The ESPN afternoon sports debate program Around the Horn is nearing its conclusion after 23 years on the airwaves. Tony Reali will be hosting the final episode of the show next Friday as the network moves in a different direction with its afternoon programming over the summer. SiriusXM Mad Dog Sports Radio host Adam Schein reflected on the show with longtime panelist Woody Paige, who appeared on the first episode in the history of the program in November 2002. Paige, who is a columnist for The Gazette in the Denver area, has registered more than 680 wins on the show and has become somewhat synonymous with the program.
As Around the Horn prepares to sign off the air, Schein asked Paige to discuss his perspectives from being involved in the venture. Paige detailed how the president and vice president of ESPN reached out to him at a Super Bowl explaining that the network was going to create a complimentary show to Pardon the Interruption and that they wanted him to be its first hire. Aside from being confused as to why they would ask him to participate, he also struggled to discern the concept. Paige remembers being told the show would resemble Hollywood Squares but instead focus on sports. From there, he reminisced on a meeting that took place from Carnegie Deli in New York City where he met Max Kellerman and listened to him discuss the New York Yankees and boxing at length.
“I’m sitting there just bored to tears,” Paige recalled, “and I said, ‘Excuse me, Max. You apparently have me confused with somebody who gives a sh*t,’ pardon me, ‘[towards] what you’re talking about,’ and the producer Bill Wolff said, ‘That’s the show, guys. You’re guys at a bar having arguments over sports.’”
When the show was beginning, he thought about how ESPN was founded as the “Entertainment and Sports Programming Network,” and he tried to fulfill those principles by crafting his personality around comedian Soupy Sales and former Broncos coach Dan Reeves. In the end, he was trying to be distinctive and find something that would work on television, and it ended up having a ripple effect on the rest of the program.
“Tim Cowlishaw said, ‘We didn’t think you belonged on the show, and then we found out you were the show, so we had to develop personalities,’” Paige reflected. “Bob Ryan was a serious, serious journalist on Sunday mornings on Sports Reporters. Bob Ryan showed us an entirely new side where he could be the elder professor and tell us what we’re doing, and we had fun with it, and I think people saw that, and they were confused about scoring and they were confused about journalists being on TV every day.”
Paige surmised that the reason ESPN had journalists on the program who worked outside of the company was in the ability to separate itself from them. For example, he surmised that if a network or league complained to the company, it could come back and say that the journalists are independent operators who are not directly employed by the network. In addition, Paige recently discovered that Around the Horn has been on the air longer than M*A*S*H and Cheers combined, and he feels that the show resonated with people in its timeslot.
“I think people became very comfortable with the concept of what we were doing and trying to figure out the scoring system, which I still have never figured out, and it was something comfortable in the afternoon,” Paige conveyed. “I asked somebody in the beginning – I said, ‘Who’s going to watch this show?,’ and they said, ‘Drunks at bars and college kids.’ Well, college and high school kids really adopted it, and people who came home at 5:00 in the East would say, ‘Well, let’s sit down and watch this.’”
Barrett Media produces daily content on the music, news, and sports media industries. To stay updated, sign up for our newsletters and get the latest information delivered straight to your inbox.
