Peter King is in no danger of being underappreciated. With a career that included such high-profile gigs as lead NFL writer for Sports Illustrated, all-purpose maven for NBC Sports and author of the long-running Monday Morning Quarterback column and website, his place as a star in the sports journalism firmament is secure.
Still, there’s an aspect of his career that is destined to go less noticed than the rest of it. King is a straight-on print journalist, from the old school, who successfully and completely blended his talent into the broadcast and digital era before many of his contemporaries were even sure it was happening.
That seems a small thing. Truth is, he was way out in front. And it is one more way in which King, who announced this week that he’s retiring at age 66, has left such an impression in his work.
You don’t have to go crazy slapping him on the back about it. But King grew up in a time when print journalism essentially dominated sports coverage, and he rose to its apex. It might have been tempting to just dig in and hold on tight. Instead, he was among those writers who figured out how to diversify – not merely to survive, but to thrive in changing times.
Sports-talk radio as an industry began in earnest after King had already started his print career, when WFAN in New York, with 24-hour sports, debuted in 1987. But through the ‘90s and into the new millennium, most sports fans in America still relied on print dailies or magazines if they wanted to keep up with the sports news.
King was already branching out. He was and remains a reporter at heart, but a huge part of his success at SI and with MMQB was his gift for storytelling, and he realized pretty quickly that other types of media provided plenty of bandwidth for that. Rather than be suspicious of or hostile to sports talk, King leaned into it – often as a way to promote his own reporting, which was rigorous and detailed.
Again, this may sound obvious. It wasn’t, really, at the time. Many of the sportswriters in King’s orbit disdained electronic media in general, and they specifically resented sports radio for ripping off their reporting and using it as talk-show fodder. King was more sanguine; he had plenty of friends on the electronic side, and I think he just understood their place in the sports biosphere better than some other writers did.
It didn’t hurt that he covered New York teams for Newsday before going to Sports Illustrated, which in the ‘90s and early 2000s was still a holy grail of sportswriting. But King not only worked hard on his craft; he also worked hard on understanding what radio and TV needed from him when he made appearances, and he consistently got better at delivering that.
The beauty of what King was doing was that, in his way, he was elevating appreciation for the art of reporting. He joined NBC’s Sunday evening studio show Football Night in America in 2006, and he spent his time on the air either dropping straight news nuggets or, mostly, talking about topics that were related to reporting he’d already completed.
He was a coast to coast radio guest, a podcast guy and a sports-talk talker who seemed equally comfortable with Dan Patrick or a local host. In 2018 he joined NBC Sports exclusively (that always felt more about the impending collapse of SI than anything else), where he made regular appearances on PFT Live and Football Night in America, hosted the Peter King Podcast, and basically appeared across the network’s array of platforms as needed, which was a lot.
Yet King continued to be, first, a reporter. He continued to grind out 10,000- and 11,000-word columns on Mondays through the NFL season. That grind was part of the reason he cited Monday for stepping aside, and implicit in King’s explanation was that, after all this time, he really didn’t know how to do the column any other way and still be satisfied with the result.
If so, it marks one of the few times in King’s career that he did not make a successful adjustment to changing times. And as obvious as some of his moves seem in hindsight, the larger truth for folks who want to be part of the sports media landscape is that change is inevitable.
We don’t know what the next significant alteration or wrinkle in sports journalism might be. It’s possible that it hasn’t yet been invented. The only sure thing is that some people will resist it, and others will follow Peter King’s path and give themselves every effort to stay in the game long enough to win it. King did that very, very well.
Mark Kreidler is a national award-winning writer whose work has appeared at ESPN, the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and dozens of other publications. He’s also a sports-talk veteran with stops in San Francisco and Sacramento, and the author of three books, including the bestselling “Four Days to Glory.” More of his writing can be found at https://markkreidler.substack.com. He is also reachable on Twitter @MarkKreidler.
