12/18/2023 0 Comments Spike eskin chicago![]() “My dad worked all the time,” Howard recalls. Howard’s grandfather started a wagon-works business in Fairmount Park in the 1930s, and his son, Donald, took over as it became a truck-body shop. He’s busy 24 hours a day.”Ī look through the Eskin family tree reveals how deeply both sports and compulsive hard work are rooted. “My mom says, ‘Dad stop working for that long? No way.’ I don’t know what he’d do with himself if he wasn’t doing this. Spike recently told his parents they should take a break and retreat to Europe for a month. “I still think I can work 10, 15 years,” he says, before segueing into a conversation he had with former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue about Dick Vermeil. Wearing so many hats suits his ADD personality just fine. ![]() “So it was hard to win, you know? But now, you can just enjoy the banter.”Īs our breakfast winds down, Spike admits he’s not sure he could handle sports talk five days a week, the way Howard once did. “When we would argue about sports when I was younger, it would make me mad, because he’s, like, a professional arguer,” Spike says. Howard’s Andy Reid admission was more than Spike’s coronation as his own man it was the resolution of a lifelong debate he’d never won. “The best era of making fun of him on Twitter was when Andy Reid was getting fired,” Spike says, while adding with pride that real Howard’s 36,700 followers are proof he’s “still relevant.” They pulled the account after a day of good-natured torment, but the needling continues. Knowing how paranoid Howard is about imposters on social media, they created a fake Howard Eskin Twitter account, complete with the blue authenticity mark, and started sending his real account messages, just to rile him up. In 2011, he and his brother Jason, a 28-year-old digital-media marketer in Los Angeles, conspired to draw their dad into a Manti Te’o “catfish” scheme of sorts. ![]() Spike’s other survival tool is a sense of humor about himself and Howard. His version of handing out doughnuts is stopping to talk to the doormen at the Omni about Eagles draft picks. “Treating people well.” Off the air, Howard doesn’t call folks on the street morons or dopes. “Relationships are very important to her,” he says. ![]() It seemed corny, until Spike tried it himself years later and saw how much the guys at the shop appreciated the simple gesture. Spike remembers that when he was a kid, his mom would bring doughnuts to the gas station when she’d drop off her car for repairs. “I don’t think she was ever interested in being a part of my dad’s career,” Spike says, “at least not publicly.”Ĭountering Howard and sports in Spike’s life are Andi and music: one of his running gags at WYSP would be to put his mom on the air when she’d call him to request Aerosmith, which she did frequently. ![]() Though she’s been married to the elder Eskin for 38 years, Andi is seen in public only slightly more often than Bigfoot, and is just as mysterious to Howard’s colleagues. Spike seems to have survived growing up Eskin thanks to his mother, Andi, the family’s emotional ballast, whom he describes as “definitely more laid-back, very accepting, very tolerant”-words never used to describe Howard. Spike says he’s frequently pestered by people on Twitter who hate his dad Howard follows that with stories of his own Twitter fight with former Penn State linebacker LaVar Arrington, which somehow leads to him hanging at the Super Bowl, where a CBS broadcaster called him “a pioneer.” Howard told me he’d only talk to me for this story for his son’s sake, then says he can’t meet on a Friday because “it’s my only day off in a week.” Warm and cuddly he’s not. When I ask about him allowing young Spike to get tattoos, he turns it into a conversation about Todd Marinovich, the USC star quarterback whose controlling father ruined his career. But where Spike is introspective and open, Howard is uncomfortable talking about his family, steering nearly every question back to sports. When it comes to work ethic, it’s like father, like son. Howard, after doing his Sports Sunday night show on Fox, was back on television that morning with the station’s Good Day Philadelphia crew. Spike was at work by 7 a.m., after a 40-minute walk from the South Philadelphia rowhome he shares with his girlfriend. A week after Spike’s night shift, I’m eating breakfast with the Eskins in the upstairs dining room of the Omni Hotel, around the corner from the WIP and Fox studios on Market Street. ![]()
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