Dave McKenna is a writer for the Washington Post and a former writer for the weekly alternative Washington City Paper. He has a story in today's Washington Post Magazine on youth baseball, his first on sports for the WaPo since 2000. Now why is this news? Read on for the rest of the story.
First, you may know of McKenna from his dealings with the owner of the Washington football team, Daniel Snyder who tried to sue him over an article in the City Paper. That lawsuit was later dropped.
Second, you may not know that McKenna was a writer covering horse racing for the WaPo while also writing a sports column for the City Paper. In 1998, McKenna mentioned Tony Kornheiser in a column. He later encountered Mr. Tony during a Post holiday party and it wasn't a friendly discussion. McKenna told the New York Times' Jay Carr in 2006 that Kornheiser was less than pleased over the mention.
“He jumped up from his table, and said, ‘We got to talk,’ ” Mr. McKenna recounted. “I thought he was joking because I had always thought he was this funny guy on the radio. But he took me in the hallway and said, ‘You will never work for a real newspaper’ and then he opens his jacket and pulls out a copy of the column that had all this magic marker on it and writing in the margins.”
“My jaw just dropped,” Mr. McKenna continued. “His face turned orange while he was yelling at me and I thought, ‘Wait till my friends hear about this.’ This really famous funny guy seemed like he was going crazy.”
In 2000, McKenna mentioned Kornheiser again in his City Paper column and in this case, the hammer dropped.
The next time Mr. McKenna wrote about Mr. Kornheiser was in 2000, upon the retirement of local sports talker Ken Beatrice, an event that was covered with a great deal of hagiography in The Washington Post. But Mr. McKenna noted that back in 1981, Mr. Kornheiser, then a reporter, had written a savage takedown of Mr. Beatrice, causing him a considerable amount of personal pain.
Mr. McKenna was summoned to the office of George Solomon, then the assistant managing editor for sports, and told he was through working for The Post. “He was very nice about it, but said he had a department to run,” Mr. McKenna said.
So McKenna was banished to write concert reviews for the Post until today when he finally wrote a sports story some 14 years after Kornheiser had him jettisoned from the sports section.
With Kornheiser gone from the Post, it's probably safe for McKenna to return to writing sports although another mention might force Mr. Tony to go off the deep end once again.
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