Steve Garvey Is Mad as Heck at Latest Criticism

After a year of stoic, matter-of-fact responses to the swirl of embarrassing stories about his personal life, Steve Garvey changed his tone last week.

“I’m sick and tired of it, and I’m not going to take it anymore,” Garvey told his XTRA-AM (690) audience Thursday morning.

Garvey used his morning show to lash out at a recent article in Sports Illustrated, which detailed his romantic life, providing a time line of the day-to-day intricacies of his overlapping relationships. It painted a picture of Garvey as “a divorced husband, an unloved father, an unadmired teammate, a sinning Christian, a lying man of honor, a failed businessman, a control freak out of control.”

According to the article, Garvey owes the government more than $500,000 in back taxes and his landlord another $172,000, and, perhaps most damaging, it questioned the effectiveness, if not the propriety, of charity fund raising handled by the tax-exempt Steve Garvey Foundation.

Last Wednesday, a week after the article hit the stands, Garvey attacked it in an interview with KFMB-TV (Channel 8) and said he would discuss “journalism ethics” on his radio show the next morning.

Sure enough, Thursday morning, Garvey attacked the article and its author, Rick Reilly.

In an “interview” with his on-air partner, Jimmy (The Saint) Christopher, Garvey labeled the story a “blatant injustice” and a “rape of my dignity and that of my family.”

Garvey said the government had disallowed a few of his tax shelters but that he is paying his taxes. He denied that he owed the landlord money, and said Reilly “misread” the tax documents.

As he has done with other negative articles, Garvey chose to attack the article by attacking the author. He said he agreed to do the article on the presumption that it was going to be about how someone “bounces back” from problems.

“Reilly is not a journalist,” Garvey said. “He can’t write very well. He has to use a critiquing style.”

In response to references to his children in the article--it quoted one of his daughter’s testimony during a court case as saying she didn’t want to see her father and didn’t love him--Garvey described Reilly as a “man who has children, but he isn’t a man who understands what a father is all about.”

Garvey more than once described Reilly as “malicious” and the story as a “blatant attack,” but he told Channel 8 the night before that he has no plans to pursue any legal recourse.

“We stand by our story,” said SI spokesman Roger Jackson. “The story went through the same vigorous fact-checking procedures as all Sports Illustrated stories.”

Garvey, unavailable for comment Friday, has always been more than willing to publicly discuss his indiscretions, but he rarely has replied with such venom. He spoke in his usual controlled, clipped tone Thursday morning, but he was clearly angry.

Before going on the air, he had discussed his response with Noble Broadcasting President John Lynch, owner of XTRA.

“I hope he does more of that,” Lynch said. “He can’t ignore what has happened in his life. If he’s going to be a credible morning drive personality, he’s got to take it head-on. I absolutely encourage it.”

Apparently Garvey is encouraged. He concluded his on-air statements by saying, “We are going to keep watch here on Garvey and Co. for irresponsible journalism.”

After 10 years with KNSD-TV (Channel 39), reporter Cathy Clark was fired Friday night. According to sources at the station, Clark had been out of favor since Gillett Communications took over the station more than a year ago, and few were surprised by Clark’s sudden departure.

News Director Don Shafer, reached late Friday, refused to comment, and Clark was unavailable.

Clark may not have the baby-doll looks of some TV personalities or the sensational style of others, but she was respected for her steady reporting style. In an interview three weeks ago, she had expressed her unhappiness. She had received few key assignments recently. Most noticeably, she was left off the station’s team that went to San Francisco to cover the earthquake.

In other Channel 39 news, Steve Corman, well-respected producer of “Third Thursday,” has resigned to take the job of executive producer with the Sports Channel in Chicago. Corman spent 20 years working in Chicago before joining Channel 39 three years ago. Associate Producer Kurt Snider has been promoted to executive producer.

A basic rule of television: Never call your audience stupid. Think it perhaps, but never say it. For most, it’s not a difficult rule to follow. But Ted Leitner is not your average television personality. The Channel 8 sportscaster has built his career tweaking nerves, and he was at it again last week.

During Tuesday’s 5 p.m. newscast, he launched into a diatribe against a newspaper in Iowa for editorializing that the University of Colorado was using the death of quarterback Sal Aunese as an unfair motivational tool. Leitner, clearly appalled, blasted the paper for demeaning the heartfelt emotions of the team and the courage of the young athlete from Vista--a good point.

The next day, though, Leitner went into a rant about the people who called him to correct a mistake. It was a newspaper in Nebraska, not a newspaper in Iowa. Admittedly, it was not a major error. In fact, it was stupid mistake, the type that happens in the business all the time.

But Leitner would not be Leitner if he let it go at that. It seems reasonable that people from Iowa would not want to be associated with such a ridiculous editorial, but Leitner would have none of it. He railed against the callers, calling them “stupid” and suggesting that the callers from Iowa should return there.

“Either I missed the point or you missed the point and one of us is dumb--and it’s not me,” he said.

Meanwhile, Leitner hasn’t said a word about his own station’s recent advertising campaign, which exploits the emotions surrounding Aunese’s death by showing footage of his funeral in commercials to promote Channel 8’s news shows.

Just three weeks after KKLQ-FM (Q106) sent out press releases touting the addition of Rusty Humphries to its morning team as a producer and on-air talent, Humphries was winging back to Dallas. Apparently Humphries simply didn’t click with Program Director Garry Wall, who has taken over the morning show since the departure earlier this year of Jack Murphy and Terry McKeever.

“I went out there and there really wasn’t room for me on the morning show,” Humphries said Friday from Dallas, where he operates a network that supplies comedy programming to radio stations. KKLQ will continue to subscribe to Humphries’ service. . . .

New owners took over KCBQ on Thursday, and morning personality John Forsythe was out of a job by Friday night. The feature spots were also dropped, including Union columnist Tom Blair’s segment. Scotty Morache already had jumped ship, taking the general sales manager position at KIFM (98.1).