It’s certainly not the biggest thing going on in sports these days, but nonetheless it’s a subject worthy of discussion in press boxes, arenas and this column.

Ryan is the Boston Globe sports columnist who said on a TV show that he’d like to "smack" the wife of New Jersey Nets basketball player Jason Kidd.

Shame on you, Bob.

Ryan, a newspaper and TV veteran, has since been suspended without pay for a month.

Ryan is no fresh-faced kid right out of journalism school. He’s fought the battle for a long time, and has the white hair to prove it.

He’s one of a growing number of columnists and reporters who appear on TV and radio shows to talk about sports.

I did it. I still do it.

There are plenty of other people in Des Moines and in the state of Iowa who do it.

TV and radio people like to have columnists and reporters on their shows because they know most of them have lots of opinions about lots of things. In most cases, the more outrageous the opinions, the better the show.

The last thing a TV and radio host wants is a bunch of columnists and reporters who say things like, "I don’t know" or "We’ll have to wait and see."

The first guy who says "no comment" to a question is the first guy who will never be invited back to the show.

Ryan obviously said something he shouldn’t have said. He knows it. We all know it.

But those things happen. Name a columnist or reporter who says he (or she) hasn’t written or said something he (or she) has regretted and I’ll call him (or her) a liar.

I was there to write a newspaper story. The announcer—it may have been Bud Sobel, who is long-gone from Des Moines—interviewed me at halftime for radio station KRNT.

I’ll tell you this up front. A reporter or columnist goes into a different gear behind a microphone than when he or she is working at a typewriter (then) and a computer (now).

In the old days, I felt much freer to give opinions I never would have tried to give in my newspaper story. The guy interviewing me liked it, and I think the listeners did, too.

Of course, I always knew there was some editor on the copy desk at the paper that was waiting to see if I was going to slip some opinions into my story.

Now, of course, I don’t have any of those mean-spirited copy editors to worry about. I still have plenty of opinions, and I obviously write plenty of them in the columns I do for these web pages.

Instead of being the guy who was being interviewed before and after games and at halftime, on the radio, I was the guy hosting a weekly show on the Iowa Public Television Network.

Even though there was a woman who was called my producer, I quickly assumed the role of being my own producer.

Because I personally knew so many of the people I wanted on my shows, I arranged to get my guests into the studio. I had people such as Bump Elliott and Lou McCullough, who then were the athletic directors at Iowa and Iowa State; Cyclone basketball coach Ken Trickey, who gave me a scoop by agreeing to appear on my show a couple of days after being fired; major league baseball umpires and other high-profile people in sports.

If I were to make a wild guess, I was given the opportunity to host that show because I was opinionated and I was controversial. [Yes, even in the 1970s, I was controversial].

Well, why not? Hell, I wasn’t going to be chosen to host a TV show by Public Television by being Mr. No Opinion.

Those shows were fun, and I think we gave statewide TV something it wasn’t getting then. Or, frankly, now.

One of the very best radio shows in those years was the one hosted by Ron Gonder, the now-retired sports announcer at WMT in Cedar Rapids.

Every Tuesday evening during the collegiate football season, Gonder put together a panel of three or four reporters, columnists and announcers to discuss Iowa, Iowa State, the Big Ten and the Big Eight (later the Big 12).

Opinions flew freely on those shows. Some of the outlandish things that were said by Gonder’s guests would not have been fit to print in the newspapers for which we worked. But certainly none of us said anything about "smacking" a woman, so that made us quite a bit smarter than the present-day Bob Ryan.

It was during the Bob Commings football coaching era at Iowa that the famous old word controversy came up in bold face type as far as print and electronic journalism were concerned.

Commings coached the Hawkeyes from 1974-1978—just before Hayden Fry arrived to bring the program back from the dead. Commings was a nice man, but not a very good coach at the major-college level. His records were 3-8, 3-8, 5-6, 5-6 and 2-9.

He also wasn’t exactly Mr. Excitement on his weekly TV shows.

Commings’ shows were being taped at WHO on Sunday mornings in those days. Jim Zabel was the host. Late in his career, Commings or Zabel—or both—had an idea to try to spice up the shows.

They thought it would be a smart move to bring other reporters and me from the Register who then were covering the Hawkeyes to participate on the shows. The idea was for us to ask Commings questions about the previous game, the next game and anything else that pertained to his team.

That went on for a few weeks, and I thought it was a great idea. The shows obviously improved. And our appearances on them gave us a chance to interview Commings before, during and after the shows—something folks from other newspapers obviously were unable to do.

Alas, it was too good to be true. The wimp who then was making some of the decisions in the newsroom of the paper, and who now—thank goodness--is out of the newspaper business, decided it wasn’t a good idea and ordered us to stop appearing on Commings’ shows.

I felt then, and still feel now, that the guy was jealous that no one was asking him to be on TV, so he wanted to throw water on our parade.

These days, my guess is that if writers were asked to appear on a coach’s TV show, most people calling the shots in newsrooms—well, maybe not in this town—would say, "Brilliant idea! How soon can my reporters be there?"

Because of the presence of two sports-talk stations in Central Iowa, there’s plenty of room for opinion.

KXNO is the obvious leader. Larry Cotlar, the morning guy, and Steve Deace, the afternoon guy, are aggressive hosts who not only have entertaining shows, but get a fair amount of firsts when it comes to news.

Cotlar and Deace are also smart to regularly include interviews with the likes of Keith Murphy of WHO-TV and John Walters of WOI-TV, who have their own strong reporting skills and share some of what they dig up with KXNO’s listeners.

Cotlar has a weekly show that includes columnists and reporters. It’s a sort of no-holds-barred format in which opinions flow freely. Deace hosts a weekly roundtable discussion group that is broadcast from a sports bar.

Hardly a week goes by that I’m not invited to appear on one show or the other—or both. They’re fun, and I’ll continue to appear on as many of them as I can.

Like I tell my wife, I’m busier now that I’m retired than when I was working.

These types of shows will continue, both locally and nationally. As long as there are sports, there will be opinions from people who write for a living and for fun.

But, as Bob Ryan will likely say now, keep "smack" out of the discussion unless you’re talking about Jim Rome.