How Papi Le Batard kind and affable and fraudulent changed sports TV

Publish date: 2022-10-21

Fathers, for some inexplicable reason, manage to pull off the art of bullshitting brazenly. And it is absolutely an art. It can be tantalizing, terrifying and, depending on what stage of life you’re in, flat exhausting.

Yet they strive to be our heroes — consciously or not — typically by being the most earnest version of themselves. Gonzalo Le Batard became a cult sports hero — the delightful, comical, sincere version of himself — by introducing to America’s afternoon audience the side of his personality often only seen by his children. He is Papi to the world of sports entertainment, where, for nearly a decade, he was the unanticipated star of ESPN’s highly meta, highly quirky “Highly Questionable” show alongside his son, Dan.

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“My father has always been a bit of a ham,” Dan Le Batard told The Athletic. “Throughout childhood, he’d fake answer a phone that wasn’t ringing and have entire conversations. He referred to himself as a version of the Spanish word for fish. Pescado. But he’d call himself pesculo. Half fish. Half asshole. And then breach the sea with his ass in the air.”

Papi’s magnetism has never waned. It can’t. He merely needed a platform for the world to appreciate his humor, his delivery, his timing, his ability to deliver performances in a way that made such a far-fetched concept gain traction, and then work, for nearly 10 years. ESPN was rigorous in its approach of providing sportswriters — or former sportswriters — a platform to offer takes on the current chatter surrounding the sports world. It had a lane and it stayed there for a good long while. The Le Batards, and specifically Papi, shifted everything.

“The very idea of putting him on television, the point was to mock the very thing that we were doing,” said ESPN’s Bomani Jones, who was a regular on the show with Dan and Papi for several years. “He was there to mock the idea that we actually know what we’re talking about. Dan was like, ‘I can put my dad on television and he can do the same thing as the rest of us.’ That was pretty bold to say I can get my dad out here at my seven-figure job to say the same shit.”

As the show that never wanted to take itself seriously grew in popularity, the persona of Papi around the converging world of sports and pop culture swelled. Hip-hop duo Rae Sremmurd genuinely went nuts seeing Papi hit the whip. Pat Sajak strangled him during one show. After the Miami Heat won a title with The Big Three, Papi doused himself with champagne. The father-son duo was fun, firmly-out-of-the-box entertainment on a network that was known to be, at least at the time, fairly buttoned-up. Papi often told Dan early on that he expected the show to be canceled within its first six weeks. It was too weird, he told his son, too random. It reminded him of “Seinfeld.”

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“A show about nothing with great characters,” Papi told The Athletic.

With the Le Batards, “Highly Questionable” had its sublime personalities. It was eventually headlined by who else but Papi, its amiable breakout star, now 78. It wasn’t a show about nothing, per se. It was about the human connection, co-anchored by a man who fled communism to pursue an existence his family believed he could thrive in 60 years ago now. Fifty years after Papi left Cuba in August of 1961, he was must-see TV on ESPN, his son at his side. The show just needed time to bloom. Papi was always going to help it get there.

Papi was born on Sept. 7, 1943, in Havana. He grew up in La Vibora, which is a borough smack-dab in the center of Cuba’s capital city. It was a quaint neighborhood where he and his school-aged friends played baseball in the streets. He went on to play left field for his high school baseball team.

“He says his nickname was ‘Legs’ because he was a fleet-footed baseball player,” Dan said, “but I believe him to be lying. He is always doing that, making fake nicknames for himself and lying.”

Papi’s father and his brothers were part of a famous orchestra, La Orquesta Hermanos Le Batard, which made that kind of bombastic, big band music that became a hit in Cuba. They loved music, but like Papi, also loved baseball. One of the resounding sports memories he has while back in Cuba is watching Sandy Amoros’ famous catch in left field in Game 7 of the 1955 World Series. The catch helped the Brooklyn Dodgers beat the New York Yankees. Papi was 12. Six years later, his father put him on a plane to New York City. He had an uncle there, whom he stayed with for a year. Papi worked at factories in the Brooklyn area and went to night school to learn English.

Soon after, he went to Fairleigh Dickinson University in Rutherford, N.J. He received a master’s degree in industrial engineering and worked a variety of engineering jobs. He married Lourdes, and in 1968, Dan was born. The Le Batards relocated to Miami, where Papi would commute between Chicago, where his work was based, and Miami every week for a year so his sons could stay in the same area for school. Sports were the avenue where Papi and Dan connected the most. He got the company seats at the Orange Bowl when the Buffalo Bills came to Miami. They would make a point to watch the Games of the Week on TV, back when the family had only three network channels.

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“My father did coach all my teams, though,” Dan said. “Football. Soccer. Baseball. My mom ran the concession stand and my father coached all my teams. I missed the baseball all-star team one year by one coach’s vote. His.”

Dan’s younger brother, David, is a renowned artist in the Miami area. Dan said David was the kid who got “kicked out of games as the right fielder for throwing rocks at his center fielder. He was a running back who’d forget the snap count because he was making sure the wind would blow through the ear hole of his helmet with a whistle.” So Papi and Dan, who admittedly wasn’t the best athlete, bonded primarily through sports. It’s where he and his father could always find a way to reach the same wavelength. Years later, when Dan told Papi that he wanted to pursue a career in sportswriting, let’s just say that initially it didn’t go over all that smoothly. Coaching your kid in youth sports is one thing, seeing them chase a flimsy dream in sportswriting? That’s another thing.

“Imagine that you flee communism, make all the sacrifices, drive a shitty 1969 Valiant with a hole in the floorboard and a glove compartment that would open every time we hit a bump just to get your kid a private education and he turns down engineering scholarships because … he wants to write about sports,” said Dan. “I might as well have told him I was going to college to become a heroin addict. He didn’t think there was any money in this and ESPN just paid HIM severance to go away. Joke is on him.”

Over a decade ago, ESPN wanted to find ways to branch out to different target audiences. Among those was the Latinx audience, said ESPN executive producer Erik Rydholm, who helped create hit shows like “Highly Questionable,” “Pardon the Interruption” and “Around the Horn.”

While Dan had his radio show in Southern Florida, he used to have his producers call Papi and ask him for hot takes on the Marlins or Dolphins and fail to tell him he was on live radio.

“Papi would go off on an unhinged rant and it was pure and wonderful,” Rydholm said in an email. “We flew Dan and Papi up to D.C. for a screen test in March before a September (2012) show launch. What we clearly learned over an afternoon of taping was Dan was going to be thoughtful and self-conscious and extremely sweaty and that Papi was already a star.”

At the time, ESPN’s former president John Skipper and senior vice president John Walsh encouraged Rydholm, Dan Le Batard and the production staff to get weird. The show launched in a mid-day slot on ESPN2. The stakes were very low. Jones was eventually given a full-time role to help provide more balance on the show. It took pressure off Papi. He could soar off script more often. The Le Batard duo became a trio, and Papi had a new favorite son.

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“The whole concept was to take a risk, develop an audience, and grow to the point where we would hopefully get promoted to ESPN,” Rydholm said. “All of us were placing a modest bet on this thing that was VERY unusual — what I hoped would feel like a combo sports show/reality show/family sitcom.”

That’s what it evolved into. The original set was designed to mimic a 1960s South Florida kitchen, which is where the Le Batards gathered at the table. The man who fled Cuba, who worked in factories around Brooklyn, who commuted across the country every week to ensure stability for his family, was put on ESPN to offer sports insight and, as viewers soon learned, the sort of genuine humor only he could provide. Asked if he leaned on any of his favorite TV characters over the years to prepare for his surprising starring role, Papi said: “I enjoyed ‘Columbo’ with Peter Falk. Great show about a detective that pretended to be dumb, but was smart like a fox.”

The show is prerecorded, which means it is more heavily produced than other shows at ESPN. But that never stopped Papi from improvising. Some Papisms were scripted, but there were times when Jones recalls Papi went rogue. That spawned some YouTube-worthy moments. Like the time he asked former Dallas Cowboys defensive back Orlando Scandrick if he’d heard the new Kodak Black. There were some hits in which Papi nailed, like the verse from “Freeway” on Jay-Z’s “What We Do.”

“No one can remember how they came up with the idea to do the rap verses,” Jones said. “To this day, I wonder how that came to be. That was the thing. He got off on the reinforcement that he knows. It would light him up.”

Papi wore gas masks, panda masks, he rapped, he danced, he swore, he flipped birds, he gave hugs. Like a core of friends just shooting the shit, it became a show where you were proud to pick up on the inside jokes. It felt consistent in that way, which is difficult to pull off on a sports show. He conjured up personas for the show, including a bookie named “Juanito.”

“Juanito was a character of my imagination,” Papi said. “One day we were stuck in a segment and I just took the banana phone and I just started talking to Juanito and we made him our bookie. Just a crazy idea that stayed with the show. I used to do things like that when my sons were kids.”

And he was rarely, if ever, starstruck. It was typically the opposite.

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“Lil’ Wayne came in one time, awed to meet him, smelling like weed,” Dan said. “He hid behind my leg when Papi appeared, peering out like a kid would with one of the characters at Disney. He had $100,000 worth of diamonds smiling in his mouth. After Lil’ Wayne left, my father, who had been very kind and affable and fraudulent, looks at me and says, ‘who the fuck was that?’”

The authenticity of Papi ultimately led to so many of his victims forgetting what was destined to happen. He made everyone happier, more comfortable, and included, like they were part of the Le Batard family. On April 20, 2016, Papi changed the show forever. He ghosted ESPN’s Pablo Torre with a handshake offer. From then on, everyone was on notice. But so many managed to forget.

There is a YouTube compilation nearly 19 minutes long of his various fake-outs over the years. It started with fellow co-hosts like Torre, Jones, Jon Weiner (Stugotz), Israel Gutierrez, Mina Kimes, Katie Nolan, Sarah Spain and Jemele Hill. It continued on. Hall-of-Famers fell for it. Pedro Martinez and Ed Reed and Clyde Drexler. Ric Flair and Trick Daddy and Hank Azaria. The list is long.

“I have to be aware at all times,” Papi said. “People in the street, especially at Heat games, try to get me all the time.”

Papi’s rapport with Kimes, who joined the show more regularly in 2016, was apparent early on. Just so happens that she fell for it so often.

“The thing that people don’t see around the times he got me is how bad he felt after. Every time. He felt awful,” Kimes said. “The thing that you should know is that none of it was his idea. The individual times in which he would do it, they would never do it. They were at the prompting of producers.”

Before becoming part of “Highly Questionable,” Kimes, now an NFL analyst at ESPN, was relatively inexperienced on TV. Papi was always there to lift her up.

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“I was really hard on myself and Papi was always very patient with me, but also recognized in the way that dads and grandpas do, when I needed support from him,” she said. “He would tell me I did a good job or blamed himself often. I think that was invaluable to me at the beginning of my career in television.”

Papi’s natural charisma is an untapped well. Kimes said it made laughing that much harder even better. Everyone else agrees.

“I want to be clear: all credit to Papi. Quincy Jones says that as a producer, ‘you can control only so much — you have to leave room for the magic,’” Rydholm said. “Papi brought magic to this show.”

The Le Batards said an emotional goodbye to ESPN on Jan. 4. Later that month, Dan Le Batard and Skipper announced together they were launching Meadowlark Media, a new content venture with an initial focus on sports. Last week, Michael Schur, co-creator of “Parks & Recreation,” and Hill were announced as new creative advisors at Meadowlark.

The Le Batard family moving on ended one of the most creative and unique shows on television. As Jones said, in an industry that tries to take itself as seriously as possible all the time, Papi and Dan — and the eventual slew of co-hosts — changed the paradigm for future shows.

“He’s one of one,” Jones said of Papi. “You’re not ever going to have anyone else who can do this, because in order for this to happen, the big combination of factors you need is: You need Dan to be crazy enough to even think of this in the first place and you need Erik to be willing to actually implement it. Those are the things you need to happen. Nobody else is going to try this.”

Dear @lebatardshow and Papi, thank you for 10 amazing years ❤ pic.twitter.com/X7Uyk26fVa

— Highly Questionable (@HQonESPN) January 4, 2021

Kimes said the impact of that era of TV at ESPN helped herself, and other colleagues, adapt to life on camera. The show was not sterile, and in order to reach broader audiences and attract different types of viewership, it needed to exist. The world of sports can be fun.

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“Among the rest of us, it really does just feel like hanging out with the rest of your friends — just in front of a camera,” Kimes said. “I think people are really drawn to that and I think it’s really spread across ESPN in a way that’s really special.”

The lasting influential dynamic of father and son remains atop an important list for the network, but also the family. Papi said over the years they received many letters from parents indicating that the show made them aware of the importance of fatherhood. Papi also represented change in a field dominated by White American men. Asked if he takes pride in being a trailblazer on TV, he deflected the compliment and replied, “I’m so glad the show lasted a lot longer than we expected and people were amused with it. I feel the viewers were able to learn who the real Dan was. Not pride as much as gratitude to be able to spend all that time with my son.”

In that farewell video, Papi said his experience on “Highly Questionable” will be something that he will treasure until the day he dies. Lastly, he teased the show that the next day would still be going on in their absence, with “his favorite son, Bomani Jones. I’ll see you never.”

He was wearing a tuxedo T-shirt.

“They say most comedy comes from pain, a need to escape, and I suppose I’ll never understand the size of his pain growing up in communism and fleeing it,” Dan said. “But my father has always been able to turn up the volume on bombastic and be loud, cartoonishly over the top. Again, though, most of his comedy is accidental. Like the time my mother was in the stands of a game I was playing in as a child, talking to the other wives about how coaching had made Papi so much more relaxed and calm, and then looked up to see him rolling around on the floor fighting the opposing coach, that damn Wayne Usina.”

At 78, Papi Le Batard is not ignoring retired life. He’s in charge now.

As Dan wrote in an email: “My father has come out of retirement in a funny video on our twitter feed…..he did so with such fanfare that you are excused for having missed it…..many people did…..too many people did…..ageism…..my father has UNRETIRED triumphantly to be the head of the org chart at all of Meadowlark Media….I report to him…..Everyone does…..We are not using him for content at the moment, as he is an old man and resting, but we expect to ride his ass to great glory and profit over the summer……….ESPN rented his accent for a few years……But now he is the cartoon voice shouting curses from atop Meadowlark Media and shooting double middle fingers at the bums and critics and Charles Barkley.”

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic)

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