Goodbye To “Around the Horn”

Because I may not be able to post timely rants next week, let me use today to make a couple of brief remarks about ESPN.  I have been a consumer of ESPN telecasts since 1979; to say the network has changed/evolved over that time span is an understatement.

SportsCenter was the foundation piece of ESPN in 1979.  It was basically a newscast focused on sports; it is where you went to see highlights and to reallize the results of sports events from the recent past.  It had substance and virtually no glitz; the anchors for the program were reportorial and displayed almost no “personality”.

Compare that the SportsCenter today.  Now broadcasts are associated with specific anchors and most of them have an angle to their program.  Scott Van Pelt focuses a lot of attention on the gambling aspects of the games covered; when Michael Smith and Jemelle Hill anchored SportsCenter, I almost thought I had tuned into an hour of social commentary with a passing relationship to sports.  Anchors now make fashion statements in their presentation; in 1979, anchors wore a shirt and tie and a jacket and were seated for 99% of the program.

Personally, I think the scale has tipped too far in favor of “personalities” and “entertainment” at ESPN and I wish it would do a lot more “sports reporting” and presenting of “sports insight”.  And now you are free to flip me the bird and tell me you will not get off my lawn…

I mention this because Around the Horn will go off the air next Friday.  If ever there was a single program on ESPN other than SportsCenter that changed so drastically, I don’t know what it might be.  In the beginning the idea was sports debate with four acknowledged “experts” in sports.  Now the format has endured, but there is way too much focus on matters peripheral to sports and games offered up by people whose credentials as “acknowledged experts” is more than suspect.  In the old days, I cared about the opinions of people like Jay Mariotti and Bob Ryan and Woody Paige because they had gravitas.  Tune in today and most of the panelists evoke the following sentiment from me:

• Who’s that?
• Who cares?

Suddenly, the debate becomes a lot less interesting and when it angles off into social commentary as opposed to straight sports, it becomes worthy of channel changing.  At its peak, Around the Horn drew audiences of about 800,000; today the audience is about 300,000.  I will not miss the 2025 version of Around the Horn, but as audiences continue to decline for ESPN as a network, maybe a detached view of what happened to Around the Horn might be instructive for the ESPN mavens as they ponder the future of the network as a whole.

Finally, since all of today has been about sports broadcasting, let me close with a comment from a great broadcaster, Bob Uecker:

“Before broadcasting for 50-some years, I did TV, played 10 years in the big leagues, won a world championship – and played a big part in that, too, letting the Cardinals inject me with hepatitis. Takes a big man to do that.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………