A Tribute to Howard Eskin, Who Pioneered Everything You Hate About Philadelphia Sports Media

Maybe it’s in poor taste to rip someone upon their exit from a job, but Howard Eskin made a living off of smug condescension and calling other people morons, so he  should appreciate this farewell column. Consider it an apropos tribute to “The King,” whose 38 years at WIP ended on December 20th with a Friday news dump.

People call Howard a sports media pioneer. Alright, fine. You have to respect a brand that lasts almost four decades, no matter what it is. Are you a teacher? Botanist? Port-o-john emptier? If you do anything for that long, you’re obviously good at it, and have probably built a personal brand along the way. But you can hate the game without hating the player, and in this case we’re talking about Howard’s pompous bad guy persona, a prototype shock jock routine that many others copied over the years, leaving us in a modern world of hot takes and pot stirring. If you’re one of those people who enjoys the blowhard radio style of saying shit to get a reaction, you can thank Eskin for that, because he was the one who started it. We have people like Dan Sileo and Craig Carton because of Howard Eskin.

That’s not to say that all sports talk radio is the same. Not everything is a shtick and not every shtick is harmful. Anthony Gargano is “The Cuz,” which doesn’t hurt anybody. He’s just overly friendly. People like Jody Mac, Glen Macnow, Ray Didinger, and Rob Ellis do straightforward sports talk without the manufactured provocation. What Howard pioneered was brash combativeness, where you make a bunch of incendiary proclamations to get the hoagie mouths all riled up. “Joel Embiid is a loser and a dope!” They call your show, you tell them they’re fools, and then you move on to the next caller. Rinse, repeat, and laugh all the way to the bank.

I remember this routine very clearly because my dad was a WIP diehard in the 80s and 90s, so he’d always have Howard on when we were driving to baseball practice in the great borough of Boyertown. The formula was amoebic in its simplicity. Some bumbling idiot from Northeast Philly would call up and say, “I think the Eagles should draft a quarterback!” Then Howard would argue with them and we’d do that a few times until the next commercial break, or a phone call from a woman, who would be asked what she was making for dinner that night. Howard was playing this role of pro wrestling heel. He engineered the contrarian approach, where you basically just take the opposite opinion of whatever is currently popular, then clash with the “nitwits” and “dopes” of the Delaware Valley. Then you act like you never said any of it at all. It was shallow and cheap and he was really good at it. There’s always been a performative aspect to sports talk radio, which people like Howard and Angelo Cataldi understood. The routine requires an endless supply of moron Eagles fans to work, and since that source is near-infinite, this brand of sports talk radio thrived.

That was Howard in the early days. He was on top of the Philly sports world and really the first person to throw these boisterous and antagonistic opinions out there. He was not afraid to tell it how he thought it was, whether that opinion was right or wrong. That can be equal parts refreshing and annoying, depending on the current sporting Zeitgeist. For those of you who don’t recall, he actually did have sources back then, and he did break news. He was immersed in the local scene and well-connected and had a robust understanding of what was taking place across the four majors. That’s what made it somewhat of a head-scratcher, because if he wasn’t doing the adversarial radio blathering, he could have been just as successful as a plugged-in news breaker like D Gunn or John Clark.

That was a long time ago, though, and you’re probably more familiar with the Howard Eskin of the last 15 years, who was a part-time provocateur working a Saturday morning shift, doing hits across the various WIP dayparts and getting himself banned from Citizens Bank Park for making an unwanted advance on a female Aramark employee. Same general routine though. He’d kill the Sixers, fluff the Eagles, and throw out a bunch of misinformation at the same time. He provided us with the ALL-IMPORTANT radio sideline updates during Birds games and walked around with a fur coat and sunglasses because, unlike the people in the press box doing actual journalism, he needed to make sure everyone saw him.

The one thing that the old timers love about Howard is that he always asked the hard questions. That is true. Nobody else in the Philly media had the guts to ask Gabe Kapler about coconut oil masturbation at his introductory press conference (sarcasm thicker than yo mama). And Howard oftentimes sat at the very front of the room to make sure he got to speak first during the press conferences, because it was always about him and he needed to be the center of attention.

But some say that a question is only as good as the answer it returns, and more often than not, coaches and players blew off or laughed at Howard’s queries and we didn’t actually learn anything of consequence. That’s what Gargano was referring to when he criticized Howard for grandstanding after Daryl Morey gave the Burger King nothing in response to a series of questions about trading Ben Simmons. A prime example of why it was all so shallow. The low-IQ Philly fans lauded Howard for challenging players, coaches, and owners, but we rarely ever got anything meaningful as a result of those questions, which was the perfect snapshot of Howard’s all-style, no-substance approach. It became even more laughable when, at some point over the years, his spare-no-one methodology turned into water carrying for Jeffrey Lurie and a disproportionate amount of criticism for everyone else, maybe as compensation for selling out to the local football team. It was so glaringly obvious that even Cataldi called him out for it.

Howard’s presence at games was just as performative as his radio routine. For several years, I watched him show up to Wells Fargo Center and ask Brett Brown a question at the pregame presser. Then he would walk around the event floor, talk to the laundry guy, and shuffle onto the court to mingle with fans and talk to security guards. But you never actually saw him on press row or in the media work room. Why? Because he’d get back in his car and drive home. He didn’t actually watch the games.

It was the same thing at Citizens Bank Park, where the scribes would joke that he always left after the second inning. This all happened while other people were actually doing things, like writing stories, recording and editing postgame audio, and shooting video. Howard was only ever there to see and be seen. He didn’t consume much basketball or baseball. He just wanted to gladhand and get his ego stroked, maybe take some selfies with fans in a self-aggrandizing effort to keep up appearances and remain relevant. I’m not sure the guy can tell you the difference between a dribble hand off and a pick and roll, but neither can his listeners, and it doesn’t matter anyway, because those people will always tell you that “no one works harder,” when anyone who was actually on site could confirm that to be false. Howard may have been the hardest worker in Philly sports media at some point, but that ended around the same time the iPhone debuted.

What’s especially funny is this –

People sometimes say that the modern generation of sports media owes itself to Howard Eskin. “You wouldn’t be here if not for THE KING,” is what angry boomers and GED hopefuls always tell us. That is, of course, flimsy, because a significant portion of the Gen X and Millennial generation grew up watching Gary Papa and Stuart Scott, reading Sports Illustrated and Phil Jasner before discovering a burgeoning internet world that included message boards, chat rooms, and retina-killing Geocities sites. You could make an argument that our influences were influenced by someone else, but Howard fans believe that sports media began in 1986 and that everything created in the last 35 years is a derivative of his brand of radio and TV reporting, which is a comical reach. Blogs like this one were a spin off of print, and the concept of having a loud opinion about sports wasn’t exactly proprietary, so to say that people like Howard Eskin are responsible for sites like Barstool and Deadspin would be like saying that Three 6 Mafia owes itself to Fleetwood Mac because both make music. Howard introduced loudmouth opinion to the radio, sure, but print columnists also existed back then, and office place water coolers. What Howard had was one of the earliest platforms, when platforms were hard to come by. Options were limited and, for a time, Howard was the only game in town. Nowadays, anybody with a microphone and/or internet connection can build a following by throwing enough shit at the wall and getting some of it to stick.

This is not some personal crusade, by the way. We defended Howard when he was accused of buying his Super Bowl ring (he did not), and when the petty national media wouldn’t give him credit on the rare occasion he did have a scoop in the smartphone era. And we don’t joke about “flowers” because it feels cheap to make light of a woman’s murder. When you look at the myriad replies to recent Howard posts on social media, you get a general sense of how people felt about him, so it’s not just us, and never was. Kyle Neubeck at PHLY ethered Howard harder than we ever have, and, not surprisingly, the split seems to run on generational lines, with the 50+ crowd throwing sycophantic support behind The King while the sub-40 crowd recognizes him for the charlatan he is.

Holy shit @KyleNeubeck ETHERED @howardeskin

(via @PHLY_Sixers) pic.twitter.com/35dKg9Njqw

— Crossing Broad (@CrossingBroad) April 24, 2024

Of course, they say that if you don’t have anything nice to say, then you shouldn’t say anything at all. To that end, you have to point out all of the charity work Howard did over the years. This guy was always raising money for something, be it a Delco animal shelter or the Eagles Autism Foundation. The total amount of money he is responsible for raising has to be well into the six figures, as a conservative guess. He was always using his platform in this positive way. And even though he became a parody of himself in his later years, at least he actually showed his face and put himself out there. There are plenty of people in that industry who can’t be bothered to show up anywhere other than a live remote or whatever client event they’re obligated to do.

People often ask us why we care about this so much. Who gives a shit about people like Howard and Angelo? Well, we don’t, but unfortunately their influence was significant and it persists. The blowhard style they created seeped into the Philly sports ecosystem and became the foundation for general negativity and low-intelligence fandom. The reason that so many people in this region have a tough time with critical thinking is because they were shaped by the low-hanging fruit of shock jock radio.

For example:

Do you enjoy the media stirring the pot when the pot is perfectly fine, and always finding the latest controversy to focus on? That’s a Howard creation.

Do you enjoy asinine polls, contrarian hot takes, and overwhelming Negadelphia? That’s a Howard creation.

Do you enjoy people saying outrageous shit for attention, then acting like they never actually said it? That’s a Howard creation.

Most of the low-level discourse and knee-jerk emotional reaction that bogs us down can be attributed to decades of a windbag filling simpleton minds with this nonsense. Everything you hate about the modern “look at me” take world is what Howard so gracefully bestowed upon us.

So yeah, Howard is a pioneer, but what he pioneered is shit. Sports talk radio adherents hate when we say that, and think we’re insulting their craft, but they know this is the censure of an individual and not an industry. That being said, some of you are out here praising Howard, when you should be distancing yourselves from him. Is this your king? –

Howard Eskin barred from Citizens Bank Park following unwanted advance toward an Aramark employee https://t.co/KDRWAaSuCU

— Philly Daily News (@PhillyDailyNews) July 2, 2024

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