On a warm, misty January morning, Phil Mushnick is sitting in his Boca Raton townhouse where he now winters. He points out the herons in the lagoon near his back porch as well as an adjacent golf course, a thousand miles from his central Jersey home and Staten Island roots. “We were third-generation Staten Island Jews, a rarity,” Mushnick recalls. “I always say my ancestors came over on the ferry.” But amid his calm surroundings, the New York Post’s 72-year-old sports columnist is not exactly mellowing. He’s still triggered by the ills of America’s sports culture, still cranking out scathing critiques of blowhard announcers, badly behaving athletes, predatory gambling, and examples of hypocrisy. In his curmudgeonly “Equal Time” column, which he began writing in 1982, Mushnick recently blasted NFL commissioner Roger Goodell as “the enormously enriched say-anything/mean-anything Emperor of the Nero Fiddles League” and ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith for his “relentless cluelessness” and for being “the most transparently absurd sports presence on TV.”
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