Retiring sports broadcaster Brent Musburger appeared on NBC Sports’s The Dan Patrick Show Thursday and went on an amusing tangent about one of his former colleagues, Keith Olbermann.
Patrick asked his guest to reflect on his career and the upcoming Super Bowl match-up between the Atlanta Falcons and the New England Patriots but Musburger abruptly said “Hey, you know what we gotta do though…?” and launched a rhetorical question to Patrick about Olbermann’s politics:
Patrick, Olbermann’s former co-anchor on ESPN, told Musburger that in all the years he’s known, him including the years the worked so closely together at “the mother ship,” Olbermann never talked politics except that at one point he gave Patrick a copy of The Last Lion, Paul Reid and William Manchester’s three-part biography of British prime minister Winston Churchill.
Musburger continued with his criticism of Olbermann’s foray into political punditry saying, “we all know that he’s a deep thinker, especially about baseball. He should get off that soapbox of his and get back to where we enjoy him.”
“I love to listen to him talk about baseball.”
Olbermann has wandered the broadcasting wilderness since his triumphant days at MSNBC. After his abrupt departure from that network he had a disastrous stint at the now-defunct Current TV, a progressive cable channel started by Al Gore and eventually sold to Al Jazeera. He then returned to ESPN where he was suspended for engaging in a Twitter war with Penn State graduates. In 2015, after two years, Olbermann was once again out of work.
His latest venture is with GQ where he delivers short-form commentary YouTube videos that appear to be produced in front of a sheet in Olbermann’s living room.
