I SAID “AROUND THE HORN” HAD TOO MANY WHITE PANELISTS — AND I’M ANTI-WOKE?
Americans who protect wokeness have found a new villain — me! — all because I said the program lost big viewership in the hundreds of thousands because the management culture became overly woke
It was me — Mr. Anti-Woke, or so they say — who protested social injustice on ESPN’s “Around The Horn.” I was the one who said we had too many white guys on the program, mentioning it during one of our weekday morning phone sessions. The producers surrounded a host with four panelists: Max Kellerman, Woody Paige, T.J. Simers, Bob Ryan and me.
All were white.
So I wanted the show to be diverse in sports debates. That doesn’t mean I wanted the bosses and the company president, John Skipper, to become so deaf and blind in their wokeness that “Around The Horn” eventually had no white panelists — which happened. Was someone sitting in a room with a geiger counter? The producers should have picked the seven or eight best talkers in the sportswriting business. In my book, the top shows involved Kevin Blackistone and Jackie MacMullan — a Black male and a white woman — along with me and Crazy Woody.
But when I left the show, ESPN decided to assemble too many panelists — I swear, 25 or more. Too many veered off into anti-Trump stances, which took a cue from Skipper and his half-cocked view of sports coverage. That is not what I meant about diversity, on a program that was flying high in ratings for my eight years. In this case, wokeness was an institutional culture too consumed by politics and not consumed enough by the greatest sports arguments. So last week, I told Michael McCarthy of “Front Office Sports” about the problems that are driving the show away with lower ratings.
Headline: “Jay Mariotti Thinks Canceled ‘Around The Horn’ Went ‘Woke’ ’’
Second headline: “Mariotti tells FOS that he thinks former ESPN president John Skipper ‘started to install people on the shows who became anti-Trump.’ ’’
My old hate mail returned over the weekend. McCarthy wrote the story well, and in the end, I never was bidding for a Christmas card from Trump. I just wanted fun, entertaining discussions about topics regardless of political persuasions. Why did the bosses, Erik Rydholm and Aaron Solomon, take those 30 minutes into an offbeat direction that turned off much of the viewership? Two of their panelists, Jemele Hill and Michael Smith, hosted “SportsCenter” in the evenings thanks to Skipper. This was in the period when Hill, angry that Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said he’d sit players who disrespected the U.S. flag, wanted the team’s fans to boycott advertisers. Over the weekend, Hill said I made a “dumb” statement last week. She is dumber.
Yes, they went woke.
And no, America wasn’t ready for “Around The Horn” to be woke. Or any sports show.
The final show is May 23. “Pardon The Interruption” never dipped into wokeness and continues into future years, even though hosts Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon knew Barack Obama well. The former President is a fan of the Chicago White Sox and owner Jerry Reinsdorf. You know what I think of Reinsdorf.
I am not Anti-Woke. I am not Woke. I like the middle of life. I just wanted them to carry on with a successful show and not screw with it, which they did.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.