South Beach Sessions - Chris Fowler
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Welcome to South Beach Sessions. I'm excited about this one because Chris Fowler, I believe, has been hiding in plain sight in the shadows for a long time. You know his voice, you know his face, you know his work because his work is great, but you may not know a great deal about him. I believe him to be one of the greatest success stories in the history of ESPN because you went, and I don't know who you'd nominate for this class, but you went to ESPN.

But you went from doing a high school show. I remember watching you. We're about the same age. I was a little younger and I remember watching as a sports network blossom. Hey, who's that guy covering high school sports for ESPN? And what is this entire network about covering sports all the time? So thank you for doing this.

I appreciate your time, and I very much appreciate your work because you've been doing it as a professional pillar for a long time. That's very kind. I've admired you for a long time. I'm glad we had a happenstance meeting outside of the men's room of a Miami Hotspot restaurant so we could reconnect and organize this. I'm looking forward to it.

I would like to get to know you better personally, because as I told you before, I've run into you in the occasional gym in a college town at an important college football game over the years. But I don't know your past. I don't know how it is you became as meticulous as you are. I don't know.

what your journey has been. So take us through sort of the beginnings of how it is that you grew up, how it is you gravitated to sports, how it is that you decided to make what looks like a dream living. Because from where I'm standing, it feels like you figured some things out about life balance,

about how to do work meticulously. It's hard, but also to choose exactly the life you have around your work. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I will accept that. It's a lot of trial and error. I'm 61, so you've been around a long time, made a lot of mistakes, learned from it, hopefully, and listened to a lot of smart people. That's obviously the key is surrounding yourself with people you can learn from and grow with. And you do learn lessons when you're in that situation. So I like to think I got a few things figured out.

But a long way to go. I mean, infinite seeking is my motto. You never stop learning and hopefully improving and growing until your last day. So that's an ongoing process. Not to get too deep right away. But my grandmother was a sports fan. And that's where it comes from. I am living the dream. Since 10 years old, I've wanted to do this for a living. What is this? What is the definition of this? Documenting live sports events and conveying the excitement that I felt as a listener myself.

in the early 70s, late 60s in Chicago, when my grandmother was a Cubs fan, would sit in the backyard of her apartment building in a folding chair on a transistor radio, listening to every Cubs game and scoring them in a scorebook. For those who don't know what that is. That is old school. Very old school. She had a book for every season, and every game of the season was in that book. And these were...

Good, but just good enough to break your heart. Cubs teams, the 69 season. I'm old enough to remember their collapse when the Mets caught them and the Miracle Mets won the World Series. I still hate the Mets for that. But I just found that listening to Cubs games with her, listening to Blackhawks games on the radio and on television was just like enthralling. And if you want to break it down to why I love doing this is because I like to see people express joy.

And for me, it was the sound through the radio of Chicago Stadium going insane when the Blackhawks scored a goal and the Oregon playing and going to Wrigley Field and seeing the collective joy when the Cubs would succeed and

I mean, obviously there was a lot of disappointment too, but it was just a bunch of people coming together and being happy at the same time for the same reason. I thought, what could be cooler than that? If you could help be the voice to convey what was going on and deliver that to people.

And so there were a lot of different detours and steps along the way we can get into, including Scholastic Sports America and even College Game Day, before getting to call championship events in my two favorite sports, which are college football and tennis, at ESPN. So, you know, one employer for 38 years doesn't happen unless you navigate that well and get lucky with the rights that that company acquires there.

and and learn how to say no because it's very easy to get off course in life and in any career but particularly I think in media so you know since 10 years old I wanted to do it did everything I could extracurricular stuff throughout high school and college I did PA announcing for high school hockey games in Colorado Springs my brother was a player in high school got to announce him scoring goals that was like an early thrill within the arena not on any kind of media but

You know, went to Colorado. Shared joy. Yeah, no, it was amazing. I mean, it's just amazing to be in the, I still go as a fan all the time to all kinds of different sporting events. For the energy? Yeah, for the energy. I mean, just to be a part of it. I think we do our best on TV to capture it. Some sports, you could argue, are better on TV, but the live experience for me is,

There's just no substitute. So I think of you as so even, though, it's interesting to hear you say that it's the joy that lures you like, of course, you summon it during the big calls. But what I think of you is just maximum professional even. So to hear you say that the magnet for you is just being a joy associate. Yeah.

I think that's what first got me into it. I know that you're going to have people that are pissed off and inconsolable on the other end of the spectrum as often as you're going to have joyful people. But I think what drew me to it was focusing on how important sports were to people and how much happiness it brought them. And it's been cool.

over the years to hear all kinds of comments from our customers that how much a show like College Game Day meant to them because it's the first time they sat with their dad or their brothers and watched sports. And that's how they came to have a passion for college football or someone grew up, because I've done tennis for 20 some years now, grew up listening to us call

Federer or Serena matches and that drew them to the sport. I can't tell you how neat that is because that was me. I was on the other end of it as a little kid watching

getting acquainted with sports through the voices that brought it to me. Looking at you at 61, though, and obviously everyone tells you that you look great, healthy, radiant, and balanced. I'll drink this margarita to that. But I don't think of you as a museum, but you now are that. You've covered enough of this history that when you go and do Wimbledon or when you're doing these big games, you have a library at your disposal of experience.

Yeah, and it's fun. I don't think of it that way, but you're right. I mean, I just talked about Nadal. He was hanging it up, and Rafa's been the most admired athlete for me that I've ever covered. I probably had the most admiration and affection for him. And the great thing about tennis is you see these long career arcs when it's an all-time great like that.

19 years ago, I watched him win his first Roland Garros title from right behind his uncle Tony and his family in the stands because we didn't have the rights to broadcast the finals. So I just went and sat with Brad Gilbert in the stands and

That was 19 years ago. He was 19 at the time. He's now 38, so half of his life he's been winning the French Open, and I was there to see the first one and quite a few others since then and then just watched on TV and tried to put into words how he felt about that. So, yeah, I guess when you've been around long enough, you are blessed to be able to see the entire career arc as you can of many athletes you've covered in various sports, and there's a richness to that. I don't get that in college football. The career arc is about, you know,

Two years, two and a half years, right? But in tennis I've had the chance, and other sports I've covered too, to be able to see the growth of an athlete as a person and a player. I don't take that for granted. Why isn't Nadal your favorite ever? What he has brought to every performance he's given on the court. The grit, the competitive spirit, the fight, the willingness to suffer.

to dig deep within himself, to do whatever it takes. The humility, he's grounded and he's a family guy. He practices the way you're supposed to practice. He has done a lot to grow the sport by the way he's acted off the court. Just all of those things. And that's not me. Everybody that's covered him would say that all of his peers, they were paying nice tributes to him when he lost the other day in Paris. And that's the last time he's going to play that tournament. And I heard everybody from Coco golf to,

Sasha Zverev, the guy who beat him in that match, talk about what he has meant to them. And that's really a lot more important than what he's meant to me is what he's meant to the sport and millions and millions of other people. Are you someone when you talk about I associate you with like because of the work?

I imagine you to be very willful and meticulous when you talk about the suffering of Nadal and the craft of what it is that you do and what goes into it. The product I get on television is a very polished one from you. But I imagine just watching your career arc that you're probably obsessively and insanely meticulous. Yes.

That you must be sort of unreasonably meticulous just from watching how... I'm telling you, since watching you covering high school, I'm like, that dude knows how to do television. He's sort of... He's perfected the sculpting of how people learn the doing of this. Again, that's very kind. There's no perfecting because you don't chase perfection. I don't think it's possible. You just chase constant improvement. No, I think you have to...

Love the grind. It's no different than being an athlete. It's no different than doing anything for a living. If you like the process of preparation, improving the groundwork that leads to the broadcasts, that isn't torture to you. Um,

Then you're ahead of the game. I don't think people understand the preparation, though. I don't think people can. You are not supposed to. It doesn't matter. They don't have to understand what it sounds like on Saturday. I'd like them to. I'd like them to understand when you get out there and do a broadcast, any kind of broadcast, and you're on national television for three hours learning everything you've learned over 38 years. Tell me about your process up to that and how forgiving you are with yourself after you've performed well.

less than wherever I'm imagining an unreasonable standard is. Oh, last question, not very forgiving. I mean, I'm getting better at that because, as I said, you know, perfectionism is not a path to happiness. You can't be a very happy person if you hold yourself to a standard of perfection. I have a great conversation with John McInerney about this. He was miserable because he was raised to be a perfectionist. Once he realized you're going to make mistakes, you've got to move on and process it. So I've made plenty of mistakes and thousands of them. And

you know, used to get really pissed off and pick up something off the desk and throw it somewhere. Hopefully not at somebody when I would get frustrated, but you overcome that. You realize that you're not going to be perfect. You just have to meet your own high standard and make sure that your, your standards for yourself are higher than anybody else's for you. And I think that's what I tell young people. You know, you got to care more about your level of performance than anybody else does. If you do, uh,

You're going to do what it takes to be prepared. So, yeah, a lot goes into a football broadcast. A lot goes into a tennis match, even though there's only two players on the court. But, you know, the preparation for college football, I say this, having done NFL games as well and other sports, it's the hardest to do just the sheer size of the roster. And the fact that the rosters change every hour these days in the sport. I mean, it just it's harder to get prepared.

Your head wraps around all the names, all the numbers, all the stats, all the history. And you have to learn how to be efficient with your time because you can't grind yourself to the bone and then still be fresh and sharp. You know, sometimes you got to figure out, hey, all that matters is really what you sound like Saturday night. For years, it was Saturday morning for me. But, you know, you can have a great week of preparation, not sleep enough,

not be sharp and suck. And no one cares what you did on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. You know what I mean? So it's getting yourself in the right position to perform. It's a performance what we do here. So you have to figure out what makes it work for you. Preparation is confidence. I say that if you're prepared, you know you can handle the situation. But

It's also important to know when to back off. I don't anymore, like stay up till three in the morning studying my chart just in case the backup left tackle goes in the game. And I want to have a story about his grandmother. Okay. There you have the diminishing returns, right? You have to know when to throttle back. There's just too much to learn in college football tennis. Okay. I should know everything about Djokovic and his opponent and a big match. I mean, there's just no excuse for not knowing that, but yeah,

College football, you might see a team once or twice a year. You do what you can. You watch as much tape as you can, but at some point you've got to pull off and I'll go to the gym or go for a walk or meditate so that when the light comes on,

You're going to be in the right frame of mind. I'm going to pin you down, though, on for a Saturday night performance for the people who might think it's easy. Chris Fowler shows up and he's just going to do Saturday night and he's going to leave three hours later. Explain to them what that week is like now that you've arrived at a place that you could work smart and not just work hard, that you can be efficient about it. I'm guessing the workload is still pretty unreasonable.

Yeah, I mean, we're doing more and more. I mean, what Herbstreit does a couple games a week in a pregame show. He's a lunatic. Yeah, he is. He's a lunatic working that. I don't know how he does it. It keeps his energy up somehow. I believe in doing less and trying to make sure that I can do the best I can at each thing. But still, you know, there's not really a bunch of time off in the week. College football, you know, you're looking at that team's

recent game on Sunday, Monday. You're beginning to spin it ahead. You get your chart. You start to fill your chart in. You have conference calls with coaches and players. You have in-person meetings. You look at a lot of tape. You need to look at at least two or three complete games of a team, especially later in the season. You've got to pick and choose. You can look at chunks of games, but looking at tape for play-by-play is important too, even though it's mostly an analyst realm. You have to be familiar with what they've done so that you don't just parachute in and act like

this game is a singular event and isn't part of a season. That'd be foolish. So time is spent doing that.

There's so much information out there now. It was very different. I'm old enough to say that I started doing game day almost in the pre-internet era. The internet was just getting up and running. There were very few websites that had college football information on it. And so you could sound really smart if you told people in a national platform what was going on in Eugene, Oregon, because you're able to read the Oregon Register Guard online, which no one knew how to do. Actually, I had some ways to get at

These out of town sports sections like this is so primitive when that wasn't easy to do right now. You had secret access to newspapers and others. I had a website called E.C.O.L.A. dot com. You could link to all these all these local sports sections and read what the beat writers are writing. Now, of course, that is that is baseline. That is the beginning.

not the sum total of your preparation, but the audience is so much better educated. And these big college games, there's so much on ESPN and other places that you've heard 10 hours of content on that game at the time we get in the booth. So you better come up with something different or fresh. And that's where sort of, you know, you explore other ways to get information that's proprietary or not out there for easy access all week long. And that helps too. Yeah.

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Grandma and shared joy is where it starts. How supportive was the family? What was the upbringing around you deciding to choose sports as a livelihood? Because it seems unwise. They were supportive, but clueless, basically. My parents were not sports fans. They were in the arts, but dad was a theater director.

a professional theater director and professor of theater arts. My mom was a choreographer. They were very much in the arts world in the 70s.

They had interesting parties at the house, interesting characters who dropped by. None of it centered around sports. They might watch a little bit of the Olympics. That was it. My grandmother was the one that got me into it, and I kind of just took it from there. But they were supportive. I lost my dad when I was 16, and he had a vague idea of what I wanted to do. I was just beginning to sort of think about college at that point. So he's never been able to see any of the success. My mom...

Did see it. She was able to witness sort of like the emergence of game day. And she was proud, although being an Irish woman was very stoic. I mean, I wasn't showered with positive reinforcement or love or or accolades the way somebody might have been from a different family background. But but, you know, there was the understanding that she was proud of what I was doing. And I've always been pretty good at not needing a lot of external support.

I mean, I don't say that it's unimportant to me what people think because they're our customers. I will just say that feedback from them, be it really positive and kind or really negative, duly noted, but it's not going to rock my world. It's not going to make me feel too differently about what I do. I think you go about your business and, like I said, you meet your own standard and you try to do right by the people you work with because I love the collaborative part of this.

And you're surrounded, hopefully, by people that also hold themselves to a really high standard. And you take great pride in the production. And so you're less concerned by what other people say or don't say. And I was fine with the level of support that I got, that it wasn't like my mom was watching every show and

Jumping on the phone and telling our real friends. It was good. It seems like you've arrived, though, at something that sounds like real confidence and that it would be hard to arrive at it if you lose your dad at 16 and your mom is, you know, stoic. Stoic is the good word. I mean, I don't know. I think you...

I certainly didn't have a lot of confidence as a younger person. Wasn't a great athlete. Moved around. We changed schools a lot. I was the new kid a lot. You don't swagger into the school thinking, hey, I'm him. I'm going to run this show. You're just trying to get along and not get knocked around. And, you know, you kind of try to blend in when you're the new kid all the time to not at least I did.

And so, you know, same, by the way, same fringes of sports, admiring the athletes, but just wanting to be close to what it is that they were close to, but not good enough to be as good as they were. Yeah, I play, but thankfully none of my career has to do anything to do how I played tennis or football or anything. So, you know, I liked it, but I recognized pretty early I wasn't especially gifted and it wasn't going to be a pathway for me to gain confidence or build an identity. You know, it wasn't that wasn't going to be.

A part of my my self-identity was an athlete or a popular person. So I don't know. I think you you gain confidence over time slowly if you're in my position or your position. Maybe I I don't know how you felt, but I mean, I had no game with girls in high school. That wasn't a part of it. I didn't go off to college thinking I was going to conquer the world. I just went off to work hard.

And really take no handouts and make my way and sponge up every piece of useful knowledge I could and be around the Colorado Buffaloes program, even though they were horrendous in football at the time, and just sort of pay my dues and loved it. But, yeah, I think it took me a long time to have whatever confidence. I think I had belief in myself, but it certainly wasn't displayed outwardly too often.

it feels like we had similar paths, right? I went to an all boys school and I was doing all that same stuff, just trying to fit in. Didn't, didn't move around a lot, but had a father who was difficult to please or didn't show pleasure and a very supportive mother also warm, which was helpful to believe in something that was hard to believe in. Cause I wasn't even doing it the way you were doing it. I'm, I'm telling Cuban exiles that,

who have come to this country to get me a private education and an engineering scholarship. Hey, I want to write about sports. I want to see if I can make money writing. It's not even television and some of the vanities. And so my father...

was mortified, right? Because he had made so many sacrifices so that I could get and become an engineer like him because it would have been a safer path, but I would have been unhappy. Like this thing that I chose fed me because of the same things you're talking about. The first time I go to the orange bowl with my dad, the electricity of the places, it's like, it would have been what Disney world is to kids, uh,

of that age, the orange bowl was to me because I'm being jostled around and I'm like, why is that noise being made? Why does it feel like this? Why does everybody feel so good? And it was more joyous than my household. It was, uh, my, my house didn't have, my house didn't have a lot of joy in it. My mom, my father's not a joyful person. And, uh,

And my, you know, my mother tried, but I wouldn't say that there was a giant joy in my house. It was work and commitment. That was those were the important things. The only way you got to freedom in this country was to work and working couldn't be joyful. So satisfaction more than joy. I get that. I've never focused, though, on.

Yeah.

one conversation after school at the family dining table when that news was delivered. It was kept from us for a long time because parents kept stuff from kids. Cancer wasn't discussed as openly back then and not with kids, certainly. And

When it was finally time to tell us what was going on, it was scary as shit. And we knew in that moment that our life as a family was not going to be the same. And you're very – you're just – you're unsure. You're scared. Pretty soon he was in another state getting treatment at a hospital in Colorado. We were back in Pennsylvania because he was at the faculty at Penn State when he got diagnosed. And we were apart for months. And this was –

pre-everything, man. There was no FaceTime. There was no cell phones. You maybe got a phone call once a week from him. Here's how chemotherapy is going. How's school going? It was primitive communication, right? So it was all very scary. Those are such formative years for you. They were. But again, what do you do? I was the oldest of two kids. My younger brother was struggling maybe even more than I was because he was two and a half years younger. My mom was obviously...

really strongly. So you try to be there for both of them and not be a problem for anyone. You learn to be very self-sufficient. And I've never focused on, geez, that really sucked that I didn't have a relationship with my dad beyond 16. As an adult, I'm envious of that to some degree because I think it's a rich experience.

He never saw any of my success. You know, I wasn't shower with hugs and kisses from my mom, but that's okay. I don't focus on what was lacking. I focus on what I needed to do to, to navigate through that. And, and as I said, be really self-sufficient, go to school and be very determined. I'm not going to take a dime from my mom or anybody else like zero. So little scholarship here and there, a bunch of jobs, you know,

You know, people tend to see you now and they would think that you were born that way. Right. You're born on third base or that you don't know what adversity is, that you don't know what trauma is and heartbreak is. And I get a little emotional even talking about stuff like that because you've all got shit we've dealt with. Every single person you see walking around, that's what you learn. You might see a dream life or a God, the guy is so lucky and I am.

But that doesn't mean you haven't been through plenty of things to help shape who you are. And I'm very aware that everybody I see has stuff, heavy stuff, hard stuff, difficult chapters in their life and stuff they have to overcome. And so I don't take for granted where I am. And I don't assume that others have it easy, even though it appears from the outside that they might be really lucky. What are the parts that make you emotional? That's a good question. I think just...

You know, there's no point in sort of regretting what you don't have. I think that's what I've come through. You don't get better or stronger when you focus on what you didn't have. You take pride from the fact that what you made it through. And again, people had a lot harder than me. OK, I mean, everybody out there can can relate to tough experiences. And many, many people came through a lot more than I did. But I just think that, you know, it's.

it's powerful stuff to think about how a parent, both parents really suffered. Both parents really suffered from poor health. My mom had Alzheimer's. It's a different kind of heartbreaking to lose someone slowly who is physically fine, but mentally erodes and becomes an echo of themselves. And Alzheimer's is awful in that way. So that was opposite for my dad who was

was sharp mentally and still writing and creating, but whose body was being ravaged by cancer at a time when they didn't really have treatments nearly as sophisticated as they do now. So, you know, both of those things, I think if I think about them, make me emotional. And if I allow them to, it's just not a part of my daily life, but

It is definitely a part of who I am. If I allow them to. It seems like you're very tough and don't want... It seems like I'm asking you the question, so you're not volunteering how tough your life was, and you don't have to account for how tough everyone else's life is to know that...

cancer as you're talking about it i saw with not primitive treatment how what that did to my brother over the last year and i wasn't in my formative years i'm in my 50s and it wasn't my father and so watching all of that you've now mentioned twice volunteered twice my father didn't get to see my success yeah clearly that's something that stayed with you

Yeah, I think so. I'll tell you something. I won't tell the long version of this because people might wander away, but I discovered a shoebox full of cassette tapes my dad recorded when he was a cancer patient. He had planned to do a memoir because at that point, people had not written a lot of books about what cancer was like. Again, this was middle 70s, and that stuff was kind of swept away. It wasn't talked about. He wanted to do a book because he was recording cancer.

his daily activities during treatment and some of it was very mundane and how who he had lunch with and what he felt but some of it was deeper lessons he was just learning and these tapes sat in a box in my mom's basement for a long time got discovered when she passed away we're going through her stuff and i have since listened to most of them i'm going to do something with it so there's a project there because even though he never finished the tapes

There's a lot of interesting stuff on there, and half the story, at least half the story, is me listening to him record these at an age when he was a lot younger than I am now. He didn't make it to 50. He died at, I think he was 47. So I was already a lot older than that when I listened to these tapes. And so it's an out-of-body experience. I promise you, to listen to recordings of your dad's voice that you hadn't heard for decades,

40 years, 45 years, you know, to now hear these tapes. And this is what he sounded like. He's very theatrical and being from that world, you know, doesn't speak like I speak, is very different than I am in a lot of ways. And to process this is his voice as he is suffering, what his daily life is like, and then coming to these epiphanies that

Every day is precious and a simple lunch with friends is priceless. I'm sure you had conversations with your brother. You realize when you know your time is not limitless that these things are precious. And he was recording it. And my reaction was basically like no shit.

I mean, he figured that out when he was a patient, but that was so long ago and at such a younger age. I mean, I've known that for a long time, maybe since I'm 16. There were guaranteed nothing. You know, when you have cancer in your family, it was three brothers, right?

of him, not just him, that cancer took. You know, you don't assume you're going to live to 90. You don't assume you've got plenty of time to do all these things because I'll live forever. You know, the mortality is in there. And so I think I've approached life like don't put stuff off. You know, time is precious. And hearing him figure that out after he got cancer on tape was

45 years later was quite an experience. I'll do something with it at some point because, you know, it's very interesting. No one I've talked to has had that similar experience about hearing tapes from a dead parent. It's crazy.

But there's a certain lack of self-awareness in you saying no shit to those observations about mortality when it was forced upon you between the ages of 14 and 16. And so you lose your childhood there. You lose your father. And, of course, it's no shit. Time is short. I just learned the lesson. If he'd lost his father at 16, he might have learned it before cancer. He smoked like a chimney. My mom smoked, too. I mean, it was lung cancer that took him. I mean, it's a long story.

You know, so, yeah, you should have known. But it's just like when someone says, hey, there is power in something simple, just having a conversation on the phone with a friend and sharing this and that and just taking a walk in nature. There's power in that. I've known that for a long time because I've known that we're not guaranteed things. So to hear him arrive at that conclusion in his mid 40s.

when cancer was staring at him was just an interesting experience. That's all. When you say you've known it though, you know it because your dad died. Like it's, I can't imagine that not being a, a thing that shapes you like instantaneously losing teenage years to, um,

To the realization that life is short. Yeah, I don't want to feel like I walked around every day fearing a short life or fearing cancer. No, it's appreciating small moments. It's finding real happiness. I choose not to be morbid. I take care of myself. My penchant for obsessing about health and wellness, I'm sure, comes from that. It doesn't take a genius psychiatrist to figure that out. I try to take as good care of myself as I possibly can. But

Now, you realize that the small things matter a lot when you have them taken away.

It leads us to why you would seek out joy and why you would find it on a wilderness hike because you're just enjoying the precious moment of being connected to... Being healthy. I'm alive and grateful. I celebrate every day that I'm healthy, that I can get up and move. And so I have a hard time being sedentary and inactive. It drives me crazy to sit for long periods of time and not do something because I just take great joy in activity and health and moving around. Where does that come from? Yeah.

Do you think it's in here somewhere? Like when you when you think of restlessness and activity, you've mentioned that your your parents were performers. You don't strike me as somebody who's naturally inclined to perform. I had to step on stage. I had a lot of opportunities to be in theater as a little kid. You know, you jump out there in some Shakespearean thing. My Lord, my Lord, here come with it. I was scared shitless of that. I associated live performance with tension.

Because as a production was getting ready to be launched, my dad would be nervous about it and he had hit a temper and he was wound up. And so that's what that's what theater meant to me was tension. So I took acting classes. It was definitely not for me. And I was scared to death to give up.

reports in class or reports were, I mean, I didn't like public speaking at all when I first got to ESPN, you figure out you better get over that because they're going to pay you money. You know, it's stupid to be scared as standing in front of a group talking to people, but, but you know, none of that was natural, but now the, the,

My appreciation for nature did come from my parents. We took a lot of hikes, and they're both from Colorado. We spent time out there. I still do every summer. I feel very connected to them and myself when I'm out in the mountains. That's kind of my happy place. So that's always been there, even pre-cancer. I mean, just the wonders of nature in all its many forms. I mean, I like living here in Miami because I love nature.

seeing the trees and I love swimming in the ocean and the color of Biscayne Bay is something that I just cherish every time I drive across the causeway. I just love nature in all its forms and

And so being healthy enough to get outside and enjoy it is like something I'm grateful for every day. You mentioned your father's temper and you mentioned your own when you're frustrated with a mistake you've made. I don't have a big temper, though. I'm nowhere near him, I promise you. No, no, I don't know what his temper is. I just want more details on the mistake that gets the thing thrown. I want to know, even though you've outgrown it, I want to know when you say you're unforgiving with yourself, because I do imagine...

Again, I'm making assumptions. I don't know you this way, but I assume that you're very tough and that you're very tough on yourself. And so when you're throwing the phone or whatever it is you're throwing, what is the nature of the mistake that makes you ravage yourself unreasonably, even though you don't do that that much anymore? Well, at least you added that last part. I don't ravage myself very much anymore, but I have been far, far angrier at myself recently.

than I have at any other person, not even close. And especially these days, I really don't... I've never raised my voice or yelled at anybody at ESPN in all those years except for one person, somebody that I actually really love, and that's Dick Vitale. That's another... That's a TV story that I've told at his event. But, you know, I lost my mind, but he drove me to it. No, but I don't... Temper is not really a part of my game, especially to other people. I will... I actually...

People who think all they see is intensity and hard work. That's what they thought about game day for this guy doesn't take a lot of joy. I've had people really smart, sensitive people, tuned in people who know me well, like Tom Rinaldi take

Take me aside and say, you know, I know you enjoy this show, but can you show the joy more? Sure, I can. I mean, believe me, I'm very grateful to do this job, but it is such hard work that that comes first. Right. You meeting your standard and the responsibility of that particular role in a show like that.

You know, you are the point guard, the quarterback, whatever people take their cue from you for better or worse. So you want to convey commitment, hard work, attention to detail, high standard. And, and I've been really, really grateful that people have expressed that to me, that they've, they've seen that now,

It took me longer to realize you should also show you're having a great time, that this is fun, that you're lucky to be here in this spot, that you're taking great joy in this because they take their cue from that too. So that was a longer time coming, but I will still get pissed off at myself if I miss an exit over here and I'm just not paying attention. I'll scream out.

nasty words at myself in the car for five seconds and I'll calm down and go about my rerouting myself. But I can't, you know. What does your wife have to say about these parts of you that she accepts and understands and loves but may not love? Oh, Jennifer understands. I mean, I think that I don't have a temper, so I don't, and I never, I don't. No, I'm talking about being hard on yourself. When a woman loves you or when a person loves you, I know my wife helps me a great deal here because if I could find

fix one thing about myself or improve one thing about myself, I would be more gentle with myself. And having someone love you in a way that's understanding and accepting and can talk me in on stuff when I'm being unreasonable with myself. That's why I was asking you how she looks out. Well, she's very, very hard on herself, too, though. She has very high standards. She's meticulous, detail-oriented,

when she does a job does it right so she we agree on that part of the thing and she doesn't let me off too easy if i don't do a good job with something because that's the way she is but no but she understands i mean she's not the voice though that says hey you're too tough on yourself relax throttle back a little bit i mean that's not i don't ask her to do that and that's not the role that she plays she's she understands that i can i can sort through this myself and that i i'm not going to uh

beat myself up for a game that I consider to be below my standard. You leave the stadium sometimes and you know you didn't bring all that preparation that you did properly to bear. Or you just screwed up in the moment. Or you let your concentration dip in the third quarter. Or you didn't have the words when it was needed in some big moment.

But, you know, I don't again, that is a carry over very long. I want a couple of tequilas and I get over. All right. We'll keep you. We'll give you keep giving you tequila and we'll keep trying to milk you for more and more information about how it is. You're as good as you are at the things that you are good at. When you mentioned preparation, I'm going to try and pin you down here at your most crazy, extreme meticulous.

preparation is how many hours a week maybe not now but whenever it was that you were most unreasonable about hungry and getting to a place that had achievement in it and wasn't necessarily reasonable or balanced how many hours a week does it take you to prepare for what you're doing on saturday night what time are you going to bed at on on the most unreasonable preparation weeks

Um, not very late anymore. Maybe one o'clock. I'm pretty nocturnal. I'm not talking about now. I'm talking about whatever represents your, your greatest extremes on preparation when you were fighting for your dreams. When I did college game day and also did Thursday night football, it was super challenging. I probably worked, I don't know, 70, 80 hours because it was required. You know, I did a game on Thursdays. It was great fun. It was never the hugest game of the week. Um, but,

I took it super seriously. I hadn't done that much football play-by-play until that. So it was myself and Jesse Palmer, Doug Flutie, Craig James, Aaron Andrews. That was sort of our group in some kind of rotation. And I did that game. And then...

commercially flew to game day site on Friday morning and cranked really hard to do a show that just kept growing from 90 minutes to two hours to three hours just got harder and harder and the the level of detail that I wanted to bring to the show to an increasingly educated viewership

was stressful as hell. Outdoors. Oh, it was so stressful. I mean, yeah, the execution of the show is another thing. We can talk about that, but getting ready for the show, there was no downtime. It was nothing but that for 15, three weeks. Again, I loved it, but it didn't leave much time to try to be a good husband. We were trying to be parents at that point. I wasn't present for every chapter of that. It was...

It was difficult and super challenging. I don't really, I'm not a reflective person. I don't think back on that much, but that was a tough time. And again, you do what you think you need to do to meet your own standard and not disappoint yourself. And it was a lot of work. When I stopped doing the Thursday game and just did game day, I could breathe a little bit. I still stay up really late. I still don't want to miss anything.

And that continues today. I just think you can work, as you said, work smarter and know how to prepare yourself for the broadcast and not get caught up. The preparation is not the thing. It just sets the table.

It's essential, but the job is the performance, right? So like I said before, you can suck on Saturday. It doesn't matter to anybody, including me, how well you did Monday through Friday preparing. Jeez, I had that down. I didn't say it well, or I forgot this in the moment, or I got this guy's pronunciation wrong.

OK, that's what you're judged by, you know, practice. It doesn't matter how you shoot and shoot around. It matters what you do. You're judged on Saturday night for three hours. It's you figure out, OK, how do I get the best out of myself for that? That three, four. I wish it was three hours is more like four hours. Is there any particular reason that you're not a reflective person? I've never been asked that question.

Um, because I, I number one, believe in the present moment a lot more. I don't believe in the future stressing about that. I don't believe in trying to rewrite the past. I think what's, what's done is done all those kinds of cycle babble cliches that people say that I happen to believe in to a large degree, but that, um, you know, I do think that

We can go deep if you want to. I do believe that control is an illusion. We think we have control over things we actually have no control over. We have no control over the past. I don't believe you have that much control over the future, except you can put yourself in position to...

to succeed with probabilities play or try to play but it's not controlled so what you're doing now to get ready for that moment you know where preparation meets opportunity that's luck i believe that so it's what you're doing right now to get ready for what might happen but you're not stressing about what's going to happen in the future because we don't control that so i i think i've just learned that one way to take stress out of life and to be a happier person is to not

spend too much time looking back or looking forward. What a wisdom, though. Like I read an entire book Eckhart Tolle wrote about the power of now and he writes about fear. Regret is the past and fear is whatever it is you think you suffer much more in our imagination than we do in reality. Eckhart Tolle writes about a lot of that. I've read a lot of books like his and all his books. You know, we what we imagine could happen.

far worse than what's usually going to happen. I mean, nine times out of 10, we're imagining stuff worse than, than we'll actually confront us. What a great thing for you to have learned. Like how did you arrive at the path of looking for these kinds of nuggets of wisdom that those are self-help books that you're reading about how to get to something happier and you seem to have, you're, you're living it. It seems. Yeah. You know, I don't know. I, I guess, um,

And intuitively, I've come to some of the same conclusions that these other people have. And when I read books, I mean, there are light bulb moments. I mean, I can't say that I read Eckhart Tolle and none of that stuff. I hadn't thought of that before. I mean, it makes sense. But when it reinforces something you already thought and I read the Stoics, I read Marcus Aurelius, I read a lot of because there's a lot of smart people back then. And I think a lot of it resonates now. It's timeless. So.

you know, just being focused on the present moment is not original and it's not exclusive to one author. I think it's, it's sort of, um, you know, Eastern thinking interests me. I've spent time in Nepal and the Himalayas getting to know Sherpas and talking to them and seeing kind of what makes them tick and what makes them joyful and what they prioritize and what they don't. I mean, it's,

All of life is prioritizing, right? And prioritizing begins with subtraction. You start subtracting things that are really unimportant to you, that are wasteful. And then you're left with fewer things to worry about, and you can choose from among those things about what to prioritize. That, to me, is just life. If you stress about, hey, I've got so much on my platter and so little time to do it, which I used to do all the time, including preparing for games.

Look how much energy you're wasting on the stress of that. When in reality, you know, you come to the conclusion that you have plenty of time to do the things you really need to do. As long as you can differentiate the stuff that you don't really need to do. And then once you figure out what's important to you, what's going to help you and help others and make you happy and gets you where you want to go, then...

Somehow prioritize that. And usually for me, there's no room for sitting and complaining about the past. I like to do it. I like to reflect on, hey, memory lane. I sat with Corso the other day in Orlando. We start telling old stories and laughing. When I do that, I realize, oh, there's great joy in that too. And I shouldn't take more time to do that. But

It's never going to be more important to me than the present moment, you know. Understood. Why are you talking to Sherpas? Are you on a quest for curiosities? Like how are I know you like to travel, but what are you what are you doing there? Like you're trying to learn. Are you just inherently curious? No, I go there because the mountains are there. But the people of Nepal in that region who are basically they're Tibetan, they've come down from from across the Himalayas from Tibet into Nepal. Then the Sherpas who populate that part of that country.

are of Tibetan descent, typically. No, they're just fascinating, very, very tough people who know how to keep things simple and know where to find joy and know what's important, I think, as well as the amazing scenery.

Which if mountains speak to you and mountains to me are the most profound expression of nature. And we talked about how much I love nature. Then the Himalayas are where you go and you test yourself mentally, physically. You go over high passes and climb mountains. I've never climbed Everest or anything of that 8000 meter range, but I've climbed smaller mountains there. And I've certainly spent a lot of time in altitude and and taking great joy in that. Just went last last year with my brother, 25 years after we had gone the first time.

and was extremely proud of being able to do that at age 60 and be physically better than I was at 35. But no, along with that, you find stillness and just take a lot of lessons from kind of what you see and what you experience. And there's a lot of wisdom. Those people are incredibly tough. I mean, old stories about walking four hours to school every day. They walked four hours to school every day. The guy, the Sherpa that took us around just climbed Everest 20 times every

was telling us stories. Now, that's not the thrust of his wisdom, but it shows you that people have been formed by serious hardship and the resolve and resilience that it takes to overcome that. And the fact that, you know, people sit there in a small village and they watch foreigners walk past their house every day.

loaded down with super expensive camera equipment and climbing equipment. And they've spent $65,000, $70,000 to climb Everest, okay, for a month of their life. And that is an amount of money that is unfathomable to anyone who lives there, right? So they've seen that their whole lives and have... I'm not climbing inside the head of every Sherpa I've ever come across, but in general...

They're not envious. They're not jealous. They're not angry. They don't feel cheated. They don't feel deprived. They're very happy with what they have and how they live their life and what's important to them and not important to them. And that's,

family and health and being surrounded by these mountains. Are you someone who's perpetually testing himself? Do you like to test yourself in a lot of areas, whether it be the weight room or beyond where you're pushing yourself through what might be some limits or trying to? Yeah, I think so. A lot of different forms. I mean, I don't give myself that pep talk every morning by any stretch, but I think part of what I consider to be a happy life, a fulfilling life is

is one where you continue to challenge yourself and get outside of your comfort zone and improve and grow. And if you cease doing that,

then something really precious is lost. And I really can't imagine life without that, without in some way continuing to try to improve and grow. And you can't do those things unless you're pushing yourself, unless you're getting out of your comfort zone. Again, that's psychobabble, but it really is true. I mean, you have to be comfortable getting out of your comfort zone and pushing yourself and risking failure. It's why I don't have any fear of losing. I don't really have any fear of failing.

I want to do everything I try to do well. But if you sit around and ask anybody you talk to, you know better than me, talk to these athletes, if you're going to fear losing all the time, you're never going to take a shot. You're never going to take a risk. You're going to go nowhere. If you fear losing and failing, you wouldn't even launch a career of being an athlete in sports because the odds are so long, right? So you've got to suspend that and not be afraid of failing and looking bad and falling short. And then you can kind of get just kind of freed up to keep trying to do different things.

It's a broad question I'm going to ask you, but what has your wife taught you about love and where has your wife helped you grow through some of these things that we're talking about? I mean, that's a long conversation. I mean, I think when you run into your life partner, you learn a lot about love. You learn your capacity for it. You learn how to receive it. And you learn that it's the most important thing. So.

We met at the least romantic occasion you could possibly think of, the ESPN Christmas party at a catering hall.

In southern Connecticut, my wife Jennifer was on Body Shaping, which was a show that was very, very important to ESPN. It was huge. Family of stations early on. It was really important. ESPN2 had nothing. In fact, ESPN didn't have a whole lot before ESPN2 was even launched. There was not SportsCenter and Get Up and First Take. These shows didn't exist. The show was an exercise show in Hawaii. Was it Hawaii? Different places, yeah. Jamaica, Hawaii. Beautiful people exercising outdoors. So she did that for a long time, was very good at it, among other jobs. She worked.

As a home shopping host, she was on Channel 2 in New York at CBS and did a lot of acting and other things, too. But she was an ESPN because of body shaping. And so that's what brought her to the company Christmas party. And we were supposed to get fixed up at a Super Bowl party by some mutual friends the year before. But nobody told me it was a fix up.

They just told me, come to Connecticut on your off day to go to a Super Bowl party. And I was living in New York. I was like, I'm good. I'm up there during the week. I'm just going to watch the game on my couch. And after the fact, they said, we had somebody we wanted you to meet. He didn't tell me that. So we go around from January all the way till the next December. And she walks up to me at the company Christmas party, introduced herself. And I knew who she was and everything.

And, you know, we just hit it off and it's quite weird. But our first date was the Espy's in Radio City, which, again, it sounds so sad. It sounds so unromantic and sad. Well, but 25 years later, I'm asking you a question about how she helped you grow and what she taught you about love. She taught me everything about love. I mean, I think, you know, you meet your late partner and you, you know, I'm not a parent.

But so people say you learn another capacity for love. If you have kids born that you learn things about yourself and about love that you never knew before, I'll accept that. But not having experienced that, my growth in that area and knowledge of love comes from Jennifer and I falling in love and growing.

And getting married and spending 25 years together, almost 25 years together. So, yeah, she's been instrumental to me in so many different ways. I can't even express it fully. But, yeah, when somebody is your best friend and your life partner, they know you better than anybody else, for better or worse. Well, I like where my wife knows me better than I know me.

It's not even that they know you better than anybody else. Like there are a good many things that my wife is showing me that I had not before seen about me before. Does that make you uncomfortable? I mean, I would say uncomfortable only in the places that you're speaking about when you say it's psychobabble to say that you have to go toward your discomforts to learn something new, to grow, to... Yeah, true. It makes you uncomfortable, but you understand that she means well. It's for your...

Oh, but it's not even – but the thing is, this is – God, it's funny to say because she's the only one that figured these particular combination keys out. I have to see it for myself. It's not because I'm going to be nagged into changing. Like, I did all of that my whole life before marrying her. That's not what's happening. It's that I love this person so much. I want to be what this person thinks I am.

And so when I see things in my behavior that are patterns from that I just saw in my house and I didn't know that that's not necessarily how it has to be or I'm just not paying attention because, you know.

I'm just not thinking about the things that have to be conscious in a loving relationship where you have to be unselfish about things. No, I'm deeply grateful that she shows me these things. It doesn't it doesn't mean that I enjoy seeing them, but then I can get to work on them. I'm never going to work on them if it if it's just forever blind spot getting married later. See, I was 36. I think when.

Jen and I got together and she was 32, 31, 32. So you've lived quite a bit of life and you've experienced things and you're not coming up together as kids. And so there are challenges because I think...

If not fully formed, you're largely formed by that stage in life. Well, but I thought I was. That's the thing. I would say that I would have argued before meeting her, I would have argued I'm formed. Men are formed by 50. There's not... I mean, we can talk about wisdoms and things that you can learn and always want to be growing, but that clay can get resistant and hardened. And so I...

If not for her, I think I might have ended up in something that would have been unwilling to change so readily because I'm doing it in the name of making sure I take care of somebody who deserves it. You should tutor me on how to be ready and willing to change that in fundamental ways. I do find that hard. I do think I am who I am. I think, obviously, you need to respect—

the wisdom of your life partner and understand what she's telling you and be willing to adjust. And I do think that it's, those are hard things and they're hard for her to accept from me too. Um, because you can sort of nudge as much as you love someone and they love you, you can nudge them in a direction, but it's hard to find them. Oh, but this is not, but what I'm saying to you though, is it's not even nudging with what I have learned in this small space is that

Her love tends to be such a pure thing, unlike anything that I've known before teaching me about love, that if I'm landing wrong with her because she's not inclined to

to have these frictions with me, I'm probably doing something wrong. That's what I learned, right? And that's a hard thing to learn. Like if you're stubborn, if you're Cuban machismo, if you're grew up thinking, you know, certain things and that, you know, them with conviction, it's never her telling me anything. It's me noticing how something lands and being like, that doesn't feel right. Like that,

I'm doing something there that I shouldn't be doing it. And then I start tracing what it is that is in my past with my parents and what I saw in my house. And I'm like, oh, well, that's what I learned.

I think that's wise. I think a lot of women listening to this would say, yes, they would stand up and cheer what you just said, because that's a hard thing for us to do as men, I think. I admit that in myself, too. And you don't see the value in it, though? I do see the value in it. I do see the value. Of course I see the value. But because you seem like somebody, you've accrued wisdoms, and to go with the Popeye, I am what I am, when you're still trying to grow at every turn, seems unnecessarily stubborn. I don't know that I said I am what I am. I just think that you figured out

When your partner, as much as you love them, does think differently than you and sees certain things that are fundamental to her and to you differently, you can bang heads on it because you're just not going to find common ground. And so we have different ways of thinking about certain things and approaching life in ways that I have...

She learned limitless things from her and what she's experienced and how she's developed as a person. She's come through a whole lot. Talk about stuff, you know? So...

But it doesn't mean that we're going to find. No, no, that makes sense. Yes. On fundamental disagreement, you're going to have fundamental disagreement. You don't hang around for 25 years. Look, we just got to be one of those agree to disagree things. I am not going to see it this way. We do not see social media the same way. She does not understand why I ever want to pick up this phone and talk to people on Instagram. Just will not get it.

And I say, well, you don't have to get it. It's okay. It's not, that's not a pillar of who I am. It's a part of me. I like to, my dad was a professor. I like to help share stuff with people. I don't go on there and say you must, or even you should very often. I just say, Hey, I made mistakes. Here's what I figured out for me. Here's, here's an idea or two consider this. And that's, that's the way it's presented. But you know,

How do I get off talking to strangers and telling them anything about anything?

We have to disagree on that one. Right, right. Well, but yeah, no, and I understand that also keeps you from being present. Social media does, keeps one from being present. But also we need it for our work. And you just mentioned a little while ago the idea that you need to keep up. My guess is that you have to be competitive and hungry no matter where it is that you've arrived in life with success and you feel the need to...

to keep up with where everyone is because we're aging. On social media? I don't know about that. I need it for information. For what I do, the reason I said it, I was putting my sensibilities on you. I don't want to be in the phone. I prefer to get out of the phone. But there are certain things because of the daily necessities of what I do. Yeah, as an information-getting tool. I mean, we don't open actual papers anymore. But

But I think she means, you know, why share with strangers anything on that platform? Why? Why? It's not your job to do that. I do sports videos. I talk about sports sometimes on there. Most of the time I don't. I'm sharing whatever else is important to me. You know, when you're not a parent, but you think you've learned a thing or two.

I don't go up to strangers on the street who are college age and go, listen, if we'd had kids that had been your age, so you're going to have to listen. I don't do that. But when...

I'm asked for help. I get pleasure in trying to help someone understand something that maybe I can assist with, you know. You have life wisdoms accrued. You're allowed to share them before. Thank you, Dan. Before we get out of here, I wanted to ask you about both your experience with a college football video game that everyone is excited about and whether you think that you've given...

EA Sports, college football, the ability now with what it is that you did for them for many, many hours to replace you with AI. Of course they'll replace me with AI. In the future. In the future. Have you realized that you've just given them the entirety of your career as soon as they figure out... It's a multi-year contract. I'll say that. They can't do it after the first year. When the contract runs out, they can...

they can let machines do all of it. I think that that's a whole other conversation. You could do a podcast only on the looming dangers of AI. First of all, the video game was great fun for me. It's an important part of

The college football landscape, because people approach the sport very often through the video game, hasn't existed for 10 years. ESPN blocked me from being involved in the first version of that game because I was a staff employee. They could do that at that point. And they were supposedly going to develop their own video game in competition with EA. So they didn't want me to be involved in it.

um really bothered me uh because it's a part of the pop culture of the sport and now that it's back and it's been gone for 10 years and it's it's like mind-blowingly advanced the players are involved nil has opened the door for you to pick your team with names on back of the jerseys and the level of technology in the game is is staggering way too hard for me to play like i

I have a PS1, which doesn't work on that game anymore. You have to have a PS5, I think, to play it. But just being involved and putting your voice in the game is flattering because it's just...

another outlet for what you do. And when, when somebody is playing a video game and they, you know, they throw a 75 yard touchdown pass and, and, and they're playing Ohio state versus Michigan, you know, they want the voice narrating that to be as excited as they are. And so that was the challenge. They wanted your voice for years. They wanted your voice.

Well, thanks. I mean, they wanted some boys. It hasn't even been around for 10 years. So I think people are psyched that it's back. And I think it's going to explode when it goes on sale in July for that reason. I've just gotten a lot of really positive feedback about the fact that the game's even returning. When people actually get a look at it, we were up in Orlando about a week ago and people were shown for the first time just how amazing the game was. Bloggers and insiders. And I think it was embargoed until really recently. But now I can talk about it. It's

It's pretty mind-blowing what's out there. And so, yeah, I wanted to do that really, really well. And 115 hours spread out over more than two years as they developed the game. It wasn't like an intense amount of time in any given week or month, but over a couple years, we got everything that could possibly happen in a game recorded and

including stuff that would never happen in a real game, but happens in video games where apparently people punt on second down sometimes because they lose their mind. But we're ready for that too. But no, I just, they played back a simulation of the play that I described. Ohio State scores 75-yard pass, first play in the big house against Michigan, and played back what the computer had stitched together as my call. Because you don't do a complete call. You do everything involved in a long play, you know,

He's rolling right, looking deep, has a man, caught, in the clear, touchdown, Ohio State. That's like six different little pieces of information you've recorded at different times that the algorithm somehow knows how to stitch together based on what the controller does. It's crazy technology, right? But when you do that, it didn't quite sound right to me because this is pretty granular, but anybody who watches sports, who's seen Chris Berman lose his mind

on, you know, NFL highlights at the end of the day on Sunday. All right? You have no idea what that's actually like in person. You've seen it. But the intensity level in the studio is, I'm holding my hand, a foot over my head, to get to where it is eye level. Okay? Because the process of putting it on the screen, filters, everything, it's the same thing. You know how to do it.

Well, in a video game, I found it was the same thing. I had to go crazy in a little padded room in my office down here in Miami Beach. Inauthentic. Faking emotion. Faking it. Trying to put yourself in a booth and imagine that situation. And then bringing a level of intensity that's very natural in the moment, but very unnatural. And then trying to do that, by the way, again and again and again. Because we were calling...

these high-energy, crazy touchdown plays, probably half a season's worth would be squeezed into like one three-hour or four-hour voiceover session. So you're losing your voice. You're losing your mind. It's a very unnatural experience. You know, we finally figured out how to do this. Let's not quite do that. Let's have some regular three-yard gains, and then we'll mix a touchdown call or two in there. But there was one day when I went into the room and said, touchdown Air Force, which is the first letter.

first school in the alphabet, down to Wyoming and just went down there. And it was just with a couple of breaks, but you don't do that in real life. And so I wanted, when it was actually put together by the computer, I wanted it to sound like a real game, but it took a while to get there. And I had to kind of change

my energy to make it work. I wonder if you thought about your mother, the choreographer, and the father, the theater coach, because that sounds more like acting than anything that you've done in your career. Yes, it is. Although, if you can put yourself there, you're just kind of

It's not you're not creating from, you know, something you do have it done before. You're just trying to fake it and say, I'm in a booth and I'm imagining this play in front. Well, how did that sound like? I listened back to some calls from real games to kind of get in that place. You're describing acting, Fowler. You're describing you're describing acting. It's your own words.

So I'm not trying to be, you know, quote, like Shakespeare or, you know, I'm not standing out there and say, here's the latest, like, Ibsen. I mean, it's shit that I have said before and would say, just done in a different environment. That's all.

Appreciate your work. Appreciate your time. And appreciate that after all of these years that we're able to get together and do this because the audience should know in the history of sports journalism and ESPN, there have not been a lot of stories like yours. You basically went from intern to top of the game there over 40 years. Like your first assignments at ESPN were on the lowest rung of the- I looked 11 years old, man. I thought they were going to hire me for SportsCenter. They didn't. No, no. We got the high school show for you.

That's right. You were covering high school kids, but you did it with a great enthusiasm. And I still remember that as sort of aspirational. Watching you do that was like, oh, that's interesting. In fact, my first my first job in television was doing a show like that. The Miami Herald High School sports show right near here. Did someone tell you don't do that? Because the last thing I'll leave you with it, what I tell anybody is listen to your gut.

and your inner voice, and you only do that by cutting out the static. Well-meaning people will give you terrible advice along the way. And one of those pieces of advice was don't go to ESPN. Startup cable company was seven years old at the time. I got there in 86. And you should not do that. It's a magazine show, not live, high school sports. You should go read scores. These are real places that I have job offers. Wichita, Michigan,

New Hampshire, Cincinnati as a weekend guy. I was lucky. I was decent coming out of college. I was in Denver. I'd worked out of college. I'd worked in a top 20 market producing and then doing reports in sports, not anchoring, but I had been on the air in Denver. ESPN hires me to do this high school show, and it felt right. And had I listened to everybody else,

I would have had a different career. Had I listened to everybody else when I got to ESPN, they would have rerouted me to someplace very quickly away from that show, but not to college football. So, you know, about three decisions that I made early on, game day was one of those, were instrumental. So anybody listening to this, whatever you do, find a way to know yourself well, because it starts there, trust yourself,

And all the best choices I've made. I've made a lot of bad decisions on stocks and real estate and all that, but I've made no bad decisions in my career. Every single time when it's been A or B or C, I felt good about that. And stay at ESPN, leave ESPN. Could have done that a few times. Obviously didn't want it to, thought about it, didn't. Was the right thing to do was stay. Don't run away from something, run to something. So all of those things only come from the fact that

Whether it was being self-sufficient early on, I learned to know myself well and trust myself and make decisions based on what felt right and what felt fun, not money, money.

eyeballs on you, ratings, none of that ever factored in. It still doesn't. It's what is going to feel fun and fulfilling and what feels right to you. You wouldn't have met your wife either at the horribly sad Christmas party. Very, very different career in life, yes. What is the most tempted that you were? Which is the most difficult of those? When I was pissed off about how things were going at the company, when I felt unappreciated, underpaid. Yeah, I mean, we all have. You don't work

at one place for 38 years without having chapters as you know, well, right. Everybody has who's worked there. Every single person, right. At any job, not just on air has felt that. And, and probably every other company out there too. So, you know, you, you just, you just learn to check your ego, check your temper and make a sound decision as tough as it is to swallow it. Um,

It's the right thing to do. You toughed it out to have what looks like from here. I don't know if there is other stuff that you wanted to do aspirationally or ambition wise, but it seems to me like you have at ESPN the exact job you want to have at ESPN. I do. But I'm saying that is good fortune, but it's also preparation. It's also knowing yourself well and making good choices because I could have taken...

six different detours in that path that would have landed me in a different place and it wouldn't be calling the championship game in college football or the finals that we'll win at the U.S. Open. It would be someplace completely different. It might have been also good and fulfilling, but not what I'm doing now. And what I am doing now are my two favorite sports championship events. And, you know, it's...

It's not sheer luck. It's just being ready for that and knowing yourself well and knowing who to listen to and who not to listen to. And listen to yourself. It is good to see you. And I'm glad that we did this. Thank you for spending time. Yeah, I wish that we had had somebody around here bring us more so that I could have loosened him up and gotten all this drink. Do you realize if we had three of these, he would have been ripping every executive at ESPN with me lobbing him, lobbing him lobs.

I came prepared for that too, man. I came prepared for that. No, no gotcha here. This is not the setting for gotcha. Thank you, Chris. Cheers, Dan. Now's a good time to remember where the story of tequila started. In 1795, the first tequila distillery was opened by the Cuervo family. And 229 years later, Cuervo is still going strong. Family owned from the start. Same family, same land. Now's a good time to enjoy Cuervo.

The tequila that invented tequila. Go to Cuervo.com to shop tequila or visit a store near you. Cuervo. Now's a good time. Trademarks owned by Becler. SAB the CV. Copyright 2024. Proximo. Jersey City, New Jersey. Please drink responsibly.