A Nice Moment, I Thought

Of all the things that have surprised me about The Confessor Nation's attitudes towards The Little One -- all of those surprising things are among the delights of running this site -- it's that there is a significant faction out there that doesn't care much for Junior Miller.  I guess it shouldn't surprise me -- every host has his fans and detractors.  But I freely confess (of course) that Craig is one of my favorites on the station.

One of the things I like about Craig is that he isn't afraid to take definitive positions.  He has an analytical turn of mind, he favors us with his analyses, and he is pretty fearless about his opinions.  He doesn't hedge, he doesn't engage in endless qualifications on his point of view, he just blasts out his HSO's and there's no doubt about where he stands.

But even more admirable is that he frequently recalls those positions when they turn out not to be supported by subsequent events and reports on it to the Muser audience.  (I've noted instances of this in at least one or two previous posts.)

So when he opined that (1) that it didn't make much difference who the Mavs beat, if anyone, in Round 1 because they'd quickly be ushered out by the Lakers in Round 2, and (2) that Jason Terry should spend most of the playoffs reposing on the bench -- in rather harsh terms, I might add -- I wondered whether he would say anything about those views after the sweep and Terry's terrific performances.

And then I heard that the Musers were going to interview Terry.  And I wondered even more intensely.

Well.

Sports talk radio guys are entitled to their opinions.

It was hard to argue with Craig's opinion about Terry.  He was a big-talking, cheap-shotting, non-defending  .  . .  well, one could go on -- and Craig did.  It wasn't personal -- it was well within the bounds of sports-talk radio and, as with most of Craig's opinions, supported by the record.

So when Terry  goes off in the playoffs, it was unexpected.  A pleasant surprise, but most assuredly a surprise.

Junior didn't owe anyone an apology.

But on Monday's show, well in advance of the interview, Craig acknoweldged his prior opinion and said that he owed Jason Terry an apology.

I caught the interview on the Top Ten, and wondered how Junior would approach it.  Directly, as it turned out.  He began the interview with a personal apology to Terry, acknowledging his earlier critical opinion of The Jet.  To his credit, Terry brushed it off (I couldn't tell if he was aware of Junior's earlier opinions), although in the course of doing so managed to allude to his own greatness.

And that was the end of it.

I doubt that you hear a lot of sports-talk hosts forthrightly admit to an interviewee that -- on the air, but essentially behind his back -- the host had been slamming him and now regretted it in light of the interviewee's subsequent performance.  But Craig was as fearless in his admission of error as he was in his initial views, and I thought it was a pretty nice moment.