Over his career in sports media, Mike Greenberg has hardly concealed his favorite teams on the air, most notably his fandom for the New York Jets. As “Gang Green” aims to make a change at quarterback in an effort to compete for a Super Bowl championship, the team seems confident in its chances to land Green Bay Packers quarterback and perennial Hall of Fame inductee Aaron Rodgers.
The Packers did not qualify for the NFL playoffs for the first time in three seasons last year, and it left Rodgers, who had previously pondered over remaining with the franchise, questioning whether it was prudent for him to remain a Packer, request a trade, or retire.
In an appearance on The Pat McAfee Show last month, Rodgers detailed his decision-making process, which entailed a stay at Sky Cave Retreats in Southern Oregon isolated in complete darkness for four days and four nights. He entered the retreat envisioning making a decision to retire from football and emerged content with continuing to play football – and doing so for the New York Jets.
Greenberg has long been a proponent of Rodgers joining the Jets and pledged to embark on the darkness retreat himself if the situation manifested itself.
“I make no secret of the teams I root for,” Greenberg said. “I guess there are some people who think that’s not the right way to go about it, but I couldn’t imagine any other way to go about it. I cover sports because they’re fun. I cover sports because they’re games people play that bring people joy and entertainment.”
Throughout the entirety of his career, Rodgers has donned No. 12 and is statistically one of the greatest players to ever do so. Yet there are other prominent athletes both in and out of football who have called that number their own – including quarterbacks Joe Namath, Bob Griese, Terry Bradshaw, Roger Staubach, and Tom Brady among others.
One day following Greenberg’s morning television show Get Up on ESPN, he was having a conversation with several others about these storied quarterbacks who wore the number, and then choosing who owned it.
“It was like a lightbulb went off over my head,” Greenberg said. “I’ve always wanted to write a sports book, and I’ve never had a good enough idea. Finally, I had a good enough idea.”
Shortly thereafter, Greenberg called content producer and researcher for Get Up, Paul “Hembo” Hembekides, and pitched him his book idea. After Hembekides agreed to perform research for the book that Greenberg would write, the two formally met to outline the concept and how they would approach the project.
Very quickly, though, Greenberg realized he was about to author a book about sports legends without several distinguished names – such as Serena Williams, Jack Nicklaus, and Jesse Owens – just because they did not wear jersey numbers. It felt wrong to omit athletes who played sports that did not assign numbers; therefore, the premise of the book had to undoubtedly change.
“We realized [that] we had to come up with a creative way to include all athletes in sports and assign numbers for them to own,” Greenberg said. “That process was a lot of fun, and I hope that people will enjoy reading that part of it.”
Greenberg offered the example of Hall of Fame center Wilt Chamberlain, who played 14 seasons in the NBA wearing the No. 13, yet is associated with the No. 100 since he famously set the league record for most points scored in a game. The feat still stands to this day and is known by most sports fans; therefore, it simply made more sense for Greenberg to assign Chamberlain that numeral as opposed to his actual uniform number.
The motivation to write the book was multifaceted in nature for Greenberg, who hosts different types of programs on a variety of platforms for ESPN. He never thought, however, that he would reach this point based on his assimilation into the industry. Yet his unwavering passion, combined with taking advantage of fortuitous opportunities, has brought him to the point of being one of ESPN’s longest-tenured and most recognizable personalities with no signs of slowing down.
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From the time he was 5 years old, Greenberg remembers sitting in front of the television at his home and announcing football games, in part after his first idol Howard Cosell. Most conversations in his youth revolved around sports, with both of his parents and brother invested in the local teams. After attending Stuyvesant High School in New York, N.Y., Greenberg made the move to Evanston, Ill. as an undergraduate student at Northwestern University where he proceeded to study journalism.
While a large majority of aspiring sports media professionals often participate in student media outlets and other extracurricular activities, Greenberg partook in none of it. His studies at the prestigious Medill School of Journalism represented the bulk of his experience, and he continues to regret not immersing himself in the school newspaper (The Daily Northwestern) and radio station (WNUR).
Instead, he was more focused on fostering a social life and his work in the classroom and is aware of how lucky he is that the recursivity did not prove precarious in his ability to build a sustainable career. Today, he reflects back on that experience and renders it a warning to others as to what not to do in order to effectuate a viable portfolio to gain genuine experience and the necessary repetitions to land a job in this competitive field.
“You should do the opposite of what I did,” Greenberg advises. “….There’s so much opportunity now with podcasting and all sorts of other outlets that [students] should absolutely be taking advantage of all that, and I absolutely should have been too. Sometimes I’m embarrassed at how little of that I actually did until I got out of school.”
Upon his graduation from Northwestern University, Greenberg joined WMAQ-AM, a station broadcasting in the news format, where he served as a sports anchor and reporter. Over the preceding decade, the station had experimented with a variety of formats, including country and talk, and eventually moved to an all-sports format complete with new call letters by 2000.
Those new call letters – W-S-C-R – began on a different frequency (AM 820), and Greenberg immediately started working behind the scenes hoping to be afforded a chance to cover Chicago sports teams. The situation benefited him in that the station did not hire a full-time anchor to deliver sports updates on the air, giving Greenberg a chance to appear on the air and divulge the latest scores and information about sports teams to an inquisitive audience.
A few months later, the station moved George Ofman into the studio to deliver these updates regularly, someone with whom Greenberg is friendly to this day. Before he was working out of the studio, Ofman had been on-site covering sports teams as a reporter, appearing across programming to discuss news, conduct interviews and draw conclusions based on what he had observed.
With his move to the studio came an opening to serve as a reporter, something station management decided to give Greenberg, who had long been imploring for a way to be around the teams. At the age of 24, Greenberg was covering the defending NBA champion Chicago Bulls featuring superstars Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, witnessing the team’s quest for a second consecutive championship.
By the time the summer came around, Greenberg was working from Platteville, Wis. covering the Chicago Bears’ training camp, a team that was led by head coach Mike Ditka and quarterback Jim Harbaugh. A few years later, Greenberg augmented his presence in media by writing a weekly column for the Copley News Service, and also began working in television reporting for SportsChannel Chicago, and, eventually, Chicagoland Television (CLTV).
With little to no previous experience reporting, Greenberg was cognizant that he had been bestowed a prime circumstance to cultivate his growth in sports media and jumpstart his career. From covering the World Series and the Super Bowl to appearing on television and radio as a trusted voice in the No. 3 media market in the country, he ensured he worked hard and stood out within the media landscape.
“I don’t even know how to begin to explain all the ways that [it] shaped me,” Greenberg said. “It’s where I learned everything; it was the reason that I was able to go to ESPN; it was the reason I was ready when I got there…. That was an incredibly fortunate series of circumstances that befell me, and it changed my life completely.”
As a beat reporter, Greenberg was around the teams for most days over the span of four years, through which the Bulls captured two NBA championships. In watching Michael Jordan from his perspective, Greenberg drew a connection between his work as a journalist and Jordan’s as a basketball player in what it took to achieve “greatness.” Years after his retirement, Jordan remains a prominent figure and firmly rooted in basketball vernacular, and the debate as to who is the greatest player in league history continues to be amplified.
Contentious, yet astute debate is a hallmark of sports talk, whether it be between hosts on the radio or fans attending a game. It is the basis on which Greenberg authored his newest book, as there is a legitimate conversation to be had over who owns a number, especially when comparing athletes across different sports in different eras.
“No. 21 – should it be Tim Duncan; should it be Deion Sanders; should it be Roberto Clemente?,” Greenberg said. “I gave my opinion. I’m sure many people will agree and others will disagree, and that’s where the debate comes in.”
Three years into his tenure at ESPN, Greenberg began hosting a national radio show alongside Mike Golic, appropriately named Mike & Mike, and it quickly became a hit with listeners and one of the most successful programs of all time.
Before that though, Greenberg had joined the network in 1996 where he anchored programming on the new ESPNEWS channel and eventually was named as a host of the heralded show SportsCenter. Through his formative years on national television, Greenberg meticulously focused on applying and refining what he had learned from reporting in a local market to doing so on a national scale.
Looking back on the day he signed his contract to work for ESPN, the network is hardly recognizable. Although its main focus remains and has always been bringing consumers the latest news, information and opinions about their favorite players and teams, the execution of that goal has shifted with evolutions in technology and dynamic consumption patterns.
When I got to the network, the internet was a brand-new phenomenon,” Greenberg said. “Everything is different and we have adapted and evolved as every industry has with all of the changes in technology. There are a lot of ways that everything has changed, but that’s overwhelmingly the biggest one, and it remains overwhelmingly the biggest challenge going forward – to make sure that we are staying on top of what our audience wants.”
Greenberg co-hosted Mike & Mike with Golic from 2000 until 2017, making it one of the longest-running sports talk radio shows in history. As the show received positive feedback among listeners, it was added to the ESPNEWS television lineup in 2004 and continued to air on ESPN2 until its final episode.
Additionally, Golic and Greenberg contributed across ESPN programming, including serving as the lead broadcast team for the Arena Football League and calling an annual Monday Night Football game with former Chicago Bears head coach Mike Ditka for three years.
Before they began working together, Golic had been hosting The Bruno-Golic Morning Show with sports commentator Tony Bruno for a year; however, the host position became open when Bruno resigned from the network for what was reported as “irreconcilable differences” between him and ESPN Radio management.
The change required Golic and Greenberg to quickly develop chemistry, something that is never guaranteed in creating sports radio shows and composing a sound that would allure listeners in various different marketplaces with broad rooting interests.
“If there’s more than one host, then those people need to have chemistry, and that’s a very elusive quality,” Greenberg said. “It’s usually not something you know until you try, which is why a lot of things don’t ever really get off the ground because it’s not until they actually start doing the show that you realize, ‘You know what? These people really aren’t meant to be together.’”
When Mike & Mike ended, Greenberg ceased hosting a sports radio show and instead began working on the network’s primary channel as the host of Get Up, a new morning show originally featuring Greenberg, Michelle Beadle, and Jalen Rose. The show currently features Greenberg and a rotating panel of analysts, and it recently set viewership records for its most-watched January on record by averaging 445,000 viewers.
Moreover, Get Up combined with First Take, hosted by Molly Qerim featuring Stephen A. Smith, accumulated 100 million views on YouTube, up 2% from the previous year. As the host of a morning program on ESPN, Greenberg views his role as being a facilitator, someone who renders comfort in his guests and accentuates the qualities that allow them to adequately inform and entertain the audience.
“It’s a really fun challenge because we have so many different people,” Greenberg said. “Every day, basically, is a different show. My job is to get to know all these people who are coming on and know how to put them in a position to be the best they can be.”
Greenberg is equipped with a similar task, albeit with a recurring cast, on NBA Countdown, a show that precedes the NBA on ESPN predicated on previewing matchups and discussing the news around the league. Featuring a panel of the aforementioned Rose and Smith, along with longtime sports journalist and co-host of Pardon the Interruption, Michael Wilbon, Greenberg holds himself responsible for eliciting compendious responses from his analysts that precipitate additional conversation and/or spark debate.
Although he never got to the point where he could succeed Walt “Clyde” Frazier as the starting point guard for the New York Knicks, Greenberg in essence plays the position and assists his panelists, and occasionally knocks down a three-point basket by expressing his opinions.
“I try to produce the show from the chair, which is to say [that] I’m trying to think about what is the best for the show in its entirety,” Greenberg said. “….I think all hosts have one thing or another that they’re good at, [and] I think if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s bringing out the best in all the people who are around me.”
Two years into hosting Get Up, Greenberg made his return to the national radio airwaves by adding a new solo program titled #Greeny. The show airs from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. EST and brings consumers the perspectives and opinions of Greenberg; in basketball terms, he is essentially scoring more than he is passing.
On this show, Greenberg is front and center – after all, the show is eponymously named after his pseudonym “Greeny,” – and he proffers his erudite perspectives on sports, the history of which he learned through his avidity for learning. It is the second reason he decided to write his fifth book and the first that primarily focuses on the progression of sports history and everything he has learned over the years.
“I loved reading sports history books; it’s where I learned everything I know about sports,” Greenberg said. “What I’m hoping is that people who read this, whether they agree or disagree with the choices that we made, will learn [something about] every one of the sports legends in this book.”
Greenberg is in the midst of recovering from a cardiac ablation, a type of heart surgery utilized to correct problems pertaining to the rhythm of his heartbeat. Furthermore, there have been instances over the last year where he has been criticized for being absent from his radio show, with McAfee addressing his audience and entreating him to get back into the studio.
Despite balancing many different roles with ESPN, Greenberg has no plans of altering his schedule and considers himself extremely fortunate to be in his position. He and Golic were inducted into the National Association of Broadcasters’ Broadcasting Hall of Fame, along with the National Radio Hall of Fame, and Greenberg himself is a member of the Medill Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University.
Through it all, he wants to remain at the forefront of innovation and seek new ways to reach and expand the audience, the way in which they consume the programming notwithstanding.
“The way I watched sports when I was in my 20s is totally different [from] the way my son and my nephews and others that I watch with consume it,” Greenberg said. “I’ve got to make sure I’m on top of that or I’m going to get left behind. That’s the biggest challenge for me and for all of us in the industry, and I think that will continue to be for the foreseeable future.”
From the very beginning, Greenberg’s goal was to find a way to remain immersed in sports since he did not have the athletic wherewithal to pursue a professional career. Now, he is the lead host of two national television shows, a national radio show, and the network’s coverage of the NBA Finals and the NFL Draft. He hopes his career as a versatile professional inspires others and promulgates captivating ways to ruminate on sports and be distinctive amid a crowded media ecosystem.
“It’s a miracle that this has happened to me,” Greenberg said. “I do it because I love it, to be completely honest with you. I have the best job of anybody I know, and I don’t have any intention of stopping any time soon.”
Got Your Number: The Greatest Sports Legends and the Numbers They Own is available wherever you get your books and is split into 100 short chapters delineating the choices Greenberg and Hembekides settled on, along with the context for each selection. The book is largely sold out, with a select few hardcover copies available at the moment, and is the encapsulation of Greenberg’s enamorment towards professional sports and its ensuing culture.
“Babe Ruth; Muhammad Ali; you name it,” Greenberg expressed. “That’s what the book is. It’s a combination of sports debate and sports history. It’s sort of a new beginning for me, and I couldn’t be more thrilled.
Derek Futterman is a contributing editor and sports media reporter for Barrett Media. Additionally, he has worked in a broad array of roles in multimedia production – including on live game broadcasts and audiovisual platforms – and in digital content development and management. He previously interned for Paramount within Showtime Networks, wrote for the Long Island Herald and served as lead sports producer at NY2C. To get in touch, find him on X @derekfutterman.
