NBA on ESPN lead play-by-play announcer Mike Breen was a recent guest on J.J. Redick’s The Old Man and the Three podcast and shared that he’s often kept awake at night by not living up to his own expectations. He also shared a story of how Michael Kay was one of the reasons he found his way in the sports media business, but the 98.7 ESPN New York host took issue with how the story was told.
During The Michael Kay Show Thursday, Kay shared his displeasure with the storytelling antics Breen displayed.
“(Breen) tells this story and this time he added something that I think is quite hurtful,” Kay said. “He tells this story about how if it wasn’t for me, he wouldn’t be in the business because when he was at Fordham, he didn’t like the people at the radio station. He was ready to just walk away from school. He was a couple of days away from calling his dad and asking his dad to give him the application for the steel union … so he walked into the station one day and saw me arguing — playfully, these are his words — with one of the best-looking women at Fordham.
“Now, this is probably 1979. And he’s telling Redick this story by saying ‘This guy’ — me — is saying ‘You know you wanna go out with me’, and she’s saying ‘I wouldn’t go out with you if you were the last man on Earth.’ and Mike is saying ‘The confidence that this guy had. He’s clearly overweight’, and he’s saying this in a joking way … but I just took exception to ‘the guy was clearly overweight’.”
When asked by Don La Greca if he was truly overweight, Kay replied “not so much that you have to include it as part of the story.”
“Are you really offended by this?” co-host Peter Rosenberg asked.
“I was really offended by it. He keeps apologizing,” Kay said. “He said the story was to tell how important you are to my story, but it was hurtful.”
La Greca countered by saying it was intended to be complimentary, and it was a situation of Breen being envious of Kay’s confidence.
“But I didn’t have confidence,” Kay rebutted. “I was overcompensating for having no confidence. I didn’t think the girl wanted to go out with me. It was just for laughs. She never did go out with me. Her loss. Probably looks back and thinks ‘Wow. I dropped that pass over the middle’.”
La Greca then marveled at Kay, saying “It’s weird, the things that offend you”.
