Cutbooms.
If you thought four hours a day, twelve hundred minutes a week was enough, think again. He's the last remnants of the old republic, a sol fashion of fairness. He treats crackheads in the ghetto gutter the same as the rich pill poppers in the penthouse. Wow to Clearinghouse of hot takes, break free for something special. The Fifth Hour with Ben Mahler starts right now.
In the air everywhere.
The Fifth Hour with Me, Ben Mahler and Danny g Radio, who will join us at some point over the weekend. I hope you're doing well. We thank you for listening. All of my shameless promotion on the radio show has inspired you to come over here to the podcast world, where I can say bad words. I've chosen not to do that. If you go back, I know Lucky Tony listens to a lot of the older stuff that's available. I think the farthest back you can listen is twenty seventeen,
and you'll hear me cursing somewhat on those podcasts. Now, I don't curse very much at all on the Fifth Hour podcast anymore. It's a long story, but if you want to know why, I'll let you know, but I'm not going to get to that right now.
So it's a good sporting day to day.
We had a good show last night on the Overnight talking about a lot of the action, Joe Flacco outperforming expectations, and the Bengals getting it done against Aaron Rogers and the Pittsburgh Steelers, which was shockingly entertaining for a consumer of athletic competition.
So we had that.
In the baseball games, I'm a baseball guy. I loved the playoffs. Not a great game between Toronto and Seattle, the Dodgers competitive, but still.
You knew the Dodgers were going to win in the end.
And now, as bad as the Dodgers play, as terrible as the Dodgers were for much of the regular season in terms of underachieving not meeting expectations, they are one win away and likely by the end of the day today will end up in the World Series yet again. So the lesson there is that you don't need to work hard every day. The lesson is that you just kind of show up and coast along and then it's kind of like college where in college, you know it's kind of haveav.
A good time and all that, and then make sure you do well in the finals and you're fine, You're good.
So there you go on this podcast today you and I will explore put me in coach, I think I can play, and soggy croissants.
We'll begin with this though.
The day the coaches ran up the score and the whistle blew on me the guy you're listening to, so they say, I don't know who they are.
They say that scoreboards don't.
Matter in these kind of games, right, They just it's a friendly, as they say in soccer, that is.
A lie lie lie, lie, lie lie.
They matter very much when one side leads twenty two to nothing and the other is looking like a group of bystanders trying to catch the five fifteen train out of town. So I bring this up because earlier this week, the coaching staff of the Boston Celtics, led by the coach known as let him Play Joe Joe Missoula, a man who looks like he could guard a baseline the
way Paul Blart mall cop guards a mall. So listen, demolished this group, demolished the assembled media in what was advertised as a friendly game of basketball at the r Box Center, and I've been by there a few times in my trips to Boston. That's the training facility of the Celtics, and right across the way there was the facility where the Bruins train.
I don't know if that's still the case or not.
But friendly is a way to describe it as friendly. I guess, as you might say a bear will smile at a salmon. You see those videos from Alaska and the Bears eating a salmon, just standing there, just enjoying it. Final score of that media basketball game was fifty seven to four. Now you know a game has gone sideways when the only thing anyone on the losing team can agree on is who gets to keep the one made basket as a highlight right now. The Celtic coaches were not just coaches.
They were not They were ringers.
They had Emil Jefferson, who I'm told as a former McDonald's All American.
He played at Duke. They don't let trumps play at Duke.
Phil Presley, who I remember when he was playing for the Celtics and other teams. He was running the offense with the Celtics. Now, they weren't great at that time. God sham God, one of the great names, who was a literal basketball royalty. It's in it.
It's his bloodline right there.
And then you had Joe Missoula, who once dragged West Virginia deep in the NCAACH. I think they made the final four. It's like the first time they had made it since nineteen fifty nine. And then there was the media, a hodgepodge of flotsam and jetsam, A couple of riders over there, a fat radio guy, a hipster podcaster, some camera people, collection of elbows and sneakers and beard bellies.
Now, why did I bring this up? Because it reminded me.
It triggered a memory that I wanted to share with you on the podcast. So it reminded me of my own humbling at the altar of basketball mediocrity.
We go way way, way, way, way way.
Way back in the hot tub time machine the day Bill Fitch blew the whistle on me. You don't forget the sound of that whistle. It was a special was a cut through the gym, It cut through the noise. It cut right through your heart, right through your self esteem, like a butter knife through those discount sheet cakes that you get right. I mean, this thing was big, and I was like, put me in, coach, I think I
can play, and let yes, I can't. Long before, long before yours truly became the self proclaimed General of Degenerates, the Tycoon of teas, the master of disaster, Long before Overnight Radio, long before the Malord Militia was even a thing, there was a little bit of a a day that changed a lot.
I don't know how to describe it.
I was just a young radio dork and I was assigned to cover the LA Clippers at training camp. And training camp was down at uc Irvine, a gymnasium called at the time the Brent Events Center because the Brand family donated a lot of money. It was the home of the ant Eaters. Yes, if you're not familiar, the ant Eaters, the only mascot in college sports that sounds like it came from the rejected episode of Sesame Street after Dark the ant Eaters, and that day it was
also that gymnasium. The Brenavan Center was also home to probably the slowest fast break in recorded history.
But let's get to the point, please.
When the whistle blew, So we're playing the media basketball game, which is code for a collection of people who write and talk about sports trying to remember how knees work and how to dribble a basketball and not carry it like.
It's a football.
So we didn't play against the coaches, I want to be very clear, which was probably a good thing, because this was the era of the Clippers.
Were the Clippers a national punch line. They didn't win anything. They were a joke.
They were in the draft lottery every year. They were going to rename the Draft Lottery presented by the Clippers. But we were coached that day by Bill Fitch, Hall of famer NBA lifer, the man who led the Boston Celtics to a championship with Larry Bird and coach Taquima lai Jahwan and got to the NBA Finals on this
fateful day. He also coached my fat ass. Now this is the part of the story where I should tell you that in my head I was an elite pre point shooter, a young sniper, and I went into that day thinking I'm going to impress these guys so much They're going to offer me a ten day contract. It turns out I wasn't. I was not at that point. Moneyball Maller that would come later. I learned my ability to shoot much later in life. I was not exactly in game shape. I did not realize that this was
a thing. I look like the before photo when you go to the gym. You know, they sign up for memberships at the gym. They signed you up and they said, well, here's like the wall, and here's the people before and after, and they look really fat and disgusting, and the next photo they're totally ripped. I was built at that time in my life more like a breakfast burrito than a shooting guard. Fleet of foot was not a phrase anyone was using. So midway through this media game and quotes
Coach Fitch blew the whistle. Now keep in mind, I'm just trying to stay alive at this point. It wasn't a little too as I said, This was a full throated, gym stopping sound of the whistle. And you know how sound just bounces off a gymnasium, the sound of a basketball dribbling or a whistle, it just echoes to the whole thing. So everyone froze, and Coach is staring at me. He then paused for a second, trying to collect his thoughts,
and he continued to look at me. He said, in my entire coaching career, you are the worst player I have ever coached. Now, this is a man who coached teams that went fifteen and sixty seven. He coached the Clippers and the New Jersey Nets when they were in the sewer, and somehow, some way, I was rock bottom. That is how he described me. Now, my friends in the media, guys like Alex norm and Lee, you don't know who they are. They're all either retired now or dead,
unfortunately because time has passed. They were older than me, and they were my eyewitnesses who reminded me of that particular moment to bust my balls for years.
Now, here's the thing.
Bill Fitch didn't just humiliate me and move on. He actually befriended me. Now we weren't great friends, but around media sessions, I saw him a couple times a week. We taught coops and he'd also talk about life, and he'd pull me aside and give me little nuggets about how the NBA really worked and what really goes on behind the scenes. And I had been there since the early days. For me, it was like this guy's a dinosaur, and he didn't call it the industrial complex of sports.
That's what we call it now.
It really wasn't like that because in that era, even in the nineties, the NBA was still run mostly as a mom and pop operation. It was really the two thousands it became completely corporate. But among the things that we chatted about, he told me about how perception always beats reality, you know, the things that are kind of normal for me now, but at that time I was like, oh,
this is interesting. He told me how the narrative matters more than the box score, and how the machine choose up players, how politics are involved, and who gets the good coaching jobs, and you know, he said, even in your business as a media guy, you know, it's it's you know who you know, not what you know, and all this stuff, and so it's just things that I take for granted now, but at.
That time I didn't.
And he pointed out that the league doesn't run on basketball, it runs on power and spin.
And he also mentioned how.
The talent gap from the top team and he coached the Celtics and the Rockets, who are very good teams, down to the worst team.
He said, and this is thirty years ago.
I guess almost now, but he said it's it wasn't that big. And if you are disciplined, if you're focused, you play fundamentally sound basketball, you will have a chance in every game with about two minutes ago. The thing that separates the teams often is the star players are better on the good teams as opposed to the bad teams. They make plays in crunch time. So I mean things like that, And it really stuck with me when he said that teams that get blown out on a regular
basis are lazy, they're not well coached, they're undisciplined. And it's true in all sports. Yeah, defense and effort can close the gap on talent deficiency, a sense of urgency, the ripple effect. I've carried that with me for over twenty five years since that conversation, and it was a badge of honor. Bill Fitch passed away a couple of years ago, a gruff, rough man to most, an acquired taste to some of his players. He was a kind
man to me. And this is not a eulogy because he's been gone for a while.
But the man made a career.
He was in a military, he was younger, the NBA. The man had an NBA title, he was Coach of the Year. I think he won it more than once. He might have only won it once. And he had more basketball stories than most of us have hair. Certainly I don't have that much air now. And to me, though, he's the guy who looked me dead in the eye and declared in front of all of my colleagues in the media that I.
Was the worst player he'd ever coached. Hell yeah, And I thought of that.
Listen, this guy, coach Larry Bird, who was the greatest player he ever coached, And I here I am, and I'm the worst. And you always remember the best, you always remember the worst. And somehow that became a big thing. I'm badge of honor because that whistle was not just about a bad screen or a my ass not getting back in transition defense, or blowing a layup or whatever. It was a moment I learned how all of the sporting world really works. It began that gym, the machine,
the mythology, all of it. And so when I see something like the Celtics media game this week fifty seven to four, again, coaches dunking on writers like they're trying to settle a grudge from nineteen eighty six or something like that. I laugh because I've been there, right, I've been there. I've been in that situation. I didn't just cover a blowout. I was the blowout. But here's the thing. When the dust settled, I walked out of that gym
with something better than a box score. I walked out with again a casual friendship with a guy that was a Hall of Fame coach, and that gave me those days. I have so many members about covering sports. In those days, it was much different than it is now. It was a fraternity and my education from I learned from Tommy Disorda with the Dodgers, learned from Bill Fitch. These are two of the big coaches that kind of as a young kid taught me the ways of the world in
covering sports. And there were some others along the way, but those were two of the big ones. And so it was pretty cool. I get this education and a story that still.
Lands all these years later.
I just popped right back into my head. I was like I was, that's probably twenty years old at the time. It's just craziness.
Crazy. Now some guys get their basketball.
Epiphanies with Larry Bird or Michael Jordan or Magic.
Johnson or something like that.
I got mine with Bill Fitch's whistle, and honestly I would not trade that for anything. I wouldn't It was an amazing, amazing time. So I want to thank Joe Mizoula and the Celtics for bringing that memory back, which I know was in my head. It was buried in the back of my head. So it's kind of cool now turning the page on that. You've likely heard the phrase it never rains in Los Angeles unless it does, so when it does, it's not a sprinkle, it's not
a drizzle. It's not light rain. When it rains in LA it's as if someone upstairs found the unleashed chaos button and pressed it. Because no matter what level of rain I say, it doesn't sprinkle or drizzle, they'll often say light.
Rain bull crap.
It's bull crap because whatever rain comes down in LA in the La basin, the city isn't ready.
It never is.
The storm rolls in like a substitute teacher walking into a junior high school eighth grade class five minutes before the bell, and immediately the kids are throwing spitballs at him.
Nobody knows what to do.
So the other night I went into the mother Ship. From the remote studio, I shade my way into the Fox Sports Radio studios and beautiful Sherman Oaks just down the hill from bell Air, and so there I was doing my show.
Whatever.
Now I had heard it was going to rain, but when you live in La you don't normally look at the weather. I don't really worry about it. I don't watch the local news anymore. So I would usually get the weather from the local news. And normally I find out about the weather because someone will says, Hey, it's gonna rain so and so, and somebody had said that. So I did have some vague reference to rain, and so I went in. I normally tried to avoid going in on the rain. And I'll tell you why in
a minute, as I explained this story. So I showed up. It was perfectly fine. On my drive in there was no rain. And then at some point when I was getting my steps in and ching around the Fox Sports Radio studios the hallways there I saw I looked out the window and I was like, oh, it's raining. Oh man, it looks like it's raining DC amount and so I meant to listen. Nobody knows what to do here, so
I'm doing the overnight show. I'm insuing with Oaks. It starts pouring, and now not the polite you know, I go to the East Coast, visit my brothers in New York, and sometimes you visit him and the rain it's just a casual, light rain and it's fine. You know, you show up, you get a trench coat. Gently taps her umbrella. Now this was la downpour, the kind that turns freeways into an audition tape for The Deadliest Catch four h five edition or one edition. So you know how people
always say, well, Californians can't drive on the rain. I would say they're wrong. Now, I would also say everywhere I've been, and I've been in Boston, New York, Minnesota, I've been to Florida, nobody knows how to drive in the rain. But people like the goof on California, so they don't know how to drive in the rain. So it's like, yeah, they don't know how to drive. Nobody knows how to drive the way, but California don't drive
in the rain. That's my argument. They actually are doing an audition because everyone's trying to be in the movies. They're doing an audition for Evil caneval stunt School is what they're doing. I'm telling you every lane, every lane is a Roulette wheel. It just is the moment the first rain drop hits that asphalt. The one on one Freeway in southern California becomes a slipping slide, the four oh five, depending on what part you're in, a demolition derby.
And every Prius driver a philosopher pondering why me, whymy Now I don't drive a Prius, so I'm not in that crowd.
Now.
Normally not to give you my exact root or route on my way home, but I normally start out taking the one oh one, which goes out near Sherman Oaks, and I circle around the mountains and the Hollywood Freeway, the ribbon of pavement that snakes its way past these iconic landmarks, the Hollywood Bowl, Hollywood Boulevard, Sunset, Melrose.
These are iconic places in LA and.
I get a great view of the Capitol Records Building, the building, the house that Nat King Cole built, the spot where legends like Sinatra and Dean Martin, the Beatles, the Beach Boys all etched themselves into the soundtrack.
Of America Immortal Musical Acts. They recorded songs in that building. I know the building.
Years ago, my fat ass did a radio remote from the roof of the Capitol Records building during a rainstorm.
Floated kind of in my head.
At footed it flooded, I felt like I was floating because the roof was covered in water.
So it flooded. The roof of.
The most famous building in that part of Hollywood, and one of the most famous buildings in the world, was like a puddle foreshadowing, possibly because this time the Hollywood Freeway was an actual river and I, without a paddle, had to find another way home. The freeway was not closed, however it should have been, so I determined not to go that way because I've taken it in the past and thought I was going to die.
I almost did die multiple times. I said, I know I'm going to die.
I don't want to die today. Maybe tomorrow or the next day, but not today. So I detoured past Dodger Stadium because nothing says life choice is like doing a late night drive, which is really like a you know, some kind of Olympic event around stalled cars. You know, you see sunset levart over their big rigs, creeping like
they're hauling nitroglycerine. Bunch of wannabe bunch of wannabe Vin Diesel's treating wet pavement like it's a racetrack, and they're trying to show people that they're ready for the next big movie and the trilogy, which is more than a trilogy now of Fast and Furious. I saw three accidents in fifteen minutes. And the thing about is nobody panic, Like nobody stopped in Los Angeles. We just nod at the wreckage like it's part of the scenery. It's part
of the show. Do a little rubbernecking, you turn your head, do a little nod. It's just like the palm trees, the neon lights.
You'll just see a.
Hydro planning camra off to the left and there you go. So by the time, by the time I pulled into the north Woods, the long winding road in the north Woods, soaked at this point in anxiety and windshield wiper fluid that had gotten a lot of work. I needed a cigarette. I don't smoke, but I needed to cigarette. I needed one anyway, So this is the part of the story where someone always says, well, why don't they fix the infrastructure, ben they've got all that tax money. It's a lot
of taxation in California. And the reason they don't is because this is La this is southern California, and they get a lot of tax money. But those politicians need a lot of money. And not to get political on the podcast or anything like that, however, they spend their money building movie sets. I guess I don't really think they build many of those anymore. But they don't build storm drains. And I have notice though, like the people that work on the roads, and they're hardworking people, they're
hardworking people. No one ever seems to do advance work. It's well known. It's this trend in southern California. Is like one of the reasons the city burned down is because of the incompetent politicians not saying why don't we get out in front on this one, Why don't we do some fire maintenance.
Why don't we have water.
Ready just in case because there's gonna be this day where you know things are gonna burn and like it's gonna rain, Why don't we I don't know. Why don't we clear out the storm drains so the highways don't flood?
How about that?
No?
No, no, why don't we instead?
Why don't we wait until everything floods, everything floods, and then then we'll send out emergency crews to be heroes and save everyone when they could have done the work in advance, and then no one would have kissed their ass and said how great they are.
Uh So, instead it's like, Ahna, we don't need to do that.
We we don't need to invest in asphalt that can handle water better.
Because it listen, look at the math.
It doesn't rain very much one storm and the entire freeway system looks like a half finished water park.
But I digress.
So they tell me this is the price to live in Paradise, that you get sunshines?
Is it three hundred some days a year?
And on the day it rains, the whole city collapses like a croissant, flaky layers in the air everywhere. Fine, fine, but if this is the new normal, this is the new normal. I am filing a formal request for a Fox Sports Radio company boat.
Now. I'm sure that the company, with all the.
Resources that they have are going to go out of their way to provide me with a boat. Of course, it's more likely that they will provide me with a dinghy.
That's right, a dingy, not which.
Is kind of a boat. You take the dinghy when you dock the boat, you gotta take the dingy. So maybe I'll get the dingy. You know, dingy put the mal or militia logo on it. Because you live in southern California.
You live in the LA area. When it rains, you're not driving anymore.
No, no, no, no, there's no driving here. You are navigating, is what you're doing. Some navigation is what's going on. On that note, I want to.
Thank you guys. Now the mail bag is open.
Don't forget about Benny Versus the Penny, And would really love for you to watch that let other people know about it.
And I say, well, it's on YouTube, it's free.
I assume you know how to navigate your way around the YouTube. Get those numbers up and grow the show. It's exciting. It's exciting. And if you watch Benny Versus the Penny. I actually got an email from YouTube which indicates they are noticing the success that the show is having. Which is a good encouraging sign as we are now heading into week seven of Benny Versus the Penny, So I'm happy about that the way the show is growing, and I look forward to bigger and better things with
the great Tom Looney on that particular show. If you'd like to submit a question for the mail bag, and I haven't checked yet because I do everything at the last minute, the mailbag is on Sunday, That's not technically true. I don't do everything at the last minute on this podcast. I normally rolled into the podcast studio and just crank the mic on and start yapping. That's kind of how the podcast thing is supposed to work. So it hadn't crossed my mind. You had to check the mail bag.
If you'd like to send a question in I would recommend doing it by the end of the day today on Friday, which is the seventeenth day of October, and you can email me at fifth hour and the actual email if I could I remember the email, I mean check the email here one second, the email address for the show, the email that we use for the show, which is very simple. It's real fifth hour, not just for that real fifth hour at gmail dot com.
Do not send it to the other one.
And ohio Al knows the email address fer dog Alf. We'd love to get some other people involved in this, so if you would like to support the show, you can email Real Fifth Hour at gmail dot com. I mentioned Danny G will likely be back at some point over the weekend. Got some other tales to tell from things that have happened and whatnot. On that note, though, on that note, we thank you, We appreciate you, we
love you for listening. You are my favorite person in the world for doing this and supporting the Overnight Show and all the other nonsense that we have on this podcast and everything else. Have a wonderful start to your weave. My weekend starts now. As soon as I get done with this podcast, my weekend begins, and my weekend will be no different than my week I plan on sitting around watching a lot of sports this weekend.
That is the plan. Anyway, have a great.
Day in asta pasta later skater, I think that's how Is that how you do it?
Danny later skater?
No, No, all right, we'll clean this up and post. We're gonna clean this thing up and post. Everything will be good. Don't worry about We got this now, I'm telling you we got that. Danny. Yes, now, all right, Danny's not He's in the other room on the other side. He's nodding his head. Yes, Danny's he's doing all the production. Yeah, I know you're doing the production. I got I got you, all right, Daddy, all right, thank you, got a murder.
I gotta go.