Last Monday afternoon, Rich Eisen was playing the role of historical re-enactor. He was summoning a dead language. He was writing an episode of ’90s SportsCenter.
“I’ve got a tease,” Eisen said, as he sat behind a computer at ESPN’s Los Angeles headquarters. At Eisen’s request, that night’s SportsCenter would begin with viewers hearing the wail of a saxophone and seeing a montage of quick-cut highlights. Then, they would hear Eisen say: “In Pittsburgh, Paul Skenes actually got runs—two of them. Was it enough against Toronto?”
Eisen knew that anyone who cared about the Pirates wouldn’t wait for him to deliver the score. But this night was about returning to an era when SportsCenter anchors knew things you didn’t. “Is that like a time machine or what?” said Eisen.
With one eye on a bank of TVs, Eisen continued to write the show in a cheerfully anachronistic fashion. There would be catchphrases: “Busts out the whuppin’ stick.” “He got it.” Eisen was writing in a language that was enthusiastic (the way a SportsCenter anchor showed you they were a fellow fan) and at the same time ever so slightly removed (the way an anchor suppressed that fandom to reach intellectual heights you could not). SportsCenter anchors were like podcasters, or vice versa.
If Eisen’s first SportsCenter in 22 years began with a tease, he wanted it to end with a “Did You Know?” trivia factoid, another standby of the old days. “These are things that they don’t do anymore,” he told me.
Eisen was thrilled—grateful, even—to climb back onto the ESPN mothership. He’d spent the day fielding congratulatory texts from eminences with whom he once shared a desk: Dan Patrick, Bob Ley, Chris Berman. Berman wrote:
Rich…..
Welcome home.
Boomer
Ps….dont f#$* it up!
A return to an old home is bound to inspire a twinge of mortality. When Eisen got to the newsroom, he asked a SportsCenter researcher how old Skenes was on the day in 2003 when Eisen was suddenly cast out of ESPN.
Skenes had just turned 1 year old, the researcher said.
“Should I say that, ‘On that day, we both shit our pants’?” said Eisen.
Eisen’s ESPN reunion is happening under modern terms and conditions. On September 2, ESPN will absorb The Rich Eisen Show into Disney’s app, its own app, and its radio lineup. Eisen will own and produce his show, like Pat McAfee does.
Eisen and ESPN agreed to the deal this spring. Then, this month, ESPN bought the NFL Network, where Eisen had fled to after leaving Bristol. The NFL Network, he said, was the company “I basically poured my heart and soul into for 22 years as a competitor. Now, on the cusp of my return, it gets bought by the company I left. You just truly cannot make it up.”
Some nights, Eisen told me, he had dreams about walking down a flight of stairs to the old SportsCenter studio to host the show one more time. Now Eisen would be descending the stairs twice, with separate contracts.
If Eisen is arriving at ESPN during a transformative period in the company’s history, well, that’s typical of his career. Eisen was present when high-period SportsCenter gave way to league-owned and -influenced networks. He was there when announcers who’d been told by executives to do things a certain way became their own bosses. A few scenes from Eisen’s career provide a mini-history of the last two decades of sports TV.
Twenty-two years ago, Eisen had a bad exit from ESPN. You might ask: What—him? Yes, him. The only announcers to leave Bristol without complications are Lee Corso and Hubie Brown.
Eisen was a second-wave SportsCenter anchor. In 1996, he got to ESPN at age 26, straight from a station in Redding, California, and was determined to uphold the standard set by Berman and Patrick and Keith Olbermann. Eisen was paired with Stuart Scott for the 2 a.m. SportsCenter. He met producer Suzy Shuster, who became his wife. He starred in some excellent commercials. In 2002, the New York Times Magazine put Eisen on its cover as one of the sportscasters who’d become an aspirational role model while on the job.
As it turned out, Eisen was part of the last group of anchors to host SportsCenter in an undiluted way. “When I got to ESPN,” he said, “SportsCenter was a show people tuned into because they either had not seen a sporting event or had only seen it once.” By the turn of the century, the internet could tell you how many runs the Pirates had gotten across. ESPN started rolling fresh scores along the bottom of the screen—“right across my sternum,” said Eisen—spoiling the magic trick he’d been performing for years.
“Instead of what happened,” Eisen said of SportsCenter, “it turned into a show about why something happened.” The pivot to why was the start of ESPN’s debate era. Toward the end of Eisen’s time in Bristol, the network had him referee fights between two analysts who argued about the news of the day.
“I never wanted to leave,” Eisen said of ESPN. He asked Disney about appearing on Good Morning America, hosting game shows for ABC, or maybe calling more baseball.
“Management pushed back in the opposite direction, in a manner that stunned me, and said no,” he said.
When Eisen turned down the opportunity to host Cold Pizza, the talk show that birthed First Take, management ended negotiations. “My agents got a fax from ESPN saying we were done, days before the deadline,” said Eisen. “They pulled the plug.”
“To make matters even more interesting,” he continued, “this happened 10 days before my wedding.”
Eisen hosted his last SportsCenter on May 28, 2003. For his and Shuster’s wedding reception, at New York’s Central Park Boathouse, the couple had set aside a table for ESPN executives. The executives didn’t show. “It was kind of like the equivalent of leaving a seat open for Elijah for Passover,” Shuster told me, “only we had Bristol executives.”
Eisen’s anchor pals came up en masse. Scott made a point of goggling at Shuster’s wedding ring. Patrick jumped behind the bar to serve Jäger shots.
A few weeks later, while Eisen was on his honeymoon in Venice, he signed a contract with the NFL Network. Today, it seems obvious that the NFL would adopt ESPN’s 24-7 metabolism and house style and use those tools to cover itself. Back in 2003, that hadn’t happened yet.
Shortly after Eisen got back from Italy, Roger Goodell, then the league’s COO, invited him out to play golf. In a sandtrap on the 12th hole, Goodell assured him that he wanted the wisecracking Rich Eisen of SportsCenter rather than a league-created drone.
“Obviously, we were not going to do any exposés,” said Eisen. But Eisen was key to the enterprise, especially in its early stages. He took a network that could have sounded like a mouthpiece—that was, when it bypassed certain thorny stories, required to be a mouthpiece—and made it sound fun and witty, like ESPN.
In turn, the NFL Network gave Eisen assignments he would have waited years to get in Bristol. (In those days, most of the choice NFL assignments went to Berman.) Eisen hosted the network’s Sunday pregame show, the draft, the scouting combine. Eisen didn’t fade away like a lot of members of the ESPN diaspora—he was always doing stuff. Next Friday, Eisen will call play-by-play of the Chiefs-Chargers game for YouTube.
Relocating from Bristol to L.A. also gave Eisen a certain proximity to Hollywood. Larry David came to Eisen’s 50th birthday party. Last year, Eisen’s comedian pal Jeff Ross asked him to be the announcer at the Tom Brady roast on Netflix.
“I was a big fan of Rich and Stuart together,” said Modern Family’s Eric Stonestreet, a frequent guest on Eisen’s show. “More than anything, I just remember the tempo and pace of the dialogue.”
In retrospect, the NFL Network with Eisen at the helm did a number of things. Every time ESPN matched the NFL Network’s coverage, or hired away Adam Schefter, the network was admitting the league had taught it a thing or two about covering the sport. “It was flattering,” said Eisen.
Moreover, the NFL Network’s founders noted, its creation was the beginning of a period of alignment between the league and media partners. For years, the league struggled to get networks to promote each other’s games. Now, networks promote them as a matter of course. ESPN and the NFL found their priorities were so aligned that, this summer, ESPN gave the league a 10 percent equity stake in exchange for the NFL Network and other assets.
The deal still needs the approval of the Trump administration. Burke Magnus, ESPN’s president of content who will be in charge of the NFL Network, said he expects Eisen to continue to host the draft and combine. “He’s a founding father of the NFL Network,” said Magnus. “So of course he’s going to have a big role. I presume those two things and a lot more will be a part of it.” If ESPN learned anything from its new partner, it’s that you can never have too much football.
In 2011, Eisen started a podcast. He wanted to do something more than throw it to Michael Irvin and Steve Mariucci. A few months later, the NFL Network used the podcast as fill-in TV programming during the lockout.
When you listen to The Rich Eisen Show, you realize how mellow it is compared to most shows. “We’re not mad,” said Chris Brockman, Eisen’s on-air producer and sidekick. “We’re not trying to pick fights.”
“What Rich really likes to do is to create a safe environment,” said Liz Waild, a co-executive producer who has worked with Eisen for years. “He’s not a ‘gotcha’ guy.”
Eisen’s style was shaped during his years at ESPN. When Eisen came aboard, he found himself sharing a teleprompter with the anchor-heroes he’d watched on TV in college. “Deep down, he was a kid from Staten Island who suddenly got to sit with the cool kids,” Shuster told me. “And it took a lot of years for him to grow into that.”
Eisen wanted the anchors’ approval. When Eisen was hosting the 2 a.m. SportsCenter, he would grab the highlight tapes of the just-completed 11 p.m. show—Patrick and Olbermann’s “Big Show”—and study them. One night, Eisen realized that Patrick had quietly sidled up next to him. In his perfectly understated voice, Patrick said: “So … you nervous?”
Olbermann was more direct. When he passed Eisen in the hallway, Olbermann would tell him, “Nope, not yet.”
In August 1996, six months after Eisen started at ESPN, a viewer sent a letter to Olbermann and Berman complaining about the new guy. Olbermann forwarded it to Eisen with a cover letter. Last week, Eisen showed me both documents. He has kept them for nearly 30 years, inside the same interoffice mail envelope Olbermann stuffed them into.
The viewer—one Brian McMahon of San Diego—complained that Eisen was too shticky, that he was trying too hard. He “appears to have no respect for sports he reviews or for the viewers at home,” McMahon wrote. McMahon had taken the unusual step of calling Bristol each night to see if Eisen was hosting the show.
Olbermann suggested the letter, if overheated, could be a learning tool. Olbermann wrote to Eisen: “I want you to do well, I want you to be happy, I want you to be able to replace me on this show some day when I finally keel over (will next Thursday be good for you?).”
Olbermann continued counseling his young padawan: “Try an entire segment of the show with neither a smile nor an impression of any kind. Limit yourself to one use of each catch-phrase per show. The more drastic suggestion, I’m sad to say, is to eliminate ‘got it’ or modify it so it is not so nasal and obtrusive. It is repeated around the newsroom, but in the same way we all repeat ‘With authority!’”
Thus began the great sanding-down of Rich Eisen. He still maintained a storehouse of catchphrases: “Those who are late do not get fruit cup!” But Eisen was determined not to turn off any part of the audience by making too many jokes.
Later, when Olbermann passed Eisen in the hallways, Eisen would look at him hopefully. “Half,” Olbermann would say. Meaning, half the number of jokes in his script.
They passed each other in the hallway again, after Eisen had lowered his joke-per-minute rate. “Good,” Olbermann would say. “Now half that.” Eisen would take scissors to his SportsCenter script yet again.
At the end of his process, Eisen’s on-air persona emerged. He didn’t burn too brightly. He didn’t sound like a stand-up comic. He didn’t sound like someone else. Eisen aspires to be the kind of anchor the audience can hang with for a telethon-length shift at the combine or NFL draft. “Everything I do goes on for hours,” he said. Eisen wants the audience, like his guests, to relax.
At ESPN’s Los Angeles studio, Eisen’s retro SportsCenter began with a saxophone. The audience heard his tease. The lights went up in a darkened studio like they did in the ’90s.
From across the set, observing Eisen’s see-highlight, make-comment style was less like hearing a ’90s song than reading a piece of journalism that was written and edited in a particular way. Jayden Daniels ran into the end zone against the Bengals, making thousands of Commanders fans go into cardiac arrest. “Sir, this is preseason!” said Eisen. “What are you doing?! Oh, scoring a touchdown. Very good.”
When Rockies first baseman Warming Bernabel hit a walk-off single: “Warming goes global!” When the Phillies’ Trea Turner went deep: “He got it.” After paying tribute to Stuart Scott, who died in 2015, Eisen ended the show with a “Did You Know?” about Bryce Harper’s OPS against the Mariners.
You can’t totally exhume ’90s SportsCenter, even for one night. Guests, as much as writing, are now the show’s currency. Joe Buck and Troy Aikman beamed in from the Monday Night Football booth. (Buck off the air: “Did they bring your old chair back?”) Eisen interviewed the Bengals’ Ja’Marr Chase from the field and talked NFL with Mina Kimes at the desk. ESPN played clips from the postgame press conferences, because they are “new on SportsCenter” in the way a game highlight is not.
Eisen found it cathartic to read from an ESPN shot sheet. Eisen had never been invited back for a SportsCenter reunion like Patrick and Olbermann had. He used to joke that his tickets to the ESPYs, held in his home city, got lost in the mail each year because the network never sent him any.
“When he came home from SportsCenter that night, I saw 22 years of wonder and questioning and pressure instantaneously lifted from his shoulders,” said Shuster. “It was really drastic. I don’t think he realized how much emotional weight he had put on himself.”
“To go from 22 years of viewing ESPN as them,” said Eisen, “after seven years to start my career of viewing ESPN as us … For me to be able to put that to bed, it was palpable.”
According to Magnus, ESPN started talking to Eisen about a reunion two or three years ago. The network wanted to wait until all the rights to Eisen’s show—radio, streaming, social media—were available so that it could buy them in bulk.
Eisen said his return was delayed by the presence of Norby Williamson, the former ESPN executive who’s now at FanDuel. “I think Pat McAfee removed the managerial impediment when he put a bullet in one particular individual by referring to him as a rodent on his show,” he told me. (Williamson didn’t reply to a text message asking for comment.)
When Eisen’s show moves to ESPN’s app, it will run from noon to 3 p.m. This is the same time that McAfee’s show runs on ESPN. In May, McAfee wondered if ESPN was programming Eisen against him to send a message.
“No, of course not,” said Magnus, when I mentioned McAfee. “We’re in the business of collecting talent.”
“We don’t worry about cannibalizing or competing with ourselves,” said Magnus, sounding a mantra of ESPN in the age of the app. “We’d rather compete with ourselves than compete with somebody else.”
As Eisen prepared to reboard the ESPN mothership, he sounded like someone who understood the language of the era perfectly. “I am not concerned about being lost there,” he said. “I am happy to be an offering.”
