The Five: Run, Paul, Run?

Paul Finebaum as a voice of reason in politics? Maybe so.

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I.

Here’s one thing I’m coming to realize about living through the most surreal political era in modern American history: Things that might have struck me as mind-blowingly unfathomable five years ago now feel entirely mundane. And so this week, when I heard that ESPN talk-radio personality Paul Finebaum was considering a run for Senate in the state of Alabama, I was not particularly surprised, any more than I might have been surprised if Finebaum had picked Auburn to beat Oklahoma two weeks ago.

In fact, the more I thought about it, the more it made a weird amount of sense to me, which either means I’ve lost all grip on what reality used to be, or it means that Finebaum embracing politics might actually prove a small step toward helping us grapple our way back toward some semblance of normalcy.

Back in 2012, the New Yorker’s Reeves Wiedemann wrote a long profile of Finebaum that felt like one of the first real attempts by the Ivy League cognoscenti to translate the nascent strands of Trumpism. Finebaum hosted a radio show focused almost entirely on Southern college football that blended elements of Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. He was a former newspaper columnist who had become famous in Alabama for his incendiary takes, but he understood that his callers were the stars of the show.

For whatever reason, Finebaum’s deadpan energy and his preternatural ability to never break character or even offer a hint of a smile unleashed the id of his listeners. They would say crazy things and Finebaum would let those crazy things linger in the air so that those people would realize just how insane they sounded. Over time, he became an essential figure in Southern culture, in part because he exposed its extremes even as he embraced its unique passion for college football. Here is an example of one on-air conversation that Wiedemann captured, with a dude named Glen from Louisiana, who also admitted that he celebrated an LSU win over Alabama by drinking thirty beers.

“They played like a bunch of queer little boys,” Glen said, after a loss by Louisiana State.

“What is your sexual preference, anyway, Glen?” Finebaum asked.

“Hot women.”

“Who’s the governor of Louisiana?”

“Bobby Jindal.”

“Did you vote for him?”

“No.”

“You couldn’t vote for David Duke.”

“I would have, though. Anybody but Obama.”

“Why don’t you like President Obama?”

“Because I just don’t—man, this ain’t got nothing to do with L.S.U. football, Paul. That’s what I called for!”

“What are you drinking?”

“Busch Light—you know, man beer.”

“Is your wife an L.S.U. fan?”

“Aw, hell yeah. I’d divorce her if she wadn’t.”

The zenith (or nadir) of the Finebaum program may have come in 2011, when a caller who went by the name Al from Dadeville confessed on-air that he’d poisoned the trees at Auburn’s Toomer’s Corner. Finebaum presumed it was a joke; it turned out it wasn’t a joke, and Al from Dadeville—real name Harvey Updyke—was convicted of a felony. He’d felt so comfortable talking about it on Finebaum’s show that he confessed to his own crime.

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II.

If all of this sounds utterly insane, that’s because it is. But the thing about Finebaum is that he’s always understood what he’s doing. The chaos is controlled. He spews his own hot takes, yes, but over the years, his role has become more calculated. He’s more of an emcee now. He recognizes when his callers have gone too far, and he exposes them for their cruelty and stupidity. When one caller made fun of another for having lung cancer, Finebaum replied, “I’m not going to respond, but you can make a complete ass out of yourself and go right ahead.” (Finebaum later made the rare move of banning that caller from his show.) In 2024, after Finebaum deemed a longtime caller delusional, the caller wished a heart attack on Finebaum. Only one side came out looking dumber amid that exchange.

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III.

It was late last Saturday night, and I will admit, I was in a mood. I imagine you’ve probably been there yourself; I imagine that, whatever kind of team you happen to root for in whatever competitive endeavor you happen to immerse yourself in, there are moments after an excruciating defeat when you wonder why you even bother to put yourself through this, and whether anything is ever going to change, and this is not just true for New York Mets fans.

There is that moment in Groundhog Day when Bill Murray’s character traverses from hedonism to nihilism, and this is what that football game on Saturday night felt like to me. This was the toaster in the bathtub; this was the exploding truck. This was about as low as it gets. And then it somehow got lower.