Exclusive: WEEI is Bringing Back Alex "Pissant" Reimer
If you’ve been wondering what it takes for a part time sports radio host to lose his job, you can scratch “verbally going after the 5-year-old daughter of the station’s most important guest” right off your list.
I’m breaking the news that WEEI is planning to reinstate Alex Reimer, who’s been suspended since they sent him home from the Super Bowl after he called Vivian Brady “an annoying little pissant” on the air. I have it from an excellent, ironclad source that Reimer was in the WEEI office, brought in to record an apology in order to get his job back.
To be clear, I’m not calling for Reimer to get fired. With the rare exception of a talentless, unemployed actor calling the audience that pays my bills “idiots,” I almost never ask for people to lose their jobs for saying stupid things. In fact, I think that if you use your words to make a living and then call for the firing of other people for using their words, you’re worse than a hypocrite. You’re a goddamned McCarthyite. If management thinks people will say “Alexa, tune in to WEEI” to hear Reimer’s molten lava takes on the Sox bullpen or other people’s children, that’s entirely their call. If they believe his being on the air makes people tune out, they let him go. That’s the radio game. It’s all about getting ears on speakers, so to speak.
The people I have no tolerance for are the ones who defended him by saying “he’s just a kid” who didn’t know better. Reimer is 25. I have a “kid” who’s three years younger that is running live-fire mortar exercises and just carried his buddy two miles through a steaming jungle to a medevac because he was dying of heat stroke. Besides, I have a 16-year-old who wouldn’t call a Kindergartner names any more than he’d pelt her with rocks. So you’ll forgive me if the “he’s only 25 and doesn’t know any better” excuse goes right up my ass sideways.
The biggest takeaway in all this should be how Tom Brady and the Patriots have done an incredible solid for Reimer and WEEI. They are swinging the big hammer here but chose not to use it. After Brady has been called – at various times by various hosts – a cheater, a liar, a PED user, a snakeoil salesman ripping his fans off with $200 pajamas, a weirdo and a petulant diva. He’s been accused of running to ownership over Jimmy Garoppolo causing a “rift” with his coach. He’s been accused of ripping off Best Buddies to buy luxury items for his son’s private school. He’s been compared to Tom Cruise and his fitness center compared to Scientology. He’s been mocked, derided, denounced, slandered, libeled and called words you never heard in the Bible. Then finally someone came after his little girl. And he and the team had every excuse to demand someone’s professional head be brought to them on a platter. But they passed. They took the high road and saved this “kid’s” job.
I just hope maybe this time Brady and the Patriots will finally get the respect they’ve earned. Or at the very least, Vivian Brady will. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for bailing out somebody’s career.