Tomorrow night, Michael Strahan tackles a delicate subject — his headline-making divorce in 2006 from then-wife Jean Muggli — on his first major interview since being named to replace Regis Philbin on Kelly Ripa’s morning show.
“The worst of it?” Strahan tells Bryant Gumbel in a piece for HBO’s “Real Sports” (10 p.m.).
“I think early on when you’re reading all these things in the paper that aren’t true — I’m not an adulterer. I’m not gay. I mean, I didn’t beat anybody.”
Gumbel brings up the bitter divorce “because the thing that I find the most surprising about it is in retrospect, your public image didn’t take a hit.”
“People don’t care,” Strahan replies. “Everybody has their own problems . . . I just kept go on being myself and it worked.”
About getting the most-sought-after job in daytime TV, Strahan says he was only mildly surprised by it,
“When I did watch everybody, I felt that I was the best one,” he says laughing.
“Better than me?” asks Gumbel, who was aso a fill-in host, if not exactly a candidate.
“You were good,” Strahan replies. “But I know you don’t want to wake up every day, so I knew I was safe with you.”