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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