Hey, it's Jeff Zito and thanks for listening to another episode of the Celebrity Jobber podcast. Streaming on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you listen to podcasts, please subscribe. We'd love a five star rating and leave a review. Check out past guests and episodes up on celebrityjobber.com and please follow on Instagram, celebrity underscore jobber underscore podcast or the YouTube channel, which is youtube.com slash the at sign celebrity jobber. You know, if some of these celebrities didn't get their big break and become famous, they might hold a regular, ordinary job. My guest today is a legendary sports journalist turned author. He achieved national recognition as a sports journalist early on in his writing career. He has written sports columns and non sports columns for the Detroit Free Press for a lot of years and he also had a national sports talk show on ESPN. Did he always want to be a journalist? Was there another direction he wanted to pursue earlier in life? What was his big break and his very first job? We're about to find out. Every sports journalist and author Mitch Album is my guest this week on celebrity jobber. The celebrity jobber podcast with Jeff Zito. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, give a five star rating and leave a review. Check out all our past episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you pod. What if these celebrities weren't famous? What would they have become? What was their first job? We're about to find out. Good morning, Mitch. Good morning. I'm such a big fan of yours and really excited to talk to you today, man. So Mitch, I would imagine you were probably watching The Lions game last week. So Dan Campbell knows stranger to calling his own plays, but he hasn't in quite some time and looks like he took that duty away from offensive coordinator John Morton and I was just wondering what your thoughts were on that whole situation. No doubt. No doubt about it. Mitch, can you tell me a little bit about when you were younger and I know when you went to college, your initial major, when you first went to college with sociology, what were you planning on doing with that degree? Well, my initial major was actually music when I first showed up and then I met the Morrie Schwartz who became the Morrie of Tuesdays with Morrie and he taught sociology and I liked him so much and I ended up taking so many of his classes that I had enough credits to major in sociology. I didn't plan on doing anything with it. I just majored in Morrie basically and then I figured out when I graduated I would become a musician, which is exactly what happened. So were you thinking about being a rock star or at an early age was music your first passion, your first love when you were younger? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, music was my first love and I played it all through high school and all through college. I wanted to be a rock star as much as I wanted to be like a songwriter and a producer. I liked the studio. I performed obviously on stage, you always do, as a musician, but the thrill to me was when I was in the studio and I got to play with the buttons and bring up different instruments and things like that. I could have done that the rest of my life. Now, you grew up in New Jersey. Can you tell me a little bit about what your parents did for work? My dad was in middle management contracts and my mom was an interior designer and we grew up just outside of Philadelphia. The Celebrity Jobber podcast with Jeff Seeto. Celebrity Jobber. When did you fall in love with journalism? Was there a particular moment in time where you knew that's what you wanted to do? It was kind of an accident. I was a musician in New York and I'd been doing it for a couple of years and really wasn't succeeding. I worked at night because I was always playing gigs and clubs and things like that at night. I had my days free and I happened to be in a supermarket and they had a newspaper that they gave away for free that I picked up and it said, if you have spare time, we could use some help putting out the newspaper. I went down and volunteered and they gave me an assignment that night. I walked in and they said, okay, here, go out and do this. I'd never written anything and I didn't know anything about journalism. I read newspapers and obviously I guess I had some ability to write. I went out and I wrote a story about what they sent me out on. It was a parking meter, raising the rates for parking meters. The next week in the paper, there was my story with my name on it and I got a little tingle inside and said, wow, I wrote something, I created it, there it is. I started doing it more and more and more and started working at that place 30, 40, 50 hours a week for free as a volunteer. I learned journalism there over the course of the next year or so and then I applied to graduate school and ended up becoming a journalist. What was the moment, Mitch, where everything changed for you in your career? Was there a particular job or a big break maybe that you feel like if you didn't? Well, the opposite of a big break, it was a break from. I was doing very well as a sports writer. I was on ESPN all the time. I did a radio show. I wrote five, six columns a week and then I happened to see the Nightline program and saw that an old college professor of mine, Maury Schwartz, was dying from Lou Gehrig's disease and he was talking to Ted Koppel about what it was like. I had lost touch with him since I had graduated and he and I had been very close in school and I went to go see him once and once turned to twice and twice turned to every Tuesday that he had left. I ended up writing a book about the experience to help him pay his medical bills and that's all it was supposed to be. It was called Tuesdays with Maury but it ended up becoming something much, much bigger than I ever could have anticipated and went from a 20,000 copy run and they thought that that's all that they would ever print or anyone would ever read to now it's the biggest selling memoir in history. That certainly changed my life because instead of sports, now people want to talk to me about people that they lost and death and mourning and disease and the meaning of life and family and forgiveness and those kinds of things and all my books ever since have been about those topics so that happened when I was 37 and that was probably the real bend in my bifurcated life. The Celebrity Jobber Podcast with Jeff Seeto. The Celebrity Jobber Podcast with Jeff Seeto. Mentioning that book, it's such an iconic book and it's a memoir but what gets me, what makes me anxious is when I see people that are writing fiction and I know that your new book right now twice is fiction. This is not your first novel. You have plenty of other novels but tell me, are these stories in your mind and how do you, I mean to me that seems like such a daunting task to make up the story and then ask yourself if people are going to like it. You tell us a little bit about that process. Well I've been doing it for almost 30 years now so it's not new to me and I've written a bunch of novels, many of them and it's different than writing nonfiction. Obviously nonfiction, you've got to rely on the facts and your reporting and interviews and things like that but it's still storytelling and even in nonfiction you're telling a story and you're not just printing facts up, you tell a narrative and so in fiction you can do the same thing and in this case this new book twice is the story of a guy who finds out when he's a little boy that he has the magical ability to do everything in his life twice but he has to live with the consequence of the second try. He can't go back to the first one if he doesn't like the way it worked out the second time and he goes through his life kind of fixing his adolescent mistakes and making the basketball shot that he missed or taking back the embarrassing comment he made in front of a teenage girl or something like that and when he's a man he discovers that there's one caveat to the power that he has. It doesn't work with love. If someone loves you and you decide you want to go back in time and try somebody else and you give your heart to somebody else and that first person can never love you again. They'll be in the world, you can talk to them but there's no going back and he of course at some point in the book he's married and he thinks he's got the perfect person and then he gets tempted and he has to make a very faithful choice. Again, I wrote this because I see a lot of people in life talk about their regrets and talk about if only I could do this over again. I said well let's write a book about someone who has that power and see if his life is really any better than yours. That's how you mix real life concerns that you would talk about maybe even in a non-fiction book. Maybe a non-fiction book about regrets but this is a novel about regrets and so they're really not as far apart as you might think. Mitch is there one moment in your life that you would want to change? Is there, you know, was there secretly some sort of inspiration on one thing that happened to you that you wish you had to do over? Well, there are many. I mean there are many things I wish I could correct and mistakes I wish I could correct but if you told me that by correcting them I would have to lose the scars that I suffered from having made them or lose the lessons that I learned from those scars then I would probably say no thank you because that's how I've evolved and that's how I've grown and become a person who doesn't make those mistakes again. So you know, yeah the answer is yes and no because of that. Celebrity Jobber. The Celebrity Jobber podcast with Jeff Zito. What about your very first job ever? I want to know what was the very first thing you got paid to do? Oh, that's easy. I was 11 years old. My father told me that's it. You have to pull your own weight. I didn't even know what that meant. And so I got a job at a veteran stadium in Philadelphia selling programs and scorecards and yearbooks to the Phillies games, the Philadelphia Phillies baseball. And I would show up three hours before the game and they would give me a sweaty shirt that someone else had worn the day before and you had to put it on over your shirt so it was red and white striped and then they give you a big bag of programs and yearbooks and pens and they send you out and when you come back with the money, you know, if they're walking up and down the stadium steps over and over again, you give them the money for how many you bought and they give you, you know, 5% of what it is in cash and then they give you more scorecards and your books and you go back out and you sell them again and I would walk around the stadium for three hours yelling in my high pitched little voice, you know, scorecards, lineups, that kind of thing. And that was my first job. Wow. Is it true what they say about Philly fans? They're the toughest fans in America? You don't want to mess around with Philly fans. No, they're awful. I mean, I know because I grew up there. Yeah. They boost Santa Claus. They, you know, boosts no bulls. They're tough, but I get it. You know, they're passionate and they're tough and I grew up in it. So I guess I have to take responsibility for it. But I was on the other end and as a kid who sold programs, I remember that, you know, when the gates would open, there would only be, you know, a handful of people would trickle in before a game and you, you know, we all raced over to try to sell them programs because I wasn't the only one, you know, there were dozens of people with these and there'd be some guy like way up in the center field seats, way high up, way up and he'd be waving at you and you'd go running around sweating, you know, and running up the steps trying to get all the way up to the top step and he'd go, send the hot dog guy up. That's a Philly fan for you. Oh man. Well, I got to tell you, Mitch, again, I'm a big admirer of yours and I appreciate your time. I'm a big admirer of yours and I appreciate the book. By the way, New York Times bestseller, nothing new to this guy and twice is his current novel available everywhere and I was just thinking if I could go back in time and change something in my past, I would have something to do with my ex-wife, but you said it didn't work in love, right, right, Mitch? That's right. That's right. Yeah. Well, I don't think I have to read the book to understand the rules, but I'm not sure you learned something from that experience with your ex-wife that informed you and your relationships going forward, so think of it that way. I guess so. I guess so. Mitch Album, twice, New York Times bestseller, over 42 million copies sold. Thank you so much. Real pleasure. Pleasure. Thank you. You know, a very, very successful guy in the world of, you know, sports journalism. You know, he has written for the Detroit Free Press for so many years still to this day, he does that, sports and a non-sports column as well. And he also did sports radio shows. So I mean, between writing and doing the radio shows, I mean, I can only imagine how hectic a schedule he had. So when I asked like what his big break was, you know, I would have expected him to tell me like getting that job at the Detroit Free Press or, you know, starting his radio show on ESPN. But no, it was the book Tuesdays with Maury. He was 37 years old and that gave him a break from the hustle and bustle of his everyday life, which I definitely understand being in the journalism business, media business, radio business. It is a grind. And to do that newspaper and radio show, I mean, I can only imagine what his day looked like, but the break came from the book. And he told the story about it. He saw the news piece with Ted Koppel on his old college professor who really meant a lot to him. And he ended up meeting with him, Maury Schwartz. And one Tuesday turned into two Tuesdays, which turned into three, four. His objective was to help this guy pay for his medical bills. So that's why he wrote this book. And as he said, it turned into something way more than that, the greatest selling memoir in history. So I guess that break gave him the ability to stop the hustle and bustle of his everyday life with the newspaper and radio and more or less kind of transitioned into becoming a full-time author. And originally in college, he was a music major, so he wanted to be a musician. You know, he grew up in a middle-class family just outside of Philly in New Jersey. And his first job, I thought it was a great story. His dad told him he needed to pull his own weight. He didn't even know what that meant. But he got a job at the old veteran stadium, the vet, at Philadelphia Philly baseball games, selling like programs. And he was just a little kid. And he also backs up the fact that Philadelphia sports fans are mean. Meanest sports fans in America. Probably a reason that I hear they have a jail in the stadium. So anyway, his latest book is titled Twice, author, journalist, radio host, Mitch Album. Who knows, he might have been a musician or a producer. You never know what path life ultimately takes you on. So thank you once again for listening to another episode of the Celebrity Jobber Podcast. And if you want to check out past guests and episodes, you can do so online at celebrityjobber.com. Everyone's got a story, and we'll have a new one for you coming up next week. Until then, I'm Jeff Zito.
