Michelle Beadle loved watching and playing sports in her youth, but she was an inquisitive dilettante of law and foresaw a career in the courtroom. From the time she was 6 years old, she began telling everyone that she would attend Harvard Law School to become a corporate lawyer, albeit without having a genuine understanding of what the job entailed. The same can be said for sports media, but Beadle found a way to gain erudition in the industry that has led her to a multi-faceted role, including as the co-host of a new SiriusXM Mad Dog Sports Radio program.
When Beadle enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin, she immediately began majoring in political science and pre-law, participating in extracurricular activities to enrich her studies. Volunteering at the Texas State Capitol helped her make connections and gain practical experience, but she quickly became enraptured by other activities and began neglecting her academia.
“I went to one of these pre-law meetings and looked around that classroom and I just thought, ‘I don’t have anything in common with anyone in here,’ and I was listening to them tell their stories about how they wanted to be lawyers and what they wanted to do, and I thought, ‘This isn’t for me,’” Beadle said. “I literally left Austin not that long after that moment because I was killing my GPA by not going to class. I knew I didn’t want to be a lawyer but I had zero idea of a backup plan – and back then when I would start to lose things as any bad sport would do, I just quit – and so I quit.”
Departing the university just a few classes short of attaining her degree, Beadle chose to travel across the United States, going to cities where she knew people from an internship with a local minor-league hockey team to work a variety of different jobs. She officially gave up on law and started to wait tables at restaurants in order to make ends meet. From San Antonio to Pensacola, Beadle did not have any bonafide direction and eventually decided to leave the country entirely.
“Going from sort of being an overachiever who thought they had their whole life planned out to having zero plans and your parents mad at you was a little bit jarring,” Beadle said, “but staying busy helped because I don’t do well with a bunch of idle time.”
As the clock continued to push forward, she eventually felt an impetus to return home and was greeted by her father, Valero Energy executive Bob Beadle. Normally abstaining from scrutiny, he decided to ask his daughter what her plans were. As if by happenstance, Beadle’s father knew R.C. Buford, an executive with the San Antonio Spurs, her favorite basketball team, and was able to set up a meeting with him.
“The Spurs was the one team; the one thing that I always loved since sixth grade,” Beadle said. “[My father] sent me to another adult so that adult would yell at me so that he didn’t have to. I didn’t know that at the time.”
Beadle enrolled at the University of Texas at San Antonio to study broadcast journalism and continuously contacted Mike Kickarello, the Spurs’ director of broadcasting, to beg for an opportunity. She had been given his contact information in the meeting with Buford, but it still took several tries for her to receive a call back.
Beadle offered to be an unpaid intern and perform whatever menial tasks necessary to get her foot in the door. Kickarello opened the door to a realm of possibility, a life-changing occurrence that propelled Beadle forward.
After some time logging tape and assisting on the team’s local children’s program, Beadle asked to try her hand in front of the camera but initially struggled. Recognizing the difficulty, cameraperson Eddie Ray Rodriguez pulled her aside and provided a sagacious recommendation that has guided her ever since.
“[He] sat me down and gave the simple advice of being yourself and ignoring the camera and that it’s a three-person conversation – you; subject; audience,” Beadle recalled.
Beadle landed a fill-in role with The Nashville Network (TNN) as a sideline reporter for competitive bull riding while still in school. Two weeks into the role, TNN wanted to hire her full time, which then led to additional opportunities for various networks.
Over the next several years, Beadle balanced hosting roles in sports and lifestyle media. Additionally, she was brought on by the YES Network to anchor studio coverage of New Jersey Nets basketball and host ancillary programming, such as Yankees on Deck and SportsLife NYC. Two years later, she was informed of an opportunity to audition for a new show on ESPN.
“You hear ‘No’ a lot more than you hear ‘Yes,’ and eventually that just calms you down and you kind of lose any sort of neuroses that you might have in the beginning and just accept it,” Beadle said. “Maybe you’ll get it; maybe you won’t – probably won’t.”
During her audition, Beadle remembered well-traveled media executive Jon Walsh being in the room. In a subsequent conversation, Walsh requested that Beadle compile a list of 10 things that she would do to improve the show, an assignment that confounded her since the program did not yet exist. Assuming that she would not land the role anyway, she opted to put together a list of satirical items instead. To her surprise, she received a call back from the “Worldwide Leader” anyway.
“I can’t remember who reached out first, but they brought me in and they were like, ‘Hey, we’re serious about you doing this. You have to put together an actual list of 10 items,’” Beadle recollected. “I was like, ‘Guys, it’s not a real show yet. I can’t improve something that doesn’t exist; I have no idea what you want from me.’”
Eventually after some assistance, Beadle received the job and began working alongside Colin Cowherd on SportsNation. The show was one of Cowherd’s early forays into television. Although there were long hours and plenty of bad ideas, being able to co-host the program with him represented a stroke of good fortune.
“The people left us alone; the suits kind of didn’t know what to do with us, so we were allowed to try things out,” Beadle said. “Some of them worked and some of them didn’t, but just getting to try it was the whole game. It was the perfect entrance for me because it didn’t take itself too seriously.”
During Beadle’s stint at ESPN, she thrived in the SportsNation role and began working in radio as the anchor of SportsCenter on 1050 ESPN New York’s signature afternoon program, The Michael Kay Show. Additionally, she hosted her own podcast and co-hosted Winners Bracket with Marcellus Wiley, but discrepancies in contract negotiations resulted in her exit from the network.
Having been pitched an opportunity to cover the 2012 London Olympics and expand her skillset by serving as a correspondent on Access Hollywood, Beadle departed ESPN to work for NBC Sports. While her early days with the network were saccharin – including hosting a new program, The Crossover – the feeling rapidly bittered and left her displeased.
Beadle’s absence at ESPN turned out to be more of an abeyance, as the network reinstated her on SportsNation after her NBC exit, which was facilitated through a quid pro quo. This time around, she co-hosted the program with Max Kellerman and Marcellus Wiley, a duo that hosted a radio show together in Los Angeles. She moved to the other side of the country and established strong on-air rapport with the cast, informing and entertaining fans in innovative ways about the world of professional sports.
Just before the start of the 2017 NBA Playoffs, Beadle received another role as the full-time host of NBA Countdown on ABC and ESPN. Joining award-winning journalist Michael Wilbon and former NBA stars Chauncey Billups and Paul Pierce behind the desk, she fulfilled a dream of being involved in national coverage of her favorite sport.
During her time on the program, the show did well in the ratings and challenged Warner Bros. Discovery’s staple studio program, Inside the NBA, an institution she refers to as the “gold standard.” Reflecting back on it, she affirmed that it was difficult to make her own because of the concentration of certain kinds of content, but enjoyed going on the road.
“I think sometimes it was being used as a vehicle for females – Sage [Steele] did it; and then I did it; and then Maria [Taylor] did it – and it was almost like a dangling carrot for which woman was going to get that job next, which is gross,” Beadle said. “You don’t want to have that hanging over you, but things happened behind the scenes, and it became not a great place to be or a great place to want to go to work, and that was the end of that. I couldn’t be there anymore.”
Beadle entered into a buyout with ESPN to precipitate her final exit from the company, ending a tenure that included her speaking out against injustices on several occasions. In 2014, she criticized Stephen A. Smith for heinous implications pertaining to domestic violence, ultimately resulting in a one-week suspension for the First Take star. In her first few months on Get Up! with Mike Greenberg and Jalen Rose, she revealed that she lost interest in football and had not been watching the sport for three years. Something she views as an innocuous remark ultimately led to her removal from the morning program, which ended up diverging in a different direction than was originally planned.
“I hate to tell everybody how the sausage is made, but not every talking head there listening to and watching on TV are spending their hours watching sports when they get home,” Beadle said. “Now, it’s a job – you can talk about a lot of things and not watch every second of all of it – but I didn’t want to be the one to burst the bubble for a bunch of people and say, ‘I don’t want to tell you this, but they’re not all watching.’”
After her time with ESPN ended, Beadle remained out of sports media for nearly two years and moved back home to San Antonio amid the global pandemic. In September 2021, she launched a podcast with The Athletic with the apropos title, What Did I Miss?, and made her return to television one month later from the place her career effectively began in “Mission City.”
Spurs Chief Executive Officer R.C. Buford asked Beadle if she would be interested in returning to work with the team, an offer that she immediately accepted. The team then officially announced that she was returning as a special correspondent on the team’s local television broadcasts, a seminal moment in her broadcasting career.
“I love them so much, [and] I’m so grateful,” Beadle said. “Nothing that I have done since 1999 would have happened had the Spurs not given me that internship in the first place; I am 100% aware of that. For me, I consider them family.”
For the last month, Beadle has been on the air on SiriusXM’s Mad Dog Sports Radio with Cody Decker. The pair, working on the new afternoon show Beadle & Decker, stands out for their chemistry, acumen and collective efficacy.
“There’s no way I could go on to ESPN and say, ‘Hey, I think this topic sucks and I don’t want to talk about it,’ and then turn it into an hour of television,” Beadle explained. “Radio, for me, is the perfect combination of getting to talk sports but having a little bit more freedom than you would otherwise.”
Collaborating with Decker has provided a welcome contrast since he is a former baseball player. Spending 11 seasons in the minor leagues before a brief eight-game stint with the San Diego Padres in 2015, he understands what it means to work hard and stay persistent.
“That dude is just energy personified, and it’s kind of nice because I don’t have to come in and be sort of [a] crazy energy person,” Beadle said. “I wouldn’t even describe myself as being that, but I think a lot of times when I’m the host of something, it is my job to set the vibe of the tone on the television side and to kind of be [the] quote-unquote ‘lower energy person’ of the two is great.”
Once basketball season tips off, Beadle will balance her radio hosting obligations with a job on FanDuel TV as the co-host of Run It Back. Last season, she worked with Chandler Parsons, who is returning for the second season, and broadcast the program three days per week from the company’s New York-based studios. She respects the fact that her TV partner still wants to work, considering he earned an estimated $127 million over his nine seasons in the NBA.
As time goes on, Beadle hopes to make an impact in radio and host for as long as possible, strengthening her commitment towards the medium. Even so, she does not want to give up on television entirely and is also working on a variety of podcasts. Later this year, she will launch a podcast with Wondery titled Beadle Royale, a project that will adopt an elimination-style format in deciding which story from sports or pop culture dominates the day.
“I know you’re thinking, ‘Well, thank god another podcast,’” Beadle said. “Yeah, I get it, but at least it’ll be fun for me doing it.”
Even though most of her work takes place in New York City, Beadle looks to make herself available for as many Spurs games as possible for the 2023-24 season. It certainly does not hurt that the team has a young phenom joining the team looking to make the NBA playoffs for the first time in four seasons.
“We have [Victor Wembanyama] now!,” Beadle exclaimed. “You don’t leave just when Wemby gets there; that’s the dumbest thing you could possibly do. I’m looking forward to it; the town has taken on a new excitement and it’s nice to see.”
Derek Futterman is a former associate editor and sports media reporter for Barrett Media. He previously interned for Paramount within Showtime Networks, wrote for the Long Island Herald and served as lead sports producer at NY2C. Find him on X @derekfutterman.
