A Quote by Dick Vitale
It was tough getting fired by the NBA. I really didn't know where I was going, until [ESPN] called me. I said, "Hey, 'ESPN?' Never heard of it. It sounds like a disease." Now I have that same disease as a sports fanatic. All this sports madness we didn't have years ago, now I'm very blessed and fortunate to be part of it.
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I got fired - November 8, 1979. And all of a sudden, I got a call, two weeks later, about doing a game on ESPN. And I truly said - Scotty Connal, the head of ESPN production at the time, was the guy that called me - I said, 'Man, ESPN sounds like a disease. What is ESPN? I know nothing about it, never heard of it.'
You always think as an organization, obviously if you're in sports, you want to be with ESPN. ESPN is it. But you don't really realize how good ESPN is and how big their platform really is until you're in it.
Yes, I did move to New York when I was eighteen to do sports broadcasting. I didn't know how I was going to do it, so I got a job at ESPN Zone, thinking I would meet people in the business. People give me a hard time for it, but they don't realize that they shot 'Sports Reporter' there and that folks from ESPN and ABC were in there all the time.
If you're a sports fan and you're home and you're washing dishes, usually your TV is on ESPN and you're just getting the highlights and keeping up-to-date with all of the sports going around, all of the news.
If something touches on the world of sports, ESPN has never told me that I cannot discuss a sports-related matter.
I'll always be into sports. Sports is part of my life forever. My TV stays on ESPN all day long, I'm one of those. I don't even listen to music in the car; all I listen to is sports talk.
I love what I am doing on 'SportsNation' and to now have the opportunity to do even more on 'Winners Bracket' as part of ESPN Sports Saturday on ABC is the perfect situation.
Brand matters. And ESPN is, by far, the most popular sports brand. People trust ESPN.
The consumption of highlights on ESPN is greater than everybody else's combined. Fifty-six percent of all news and information consumed in sports is consumed on the ESPN platforms.
ESPN has this problem with sports, it's impossible to fill 24 hours with sports programming so they have to resort to things like poker and arm wrestling tournaments.
Remember one thing about ESPN: People can be critical of them sometimes for being a large corporation but nine years ago I had a stroke and I couldn't talk. That's the way I made my living. ESPN could've dumped me very easy, but they didn't. They helped me and presented me an opportunity to get back on the air.
Stephen A. Smith is the hardest-working man in sports show business. The ubiquitous basketball pundit appears on ESPN about 10 times a day as a regular on the show 'NBA Fastbreak,' a guest commentator on 'Sports Center,' and a pundit on 'ESPNEWS.'
What has truly impeded ESPN from overcoming its financial mistakes and inability to adapt to technological advances? The decadelong culture war ESPN lost to Deadspin, a snarky, politically progressive sports blog launched by Gawker's Nick Denton in 2005.
The '30 for 30' strand started life as a series of behind-the-scenes docs for the sports channel ESPN. It has now spawned an equally fascinating series of podcasts. Like the films, these podcasts don't rely on access, the usual currency of sports journalism, and are strangely excited by stories that are complicated and require telling at length.
I'm not an agate type ESPN Sports Center highlight, in-your-face kind of a sports fan.
But the rising chorus urging ESPN to change its stripes is missing something: The intersection of sports and politics is natural. And the left-wing lean of ESPN is inevitable. Conservatives bothered by the slant should stop hand-wringing and start their own network.
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