I Miss “The Sports Reporters”

Journalism is in a dire state and one show pushed the envelope and started something different, addressing sports journalism as fact.

Back in the days when ESPN valued more of their massively popular sports talk heads such as Trey Wingo, Dan Le Batard, Rece Davis, Dan Patrick, Erin Andrews, Keith Obermann, Stuart Scott, and Tom Rinaldi to name a few, ESPN was at the top of their game for one purpose the hosts were relatable and down to Earth with their audience and the general sports fan public.

In 2023, however, and since the year 2017, ESPN has taken a nose dive with its driving audience, hosts, and content. Basically, every material ESPN has made except for “The Last Dance, ESPN 30 For 30, College Football & Basketball GameDay, and SC Featured” are still keeping ESPN alive, but their content has gone south in a hurry. Yeah… Stephen A. Smith is good, especially in a struggling sports debate talk show industry, he’s solid, but for the company to use him as an analyst for every, single, sport the network airs, is in his words, blasphemy.

2023 is anything unmatched compared to today for how this company used to be, a once thriving era in sports television with no screens or even YouTube to watch as a content creator on a computer screen explained his/her thoughts on the matter in which subject the sport is in.

“The Sports Reporters” a popular ESPN show that aired from 1988 until the show hit an official end in 2017, featured four newspaper and television reporters who brought a different kind of insight to the sport. One that was professional, given their job, and the other side to them was conversational, and this was in an era before “Pardon My Take” and Pat McAfee.

What made them unique was that these were not former pro players or a random YouTuber who once played sports and got cut from a college team, these were journalists, people who study and watch the sport with the watchful eye of writing and studying players, coaches, and team personnel like they are a part of their family.

Photo courtesy of YouTube.com

My favorite two anchors on the show were Bob Ryan and especially Mitch Albom who wrote the book, “Tuesdays with Morrie” about his late college English professor who had passed away after suffering from ALS in the 1990s, but his story was so helpful when my own grandmother was going through Alzheimer’s as we lifted, bathed, and fed her to her very death just like Albom did with his professor Morrie Schwartz.

He got humbled just like me which led him to a life of restoration and comfort away from the storm and noise of life.

Ryan, who now appears on the ESPN broadcasts of “Around The Horn” from time to time, was smarter than Joel McKay was when addressing the rivalry of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson at the turn of the 1980s, but his insight, and all of the insights on the show, were so much needed because this was a time when journalism was more honest than fair, but one thing they did was expose the truth.

You cannot also forget the late John Saunders puns or Mike Lupica’s vast array of opinions as I was munching on dry cereal with no milk in the bowl on a summer break watching this show.

This period marked the beginning of the end of ESPN’s fresh content in a time where their work took more credit than pay cuts and job losses. Everyone who is into broadcasting or journalism dreams of being in their seats and chatting about sports to a group of expert writers who studied the sport for years.

This was at ESPN’s golden era for broadcasting which some of our youth only experienced with “The Last Dance” documentary in 2020, which was pretty much the only golden era for the channel we had experienced since the day “The Sports Reporters” left the airwaves.

There was a song by this artist named JVKE who wrote the song called “Golden Hour” and the title perfectly encapsulates the richness of journalism in an era where people could not even disrespect the President of the United States. Today, we have a loud, yet, motivated culture blocked out by noise and misinformation and “The Sports Reporters” brought journalism back to its traditional roots where facts and knowledge mattered more than opinion.

Today on ESPN there is no other show like it and this show took ESPN to new heights at the time when TV sports talk shows were only reserved for radio if you were lucky enough to find a channel.

I bring this up because journalism is in a dire state. After the collapse of Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon through CNN and FOX News firing them for exposing the truth on war, famine, and where our politics are headed, I watched a video that told me to write this article as a man yelled at a journalism gala exposing the system for what it truly is… crooked.

As a potential journalist, you have to acknowledge the fact over reason as this is an ancient Greek rule to let all-state their opinions and beliefs with no controversy. The views of these male and female journalists showed how much talk shows can bring on opinions and how for the time, things were so much different.

It’s not in a good spot as companies like ESPN are mass-producing politics and racism into sports culture, but this show brought us back to when ESPN was innocent and shied on talking about politics.

My mom would tell me all the time, as a millennial born in 1981, “… boy, those were the days when nothing much happened and no one shoved people, but they just let them be themselves.”