TV-RADIO / LARRY STEWART : Rome Owns Up to Mistake but Has to Live It Down

If the cameras hadn’t been rolling when a 6-foot-5 quarterback overturned a table and pushed a 5-10 sportscaster to the floor, it probably would have been an item somewhere in the back of the sports pages.

But the 30-second sound bite of the battle of the Jims--Everett vs. Rome--last week on ESPN2 made for great television. It led the 11 o’clock news on many stations across the country and subsequently made Page 1 sports columns for days.

And in this story that just won’t go away, Everett comes off as the good guy, Rome as the villain.

“Even my grandmother said she would have punched him,” Everett said to laughs on “The Tonight Show” two days later.

Few besides some of Rome’s hard-core followers, his “clones” as he calls them, have taken Rome’s side.

Don Corsini, executive vice president in charge of programming for Prime Ticket, this week said he would never hire Rome. “There’s no room for that type at Prime Ticket,” he said.

Even Rome’s colleagues at radio station XTRA have been critical. Lee Hamilton said on the air the day after it happened that “Junior,” his nickname for Rome, was “out of line.”

A call this week to Roy Firestone drew harsh responses, even though Firestone is a Rome booster, having given the young, fast-rising radio sports talk-show host his first national exposure by using him periodically on “Up Close” on ESPN.

“I was angry when I saw it,” said Firestone, who has been conducting sports interviews without incident for 14 years, five days a week. “It was a stupid thing and very unprofessional.

“You’ve got to treat your guests as if they are guests in your home. That’s why they are called guests.

“My guests have been the life blood of my show. You develop relationships with your guests, and you want them to keep coming back.”

Firestone also sees the incident as unfortunate for his protege.

“For most of the nation, this was their first exposure to Jim Rome,” he said. “This is not what Jim Rome is all about. He is not simply a shock jock. For people to look at him as one-dimensional would be very shortsighted.”

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The day after the incident, Rome’s excuses for goading Everett by repeatedly calling him “Chris,” as in tennis player Chris Evert, were trite and unconvincing. During a conference call with television sports columnists and also on his radio show on XTRA, Rome said that although he regretted the incident, Everett had been warned what was coming, and he said he did what he’d done because he had been “challenged” by the quarterback.

He only admitted that he probably shouldn’t have called Everett Chris to his face a third time.

On Wednesday, after a week had passed, Rome was called to see if he had changed his stance.

His initial response was, “I don’t want to talk on the phone. Can we meet after tonight’s show?”

What did he have in mind? Rome had taken more media bashing in a week than Everett had taken in three years. So was he now looking to turn over a table on a critic, one he had called “Stewey the Clown,” among other things, and one who was shorter than he?

No, what Rome wanted to do was totally fess up, to acknowledge he had messed up and messed up big time, to show that there is a human side to this smart-aleck 29-year-old, to say how sorry he was, and to begin repairing the damage that had been done to his career.

Rome talked about the uneasy feeling that was just starting to go away in pit of his stomach, about his sleepless nights, about his desire to apologize to Everett, about the nation’s reaction to him, about how he was lucky he wasn’t fired.

“It’s been only a week ago, but I feel 10 years older and much wiser,” he said. “My goal now is to show the country I’m not that smug punk they saw in that 30-second sound bite.

“I’m still going to talk smack, I’m still going into the jungle, I’m still going to have an edge, but mark my word, you’re going to see a different Jim Rome. I now know there’s a fine line there and that you don’t cross over that.

“I have crossed over it in the past. I know that. I’ve done things that I shouldn’t have done, like calling Monica Seles ‘T-bone’ (because she was stabbed with a knife). That was a mistake.”

Maybe this was all simply an act by a person trying to save his career, but if it was, then dust off an Oscar. During the entire interview, Rome couldn’t have come across any more sincere.

“I made a grave mistake, but I learned a major lesson,” he said. “It will make me stronger. I’ve been energized by this. I feel I have to start all over, but I’m determined to come back from this.”

Said Firestone: “Jim faces a steep, uphill climb.”

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Basically Rome, who certainly isn’t bashful, has good interviewing skills. And if he wants to hone them, he should study Firestone and Bob Costas.

Firestone may soften the questions, or come through the back door on a sensitive issue, but he gets to everything that needs to be addressed. Next to Costas, he may be the best interviewer in sports television.

Costas moved to the head of the class recently with interviews carried on NBC’s new prime-time show, “Now.” First was a probing interview with Indiana Coach Bob Knight and then an emotional one with Mickey Mantle, who talked about everything--his drinking, the empty feeling he has because he believes his baseball career was cut short, and what a lousy father he was to his four sons. At one point, he used a tissue to wipe away a tear.

Costas made Mantle out to be a human being.

Firestone does that with sports celebrities nightly.

The bad part is that ESPN now carries “Up Close” at 9:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. That’s fine for the West, but that’s 12:30 and 3:30 a.m. in the East. With guests such as Bill Shoemaker coming up next week, and Barry Switzer, Troy Aikman and Michael Irvin to follow soon after that, the show deserves a better time slot.