My point is, at the moment, Casey has less on-air charm and charisma than my high school driving instructor, and you know it, Dan. Now I think the time has come for you to think about the possibility of another partner.
My future is writing and anchoring a sports program, with my partner, Casey McCall. Now, if it's here, it's here. If it's not, it's someplace else. For right now, I'm gonna forget this conversation ever took place. Dana, Isaac, you guys need anything?
Yeah, absolutely, and I'll tell you why. Cause it's seventeen degrees outside with the wind chill so what I want to do is stand on a boat in the middle of New York harbor at half-past midnight.
I have a younger brother named Sam. Sam's a genius. I mean, literally. As a kid, he tested off the charts. The first computer I ever had, he built from a kit he bought with money he earned tutoring other kids in math. He's energetic and articulate, curious and funny. A great source of pride to our parents. And there's no doubt that he'd be living a great life right now, except for that he's dead. Because when you're fourteen years old, all you ever really wanna be when you grow up is your sixteen-year-old brother. And in my case, that meant smoking a lot of dope. The day I went off to college was the day that Sam got his driver's license. And he celebrated by taking a drive with some of his friends. Drunk and high as a paper kite. He never saw the red light that he ran. And he probably never saw the eighteen-wheel truck that put him into the side of a brick bank, either. That was eleven years ago tonight. And I just wanted to say I'm sorry, Sam. You deserved better in my hands. And I apologize.
It's taken me a lot of years, but I've come around to this: If you're dumb, surround yourself with smart people. And if you're smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you. I'm an awfully smart man, and Mike Sabath is an idiot. He had you, and he blew it. You're gonna do great here, but you've gotta trust us.
We shot a deer. In the woods near Lake Mattatuck on the second day. There was a special vest they had me wear so that they could distinguish me from things they wanted to shoot, and I was pretty grateful for that. Almost the whole day had gone by, and we hadn't gotten anything. Eddie was getting frustrated and Bob Shoemaker was getting embarrassed. My camera guy needed to re-load so I told everybody to take a ten minute break. There was a stream nearby and I walked over with this care-package Natalie made me. I sat down and when I looked up I saw three of them; small, bigger, biggest. Recognizable to any species on the face of the planet as a child, a mother and a father. Now, the trick in shooting deer is you gotta get 'em out in the open. And it's tough with deer, 'cause these are clever, cagey animals with an intuitive sense of danger. You know what you have to do to get a deer out in the open? You hold out a twinkie. That animal clopped up to me like we were at a party. She seemed to be pretty interested in the twinkie, so I gave it to her. Looking back, she'd have been better off if I'd given her the damn vest. And Bob kind of screamed at me in whisper, "Move away!" The camera had been re-loaded and it looked like the day wasn't gonna be a washout after all. So I backed away, a couple of steps at a time, and I closed my eyes when I heard the shot. Look, I know these are animals, and they don't play bridge and go to the prom, but you can't tell me that the little one didn't know who his mother was. That's gotta mean something. And later, at the hospital, Bob Shoemaker was telling me about the nobility and tradition of hunting and how it related to the native American Indians. And I nodded and I said that was interesting while I was thinking about what a load of crap it was. Hunting was part of Indian culture. It was food and it was clothes and it was shelter. They sang and danced and offered prayers to the gods for a successful hunt so that they could survive just one more unimaginably brutal winter. The things they had to kill held the highest place of respect for them, and to kill for fun was a sin. And they knew the gods wouldn't be so generous next time. What we did wasn't food and it wasn't shelter and it sure wasn't sports! It was just mean!
