By the time I left ESPN in 2003, 'SportsCenter' had become a far different show than the one I initially joined in 1996.
The days of the heavyweight champion as civil rights leader are long gone. You think you'd see Ali rolling around on the floor of an ESPN Zone? I don't think so.
On that Sunday of the Masters I remember turning on ESPN to find people talking about me. I switched over to the Golf Channel and people were talking about me. It was hard to escape.
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.
Sanitizing ESPN of politics and opinion would make it a relic; sports fans have dozens of places online to go for scores and highlights.
I didn't have cable growing up. I never saw ESPN or GameDay.
I've been asked a lot about filling Chris Berman's role - to be honest, I don't even allow myself to see it that way. He is a total legend and created so much of what ESPN is known for and specifically our NFL coverage. That's an impossible task.
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.
I told another ESPN friend here, I love all sports. I can't think of any I don't love. I've even come to appreciate cricket. Maybe I could play a sportswriter. I don't know. Anything in the sports realm is appealing.
Revolt is my new - cable music network. It's distributed through Time Warner and Comcast. And to put it simply, it is the ESPN of music.
