NOTE: This musing also appears today on our sister site The Double Overtime. Please visit regularly for coverage of sports of all sorts plus occasional stories on business and technology.
I’ve watched a LOT of television over my MANY tours around the sun. Genre-wise, I suspect it defaults to game shows, though I’ll remind anyone quick to pass judgment I’ve also probably consumed way more comedy and even drama than most of you. Obesity and loneliness do tend to be a rising tide that lifts all boats.
Destination-wise, no question it’s ESPN. Ever since I accidentally stumbled onto it during my last finals week when the embryonic 12-channel cable system servicing my college town was apparently experimenting with uploading new offerings with its impending expansion to (gasp!) 22 channels and accidentally fed it through the otherwise dormant “community access” channel we transmitted our black-and-white nightly campus newscast on, I’ve had a love affair with it, and not just for live events. Which means over the course of my life I’ve undoubtedly watched SportsCenter than any single program, genre notwithstanding. Frequency and recency are even stronger examples of rising tides.
So I’m probably looking forward as much as anyone to what’s dropping today that isn’t a remake but rather a salute to iconic IP which VARIETY!’s Carole Horst felt was important enough to report on last night:
“SportsCenter,” launched in 1979 as the flagship show on the new cabler ESPN, is now a cornerstone of the sports station but has become part of pop culture as generations of Americans turn to the show to get updated on scores, highlights and news. Its “This Is SportsCenter” commercials are classics, and much copied — the Atlanta Falcons even paid tribute to them in their 2026 schedule announcement video. Fans wanting to get behind the scenes of the show can tune into “This Was SportsCenter: Stories from the Set,” a video podcast set to debut June 5 across Disney+, ESPN App and major podcast platforms.
And as LAUGHING POINT’s Maxon Faber neatly bulleted:
- The series takes fans behind the scenes of SportsCenter during the late 1990s and early 2000s, highlighting stories from the personalities who helped shape the show’s cultural impact.
- New episodes will premiere every Friday as part of Disney+’s Throwback Summer campaign, inviting fans to celebrate nostalgia.
- Episodes will be available on Disney+, the ESPN App for ESPN Unlimited and ESPN Select subscribers, and major podcast platforms.
- The premiere episode features Dan Patrick and debuts on June 5.
- Episode 2 features Chris Berman and was recorded live at the Strand Theater in San Francisco during Super Bowl week earlier this year.
- Additional guests include Mike Greenberg (June 12), Linda Cohn (June 19), Chris Fowler (June 26), and Craig Kilborn (July 3).
- Each episode explores each guests’ experiences at SportsCenter and the role the program played in their careers.
Eisen is an ideal choice to helm this effort, as he has clearly made the most of his second tour of duty with what he still lovingly references as The Worldwide Leader even at a time when applying that monicker is open to debate. He’s already made an emotional visit back to Bristol to helm a Sunday night episode (typically its highest-rated of the week) and paid tearful tribute to his sadly prematurely departed co-anchor Stuart Scott on the eve of the 30 for 30 tribute to his life. In bringing back the likes of the acromoniously departed Patrick, the overly aspirational Kilborn and the inexplicably in limbo Cohn he allows us all to go back to simpler times when they were all more easily accessible and culturally relevant.
Even Berman and Greenberg’s continuing presences on the network has been diminished. Boomer, officially extended through what will be his personal golden anniversary season and his own 75th year in 2029, helms the resurrected NFL PRIMETIME on ESPN+; Greenberg is now only an occasional player on his GET UP! show that was once ostensibly their answer to GOOD MORNING AMERICA that now acts more like a lead-in to its far higher profile FIRST TAKE and the much more highly paid Stephen A. Smith. One has to go more out of one’s way to have that throwback experience that some of us more seasoned–and loyal–viewers seek out, particularly when life throws us the kind of curve balls and disappointments that mine has had hurled into my face as of late.
I’m especially looking forward to Eisen’s conversations with Greenberg, a fellow New York native who is at his best when they share mutual consternation with the New York Jets, and Cohn, my SUNY Oswego classmate that I take particular pride in reminding any starry-eyed and respectful female even remotely interested in sports that I knew when she was merely a bookish but athletically gifted standout on the school’s fledgling women’s hockey team and who was dating my radio lab instructor who eventually became her husband and the father of the two outstanding children they created and an excellent qualitative researcher to boot. I happen to know Eisen’s a pretty spectacular parent himself, being fortunate enough to marry another former colleague of mine, FOX Sports’ savvy and lovely Suzy Schuster, and for years merely just another hamishe couple who friends of mine knew as fellow Westside LA Little League and soccer supporters.
You may pick up on a tad of jealousy in those anecdotes. Lately, those bouts of loneliness are ever more rampant, and memories of better times all the more needed just to make it through some very trying days. In his comments to Horst, it appears even Eisen has a tinge of those sorts of feelings himself:
“The moment my daily ‘Rich Eisen Show’ reunited me with ESPN, I knew I had to create this show,” said Eisen, CEO of Rich Eisen Prods. and “SportsCenter” host from 1996-2003. “I’ve lost track of the number of times people have come up to me over the years to say how I either helped put them on a school bus in the morning or stayed up procrastinating late-night in college thanks to ‘SportsCenter.’ For those folks, I’m about to inject, as Stuart Scott might call it, straight-butter nostalgia into their veins.”
I’m not quite a child of that era, but I do confess to being as loyal and impassioned as anyone that Eisen has actually crossed paths with. I’d also add that during his 22 year sabbatical from ESPN as the face of NFL Network he was my preferred choice to spend countless Sunday mornings with–yes, even at the expense of Greenberg in recent years. I very much wish I had the ability to thank him in person for that companionship, especially on the ones when the person I once shared a life with made being alone watching TV something I actually preferred. And now, when the options for any companionship are so far away and infrequent at best.
In light of that, I’ll yet again have to resort to this method to offer that heartfelt thanks to Eisen and the two degrees of separation from moi that has made up his world. Thanks for the memories, sir. I know YOU get that reference. We all need a little more Hope in our lives when possible.
Until next time…