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"\n\nKeith Olbermann is a large man. Conventional wisdom says TV adds ten pounds to people. Maybe. But conventional wisdom rarely applies to Olbermann. And seeing him in person, you realize TV makes the man appear smaller. In life\u2014life outside the electronic box\u2014he's a good six feet three, with a chest that suggests a retired football player. We meet for lunch at an Upper East Side restaurant, where Olbermann proclaims that because he is due in the studio later, \"this will be my one meal of the day,\"; and proceeds to eat like he's at training table: a dozen oysters, spring rolls, grilled tuna steak.\n\nHe hosts a new show titled, modestly, Olbermann, in which he comments on sports and converses with athletes and others about sports. Olbermann has been on TV in one form or another since 1981, when he joined a start-up cable network called CNN, and despite the reputation he's gained over the past decades, in person he's friendly and open. He also tends to give a story-length answer to any question. A man who, it could be said, likes the sound of his own voice. But also never dodges a question.\n\n\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nKeith Olbermann: Yeah. I wound up working for ESPN again because I believe in it and because I was pursuing it. I've made no secret of this, and I believe it sincerely. As I said several times, if there's anybody who bothers to write an obit for me, it will include something in the first paragraph about contentious exits. And I'd like to change that. So yeah, I kind of believe in redemption. This is my third tour at ESPN. I've had two at NBC, an eight-year run. We retire our presidents at eight years; I think we should retire our political commentators at something less than that. So I believe in it, and it's not necessarily a permanent thing, but in this case I want to try to make it as permanent as circumstances will allow.\n\n GQ: Can you be successful without anger?\n\nKeith Olbermann: It depends on what people perceive me from. I mean, there was not an awful lot of anger on SportsCenter.\n\n GQ: You've spoken in the past of being bullied in grammar school. Do you feel at a certain point you became the bully? That you crossed over?\n\nKeith Olbermann: No. Because a bully is fighting out of a need to dominate. And is usually unwilling to take the consequences.\n\n GQ: Was being bullied a formative moment?\n\nKeith Olbermann: Well, here's the background to it. I was a big kid for my age and well advanced intellectually, to the point where I was skipped in the first grade. When another kid did not operate at my level of response\u2014\"Steven? Hey, Steven? Steven?\"\u2014I'd hit him to get his attention. And my folks enrolled me in a judo class to work out my aggressions. So I was like a potential... Bully is too strong a term. It was frustration. I had potential over-aggressive problems.\n\n GQ: Do you enjoy confronting power?\n\nKeith Olbermann: If the power you are facing is a bullying power, it is likely far less strong than you perceive it to be. If you roll up your sleeves and make the appropriate sounds, they will probably fold. In the political world, I found that to be alarmingly and, for the sake of the democracy, disturbingly true.\n\n GQ: What do you mean?\n\nKeith Olbermann: During the 2008 campaign, that John McCain actually thought that I was having an influence on the outcome of the campaign was...gratifying on one level but terrifying on another. It's like, why do you worry what I've said about you? I was thinking, John McCain was in a POW camp\u2014go change the channel!\n\n GQ: How do you define fear?\n\nKeith Olbermann:  [long pause] Hmm. Anything that prevents you from taking an action or actions that might reasonably dispel legitimate anxieties. Fear is what paralyzes you. Churchill said, \"If you're going through hell, keep going.\"\n\n GQ: Do you suffer from fear?\n\nKeith Olbermann: No, I would say now I'm at peace and I can recognize that paralysis when it comes up and take preventive measures. [pauses; resets himself] Television is a mental illness. Wanting to be on television is a mental illness. Wanting to be president of the United States, wanting to be an actor\u2014these are degrees of the same mental illness. If you need to be approved of simultaneously by more people than are in this room now, there's a problem. I don't know what would happen if television\u2014or fame\u2014stopped tomorrow for all the people who are pursuing it, what they would do. I suspect the idea of the zombie apocalypse is based on that.\n\n GQ: People out on the streets...\n\nKeith Olbermann: I'm gonna eat your flesh unless you applaud me! And that's the predicate here of my own self-analysis. But you find yourself at various times in your life being fearful, because you don't know how to function in some environment in which you're not being applauded by a thousand people or more at once. So many times I've looked back with a kind of sympathetic disgust at my personal conduct till age 40.\n\n GQ: What do you think of the whole generation that's stolen your act?\n\nKeith Olbermann: They missed the point.\n\n GQ: What do you tell them the point is?\n\nKeith Olbermann: Go see Life of Brian, where they mistake Graham Chapman's character for the Messiah, and he's talking to the disciples and going, \"You don't need to follow someone! Do your own thing! You're all different!\" And they shout in unison: \"We are all different!\" Be innovative. Counterprogram.\n\n GQ: What president would you be if you were a president?\n\nKeith Olbermann: Teddy Roosevelt. Endless energy. I don't have it.... [pause] This is how bad leaving SportsCenter was for the psyche. It was like my last crisis, psychologically, and then fortunately I got some great therapy. Dan [Patrick] had once told me he could never leave ESPN, because he couldn't spend the rest of his life answering the question \"Why did you leave ESPN?\" So I stepped out from this town under a dome, and here was \"Hey, missed you on SportsCenter!\" It killed me, until I remembered a conversation that I'd had when I met Elizabeth Montgomery [of Bewitched]. We're on a plane. I'm reading a book about Lizzie Borden, who she portrayed once. She said, \"Did you ever see the European version? They show me kind of naked in that.\" I went, \"Can we go to your place and demonstrate it?\" Turns out she's a fan of mine. We didn't like to fly. We drank all the champagne they had. We were delayed taking off, and every guy came over and said, \"Ms. Montgomery, could you do that little nose-twitch thing?\" And she did it for every one of them. And I said, \"Lizzie, your patience is unbelievable.\" And she goes, \"You don't understand. This means they remember something that we did thirty years ago. That's the essence of what I do and what you do. That's what we're doing it for. So they'll remember it long after we stop doing it.\" And I went, \"God. I never thought of it that way.\" She said, \"Be gracious and you remember as they remember, and be honored.\" I forgot this until about a year into this torture of \"When will you go back to SportsCenter?\" Lizzie's words came back to me, and I went, \"Just say thank you.\" So my last sort of crisis was about overcoming the people who were more interested in what I had done than what I was doing in the present. Thank you for remembering.\n\nFacebookPinterestundefined\n\nClick to enlarge.\n\n GQ: What is your identity, then?\n\nKeith Olbermann: Largely, and to some degree this has been a convergence of the two personalities, because I didn't have much of one before I got into broadcasting. Occasionally I used to let the broadcaster do some of the tough things, like asking the girls out. I finally figured that one out. \"Oh! That's how that works?\" That was a great revelation. But what it has become over the years is, the television version is me with a script and a teleprompter. It's easier. Not much difference. So I don't think there are huge divergences between my personality and what they see on TV. And I think that's why I have been gainfully employed doing this. I'll always deliver what an employer wants. At some point they decide the result is more trouble than they want, or they convince themselves that they have created all this success that I created for them. As in my last prominent employer at NBC, which they're learning that perhaps they were wrong about that. In my pre-introspective life, the idea that I had that script in front of me meant a profound difference. It allowed me to say what I wanted to say and be who I wanted to be.\n\n GQ: When do you think anger became the base level of this country?\n\nKeith Olbermann: Richard Belzer said that [since the 1936 election] Republicans just got angrier and angrier. And several people who had their own inner anger took that and ran with it. I'm one of the people who liked to mock Rush Limbaugh, but we cannot overestimate his influence on the last thirty years of American political history. Largely because he didn't succeed in sports, he went into this thing that wasn't his primary thing and decided to let his rage go, and became a multibillionaire as a result of it.\n\nFlash to '96, probably '95. I walk into SportsCenter, and he's standing in my way. \"Hi, Keith! Rush Limbaugh! Big fan!\" I said, \"No offense, but is there a reason you're here?\" He goes, \"I finally convinced the guys to let me sit in on the football show. That's all I ever wanted. I'd trade everything I have right now to do that show or co-host SportsCenter with you. My God, this is it!\" Seventeen years ago, he would have thrown it away if he had an opportunity to do sports for a living. It's one of those \"He didn't get to be this, so he became Napoleon instead.\"\n\n GQ: Do you have a favorite Beatles song?\n\nKeith Olbermann: Only about eighty. I was always fond of \"I'll Be Back.\" There's a sadness to it, but there's also a defiance to it.\n\n GQ: It could be your theme song.\n\nKeith Olbermann: I was just thinking that. It, eh, well, certainly wasn't planned this way, but...\n\n GQ: When's the last time you cried?\n\nKeith Olbermann:  [pause] I saw my uncle for the first time since I was a kid, when my sister got married last spring. And at the bar was somebody who looked like me, looked like my late father. My father died three years ago. I probably had gone a year or two without getting really emotional about him. But seeing his older brother... It was a powerful moment, yeah. Had a good cry over that.\n\n GQ: Do you have a favorite sports clich\u00E9?\n\n Keith Olbermann: \"He's considered day-to-day.\" We are all day-to-day!\n\n Michael Hainey (@MichaelHainey) is GQ's__ deputy editor and author of After Visiting Friends: A Son's Story."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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