Sports

ESIASON DOUBLE LIFE WILL SOON GO BOOM

BOOMER Esiason, a busy man these days, can’t keep leading this double life. It has to catch up with him. He’ll eventually be forced, if it’s not too late to choose, to make a choice.

On one side of the street, Esiason plays the keep-it-up-here host of his own MSG TV show, he’s a regular on CBS’ NFL pregame show, the Monday Night Football analyst for Westwood One Radio and even works CBS’ Army-Navy telecast.

On the other side of the street, although closer to the gutter, Esiason’s the five-mornings-a-week co-host of WFAN-Radio’s “Boomer and Carton” show.

Craig Carton plays by the rules. He adheres to the drive-time formula of crotch-talk, putdown-talk, young wise guy-talk and the excessive, desensitizing degradation of whatever and whomever. He’s what used to be known, until they became radio requisite, as a shock jock.

That WFAN replaced Don Imus with Carton tells us what radio and TV executives must now value. Carton meets the terms of modern engagement. I’m told he’s not actually a creep; he just often plays one on the radio. It’s a living.

And Esiason mostly indulges him. Sometimes he seems discomforted by him. Sometimes he says nothing. Sometimes he encourages him. But weekday mornings, Esiason’s the primary party to it all. What can he do? Carton’s his business partner; it’s the Boomer and Carton Show.

But such a double-life can’t last forever. Esiason can’t, for example, on TV, condemn the incivilities of a professional athlete, but, on his radio show regularly suffer the public incivilities of his partner – not without eventually being discredited.

He can’t, for example, indulge the sexist and homophobic riffs of Carton while on WFAN, then play the social nobleman during his other TV and radio appearances without inviting big trouble. You’re either in or you’re out.

Mike Breen went through this when he was the sportscaster on the Imus show at a time when Breen’s local and national TV play-by-play career was in ascension. He realized that he couldn’t continue to indulge or participate in the salacious and hateful dialogue on the “Imus In The Morning Show,” then seamlessly slip into his gentlemanly WNBA and NBA roles at night.

Such a double-life, while providing him fabulous exposure, was catching up with him. Breen was being asked the kinds of questions that left him uncomfortable. He left the Imus show.

As Carton’s co-host, Esiason’s on an even faster track to having to answer for his compromised, chameleon-like persona. The day’s approaching when Carton, already with a legacy for having gone too far at previous radio stops – that’s what WFAN liked about him – again goes too far and Esiason will be dragged along with him.

Past as prologue. The day’s coming when Esiason’s other employers will be asked to answer for Esiason’s partnership with Carton.

It’s not as if Esiason is Tom Brokaw, Tim Russert, Brian Williams, Bob Schieffer and all those other Imus Show big shots who, for their own egos and promotion, chose to ignore the fact that they’d become regular guests on a show that specialized in going extra low.

It’s not as if Esiason can pretend that he never knew.

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The Giants Win the Pennant! Leave it to local factotum Marty Appel to note that while Giant PK Lawrence Tynes was born in Scotland, he’s not the first such New York Giant to win his club a National Conference or League title with a game-ender. Bobby Thomson also was born in Scotland.

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What skates around, comes around: When ABC/ESPN held rights to the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, the finals were shown Sunday night in primetime on same-day tape. That gave NBC Sports, during its highly selective and self-serving late Sunday afternoon studio inserts, the opportunity to stick it to ABC/ESPN by reporting the winners before the finals appeared on ABC.

And NBC did just that, doing its best/worst to hurt ABC’s primetime audience by spilling the results.

Starting this year, though, NBC owns the rights to the skating championships. And guess what? This Sunday night NBC will air the men’s finals in primetime – on same-day tape.

One wonders whether ABC and ESPN, Sunday, will return the favor by going out of their way, as NBC did, to wreck it for unsuspecting viewers.

It would be nice if ABC/ESPN’s “Bottom Line” embargoed the results until after NBC’s show began – not on NBC’s behalf, but on behalf of skating fans, on behalf of traveling a higher road. Either way, skating fans beware!

phil.mushnick@nypost.com