Dan Le Batard did not want to grave dance, but he did not like his former rival Hank Goldberg, who died earlier this week at 82 years old.
Le Batard’s co-host, Jon “Stugotz” Weiner, who worked as the executive producer for Goldberg on WQAM in Miami before joining forces with Le Batard at 790 the Ticket, pointed out that he had a nonexistent relationship with his former mentor —  who’d spent the last decade he was on-air ripping Le Batard. There was universal agreement that Goldberg, who also covered gambling and the NFL for ESPN, was a legend, but it was clear Le Batard’s memories were not fond.
“If not for Hank Goldberg, this [show] would not exist,” Le Batard said, pointing out that his “coaching tree” had “belched” out Weiner, but little else.
Weiner posited that Goldberg saw Le Batard as a “threat,” to his ego and perch in dominating Miami — the vitriol was so profound that, in building the Ticket from scratch, he knew he had to hire Le Batard, who at that point was a columnist for the Miami Herald but did not have an audio platform to compete with him.
The members of Le Batard’s show, including Weiner and Mike Ryan, recalled that having the platform to fight back against Goldberg’s barbs was part of the motivation of Le Batard agreeing to try it in the first place.
“I don’t want to get aggregated as ‘Le Batard dances on Hank Goldberg’s grave,'” Le Batard said. “I would never say I was happy to see anybody die. I’m just saying that I was never that happy when he was alive. He was truly terrible to so many people.”
Ryan said that Goldberg’s on-air persona was that he was an “insufferable dick — I mean, to everybody … Like the greatest characters, it was pretty close within his own personality.”
Le Batard said he would decline to specify on the stories of how Goldberg “tried to play defense on my career,” and gave him credit for being a giant in putting sports talk on the map in the Miami market, helping it go national and normalizing gambling talk when it had previously been out of the mainstream.
Weiner also talked about how once people got into Goldberg’s good graces he could be “immensely loyal.”
“There were also a lot of bad qualities to Hank. He wasn’t terribly nice to a lot of people. That in part really shaped his show, the ratings he got from the show. He was respectful of people he thought he needed to be respectful of — Chris Mortensen, Al Davis, John Saunders, people at ESPN,” Weiner said. “But when there was a perceived local threat out there — no, he did not react well to it. And you were a perceived local threat. You were young, up-and-coming, connected, opinionated. You were smarter than he was; he knew it. And therefore, he took a lot of it, especially on-air, on you. I think Hank was proud of me and happy for me. I think he was proud of my success. What happened was, I had my success with you — and that drove him crazy.”