Plenty of sports radio shows and podcasts have been wrapping up the 2021-22 NFL season since Super Bowl LVI ended with the Los Angeles Rams winning.
There may be no better guest to look back at the past season and look ahead to both the offseason and next season than NBC’s Peter King. The Football Night in America columnist was a guest on Sports Talk Chicago/WCKG with host Jon Zaghloul this week.
Naturally, since the show is based in Chicago, the two discussed the Bears hiring new coach Matt Eberflus and general manager Ryan Poles. But the Rams’ Super Bowl win and the Hall of Fame chances for Aaron Donald and Matthew Stafford were also part of the conversation.
But from a sports media standpoint, Zaghloul also asked King about his long career covering the NFL and how his sportswriting career began. It may surprise some to know that King didn’t intend to cover sports when he studied journalism and preferred to cover baseball as a sportswriter.
How King eventually took the football beat, rather than baseball, made for an amusing and enlightening story. As he explained to Zaghloul, football — in this case, covering the Bengals for the Cincinnati Enquirer — came down to what he could see was a better work/life balance situation.
“When I started at the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1980, I was the back-up beat writer on the Cincinnati Reds,” King explained. “And at the time, they had four daily writers — the Dayton Daily News, the Dayton Journal-Herald, the Cincinnati Post, and the Cincinnati Enquirer.”
“So I became friends with all those guys, and every one of them was divorced,” he continued. “I was married, we were planning a family, we were thinking about it, and I just said, OK, it’s one thing to be the back-up guy on a team and you go for one 10-day road trip a year. It’s another to be gone for half of seven months every year. So I just decided that even though my sporting preference was baseball, I decided to go into a more sane lifestyle job and they had an opening to cover the Bengals in 1984.”
No one would dispute that King made the correct decision, considering where his career has gone covering the NFL. Yet it’s sobering to hear that quality of life and the ability to build a family factored in so early on for him. Work/life balance is something so many struggle with to this day, regardless of profession. Several baseball writers may hear King’s remarks and nod knowingly, even if they love covering the sport.
The entire conversation between King and Zaghloul is worth listening to. King has so much to say on both the NFL, covering the sport (including some insight into the Hall of Fame voting process), and the journalism profession overall.
You can listen to the Sports Talk Chicago podcast at the show’s website or on apps including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Ian Casselberry is a sports media columnist for BSM. He has previously written and edited for Awful Announcing, The Comeback, Sports Illustrated, Yahoo Sports, MLive, Bleacher Report, and SB Nation. You can find him on Twitter @iancass or reach him by email at iancass@gmail.com.
