The Fourth of July is an American tradition like no other, centered around honoring the birth of the nation through gatherings, barbecues and relaxation. One of its most distinct traditions takes place at Coney Island and is focused on camaraderie and revelry – by scarfing down as many hot dogs as possible in 10 minutes. Indeed, the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest makes its return with world champion competitive eater Joey Chestnut aiming to defend his “Mustard Yellow Belt.”
ESPN has been the broadcast home of the rapacious devouring of hot dogs and buns for two decades. The International Federation of Competitive Eating (IFOCE) agreed to a multi-year deal last fall to ensure ESPN would continue to present the unique event. The event will be hosted by Major League Eating President Rich Shea, and he will be joined by a familiar ESPN personality who never thought he would be doing this.
“I can watch U.S. Open tennis and go to the park and find a tennis match,” John Anderson said. “I can’t go watch the guy pole vault and go down to the park and pole vault. You extrapolate that – I can watch these guys eat hot dogs, and I can sit with my buddies and I can go, ‘I can eat a hot dog.’ The base element – I can do exactly what these guys do, at least for the first one and maybe the second one, and after that, third I’m kind of gluttonous, and the idea of eating 76 is off the table.”
Anderson ran track and field and has always appreciated covering sports based on movement. While eating a hot dog is something most people have done throughout their lives, the sheer magnitude of the contest likens it to the Indianapolis 500 as opposed to driving in a school zone. In hosting this type of coverage, Anderson relies on his passion for the rite and vast previous experience in sports media.
Green Bay, Wis. is home for Anderson. His dream was to be the center fielder for the Milwaukee Brewers, but since he was never athletic enough to make it a reality, sports media was always an obvious career choice. He did explore other professional routes, one of which was the concrete business. John Anderson’s father poured foundations throughout his career, but John did not know him well since he passed away in a car crash at the age of 25.
“My brother has since taken over the business,” Anderson said. “I think the business now is as old as I am, and I did just enough of that to know, ‘You know what? That’s not really what I want to do.’”
Growing up in Green Bay, Anderson admired the local sportscasters, including Al Jerkens, Jim Klein and Darrel Burnett. Burnett was pivotal to his career, serving as a resource to review work and offer suggestions on how to improve. Rather than simply examining and critiquing sports reports, Burnett sent Anderson examples of his work to let him see his reporting style and the production of the newscast.
When Anderson made it to Tulsa to work at KTUL-TV, he was introduced to the station’s sports director, John Walls, and noticed an unmitigated largesse towards assisting him in acclimating to the market.
Although he had focused on taking the air as an anchor, Anderson’s early days in the industry were rooted in news photography and editing. Tulsa was not the market he wanted to work in for the rest of his career, acquiescing because the other option would have been anchoring sports on the weekends in Butte, Mont. One year into his job, Anderson officially transitioned to sports and eventually found his way on the air.
Six years later, he found himself driving to Phoenix, Ariz. to take a job as a weekend sports anchor with KPHO-TV. As he was on the road and approaching the city, Anderson began to think about what it would be like to cover the Phoenix Suns, a team with legitimate championship aspirations and a legitimate star in Charles Barkley.
Then, Anderson was informed of the news that Barkley had just been dealt to the Houston Rockets. It is safe to say he was a bit disillusioned, but used the circumstance to adopt a heightened, indefatigable approach to unearth hidden stories.
“The whole circus left town, or so I thought when I first got there,” Anderson said. “It turns out there was plenty more to do – they play golf out there and they’ve got a lot of stuff going on – but it’s one of my great regrets. In the several times in my life that I’ve come across Charles, I briefly remind him of that; that he had no idea who I was at the time [but] abandoned me alone in Phoenix.”
The Phoenix Suns remained competitive under head coach Danny Ainge while Anderson was working in the market, but the play on the hardwood was far from the only sports story in the area. Hockey arrived concurrently with Anderson in the National Hockey League’s Phoenix Coyotes, and the team qualified for the playoffs for its first five seasons of play and made a habit of losing in the quarterfinals.
One year earlier, the area had received approval to establish a Major League Baseball team, which ultimately became the Arizona Diamondbacks and began play at Chase Field in 1998. Moreover, the Arizona Cardinals snapped a 15-year playoff drought when the team qualified in 1998, but ultimately lost the divisional round game to the Minnesota Vikings. Despite the landscape being in a state of development, Anderson recognized how fundamental local coverage of sports is and contributed as best he could.
“Much like politics, all sports is local,” Anderson said. “Nobody wants the best team to win; they want their team to win. That’s the team that you’re with.”
When Anderson inked a deal to join ESPN on its news channel in 1999, he was quickly rooted in the hosting role for SportsCenter. With advances in technology and changes in consumption habits, the modus operandi of the program has changed over the last 24 years, and some people have questioned the viability of a show that changed the sports media landscape forever.
“I got here at a time when the show was still just turbocharged in popularity and in cultural significance, which may have eroded some over the last few years,” Anderson said. “Every time I go out there and whoever I work with, it’s the show of record. Here’s what you need to know in an hour to wrap up your whole sports day.”
A typical day of anchoring SportsCenter involves a barrage of office work, but there is only so much Anderson and his colleagues can do ahead of time. Staying nimble and dexterous is the key to success in a dynamic, breaking news environment, and there are sometimes moments where Anderson needs to modify things in real time. Just before the show hits the air, Anderson puts on his coat and tie, sits at the desk and commences with the familiar phraseology: “This is SportsCenter.”
“It is not quite as sexy and glamorous as being on the road or being in the field,” Anderson said. “You’re there with the purpose of being at the desk. It is a lot of sitting around because prepping for a SportsCenter is not like prepping for the U.S. Open golf tournament where you have to go hit golf balls.”
Although Anderson does not have many memories of his late father, one thing he knows is how he found serenity in gardening. In the process of laying down soil and watering his tomato plants, there was a profound focus coupled with a buoyancy for the activity. Gardening is regarded by some people as an essential task, growing and sometimes selling their crops for a profit, but it is also a source of leisure. Anderson thinks about sports in the same way.
Something Anderson tries to avoid is being mundane or jaded in hosting style, especially after hosting more than 4,000 episodes of the franchise. In Anderson’s own words, even though vanilla is the most popular ice cream flavor, he is looking to sometimes be chocolate or strawberry without moving into the Neapolitan category.
Over the years, there have been many successful SportsCenter hosts who have established themselves on the program. Purposely infusing personality into the show, however, is a method that he is not sure anyone has specifically sought out. The most venerated SportsCenter hosts are able to do it without expending extra effort, and it is an archetype Anderson hopes to be a part of.
“If you had met Stuart Scott – who he was on TV [is] how he talked; that’s how he acted [and] that’s how he approached things,” Anderson said. “Scott Van Pelt – sort of very much the same way – the things that make him funny are the things that he says in the newsroom as you sit around doing a show.”
As a sports fan, Anderson has always enjoyed finding quirky, unusual parts of the game and highlighting those to his audience. It’s probably why he gets picked for assignments like the Hot Dog Eating Contest. Through his meticulous approach to watching games, he knows when things are taken too far.
For example, one SportsCenter viewer commented that Anderson made a mistake when he said New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter was hitting .320 for the year. Overly meticulous, he remarked how Jeter was hitting .32056, which rounds up to .321, and then proceeded to tell Anderson that he should be off the air if he did not bother to get the facts right. Most of the time, Anderson neglects this kind of criticism focused on the minutiae, but there are other circumstances where it is justified and requires action.
During the NHL playoffs, Anderson found himself in hot water when he was narrating a highlight of Vegas Golden Knights defenseman Zach Whitecloud scoring a goal. When he made his debut, Whitecloud made history by becoming the first indigenous player to skate in the NHL. As the highlight played on the screen, Anderson quipped, “What kind of name is Whitecloud? A great name if you’re a toilet paper.” Whitecloud took offense to the insensitive statement, as did sports fans, and Anderson promptly apologized for his remark.
“I was ignorant, which is not a great excuse,” Anderson said. “You’ve disrespected somebody like that; okay, what do you do? I keep telling people – I said something wrong; now I’ve done my best to make it right, which is talking to him [and] explaining to him what happened and expressing my apologies on a number of levels. It’s okay when you’re wrong to say you’re wrong.”
ESPN is reportedly developing a plan to take its business to a direct-to-consumer model as cord cutting permeates the media landscape. According to the latest Gauge Report by Nielsen Media Research, and over half of Americans have canceled cable TV subscriptions. The number is expected to rise to 80 million households by 2026, but by that time, “Project Flagship” may already be complete.
“Is that any different than how we select anything else in life?,” Anderson said of the direct-to-consumer future of ESPN. “I go to the library and choose the books I want to read; I don’t have somebody deliver me 40 books and I’ve got to sort out and find the ones that are about Hank Aaron. When I go to the grocery store and there’s seven kinds of peanut butter or whatever, I get to pick the one I want. I guess in some ways that makes us a lot like a lot of other things.”
As the countdown to the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest dwindles closer to zero, Anderson is looking forward to making the trek to Coney Island. While the commentary surely enhances the on-air presentation, much of the task at hand pertains to entertaining viewers in what is perceived to be a jovial moment.
For many of the competitive eaters and stakeholders though, it is the pinnacle of competition and a juncture they enter with a tenacious will to succeed. Anderson aims to balance what he knows about hosting coverage with some jocularity, similar to his job on the game show, Wipeout on ABC. Even so, the commentators are not the reason most people are going to be watching the action on ESPN2.
“I think if you literally just did it with the natural sound of the competitors eating and the people cheering and just had the clock and the hot dog count, it could stand on its own,” Anderson expressed. “People would watch because it is that unique and it is that compelling in, sometimes, a really disgusting way – which makes it marvelous by the way. It is the ultimate thing that you can do just like the athletes.”
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.
