scares? OLBERMANN: Last fall I opened a letter at home and white powder spilled out. I wasn't scared, not at first. I remember thinking, Anthrax is hard to handle; any­one using the real thing would probably kill himself. But I called the authorities, and they were there instantly: 18 cops and FBI agents, some in hazmat suits. They took my clothes and cell phone, my ESPN phone, and blasted them with radiation. I walked out of my apartment in a moon suit made of that heavy plastic-y paper they make FedEx packs out of. Next thing I knew, I was in an isolation ward, thinking, I was stupid to open that envelope. PLAYBOY: They caught the guy who sent it. OLBERMANN: They did—after I got a simi­lar package at work. The return address read, "Jay Leno, Burbank, CA." Now, Leno's on NBC; if he wants to send me something, he can use interoffice mail. So I called the FBI. They took the enve­lope to the California post office noted on the postmark, where the postmaster said, "We sell those envelopes here." He scanned the bar code. Up on his com­puter screen popped the guy's home (concluded on page 138)

KEITH OLBERMANN

{continued Jrom page 5-/) address and purchase history, including a $15 money order made out to K.ither-ine Harris"s congressional campaign. PLAYBOY: Harris, the Republican who delivered Florida's disputed electoral votes to Bush in the 2000 election. OLBERMANN: This guy saw Harris. Michelle Malkin. Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham as the hottest women in America. To please them, he tried to scare me. It wasn't political for him: it was sexual. He was like John Hinckley trying to impress Jodie Foster. He had no job, lived in his mother's basement. PLAYBOY: Chad Castagana was arrested for sending fake-anthrax envelopes to you, David Letterman, Jon Stewart and others. OLBERMANN: And he got the wrong Jon Stewart. Thai envelope went to a Manhat­tan lawyer named Jon Stewart, poor guy. PLAYBOY: Two days after your trip to the hospital, you turned up in the New York Post's "Page Six" gossip column. OLBERMANN: Somebody from the hospital

or the NYPf) tipped off the Post------

PLAYBOY: Murdoch's paper. OLBERMANN: "Page Six" reported I insisted on being taken to the hospital, which is false. It reported that "preliminary tests came back negative" for anthrax, and the doctors sent me home: "It is not known if they gave him a lollipop." PLAYBOY: "Page Six" had fun with your anthrax scare.

OLBERMANN: And reported it without calling me, without calling the FBI or MSNBC. The Post, in its zeal to mock me, look the side of this domestic terrorist. That's how it shows its true colors. The New York Post is in favor of terrorism, at least to the degree that it scares the Post's enemies and sells newspapers. PLAYBOY: During your stint at Fox TV, you worked for Murdoch. Did you and he ever meet?

OLBERMANN: No. he was never around the office when I was. Rupert spends most of his time in hell. I believe, and gets out on a day pass. PLAYBOY: Jump ahead to the year 2020. Will you still be doing Countdown'? OLBERMANN: Who could know? II you had told me this was how my career would spin out, two things would have surprised me: first, that I would be

friendly with John Dean------

playboy: Who went from Nixon lawyer to frequent Countdown guest. OLBERMANN: And second, the length of my resume. So many jobs! In fact, most of the places I've worked didn't exist five or 10 years before 1 got there. You can't plan for thai. One key to banishing what­ever demons I had was to stop looking to the next job, the next improvement, and focus on the here and now.

A candid conversation with MSNBC's liberal firebrand about all the things that piss him off: Iraq, Bush, Fox News and people who don't speak English

Sports fans aren't dumber than the rest of America.

They're smarter. The rest of America believes in crazy

plots because they listen to Limbaugh and Giuliani.

I've changed my mind

about Pete Rose. Given

what we know about players

using steroids and human

growth hormone, what he did doesn't seem as bad.