Three weeks after signing off Around the Horn on ESPN, Tony Reali has returned to sports media programming with a surprise Monday morning appearance on The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz. Le Batard, who attended Reali’s final taping in New York City, explained that the program needed some more sunshine and teased that they had flown someone in for this purpose. It turned out that Reali was roaming the streets of Miami with a camera and microphone, and he forayed into a local coffee shop to speak with patrons. From there, he interviewed an employee at The Elser Hotel before making his way upstairs into the Meadowlark Media studios with an inflatable bounce house he rented.
Upon entering the facility, Reali began to inflate the bounce house inside of the studio, which began to crush Le Batard as he was discussing other topics. Upon deeming that there was a risk that Le Batard’s studio lights would be blown out, he deflated the device and presumed to engage in a takeover of the show. Reali, who was the host of Around the Horn for 23 years and also contributed to Pardon the Interruption as ‘Stat Boy,’ explained that he would be there for the show all week after previously spending time surfing in Malibu.
“We’re here all week,” Reali explained. “Let’s get it – let’s get around the popcorn. Let’s go, let’s go. We’ll do movies, we’ll have a game segment. ‘Around the Popcorn,’ alright? And we got parents here? Let’s go Around the Babybjörn. Alright? ‘Around the Babybjörn.’ We got Ron Magill in the house? ‘Around the Horns?’”
Mike Ryan, a producer on Le Batard’s program, explained to the host that he brought in someone who has been hosting a show for decades and is unable to contain him. Le Batard then noticed that the LED screen behind him read “Tony’s Takeover,” something that no one told him they were doing and sufficient explanation as to why there was a bounce house in the studio.
“I can’t wrangle the giant personality of 23 years of [starring] daily on ESPN,” Le Batard said of Reali. “He has his own show, he’s not a team player.”
Reali replied that he had nothing to do, and Ryan proceeded to question if he could even listen to them. This prompted Reali to explain that he was hearing every word being said but listening in an active sense taking everything in as if he had Woody Paige and Bill Plaschke with him. Le Batard later divulged that the Meadowlark studio and people are going to be doing an Around the Horn livestream with him and Izzy Gutierrez, more details of which were not yet revealed. The show then extolled Reali’s ‘glam shots’ on his official website as the takeover continued.
“Look, you’ve been good at this since I’ve known you,” Le Batard said to Reali. “Stugotz, Tony as a lifetime television person, when I saw him at the very beginning of his career, that he fell very naturally into, ‘This might not be a natural thing to pose for the camera this way, but I will do it exceptionally well.’ He did it from a very young age.”
The parameters of Reali’s involvement with the show and Meadowlark Media remain unknown at this time, but he has appeared on the program several times over the years. One of the first interviews for which Reali gave upon the news of Around the Horn coming to a conclusion came on The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz. Reali and Le Batard are former colleagues at ESPN hosting Around the Horn and Highly Questionable, respectively, overlapping at the company for a stretch of two decades.
“There’s nothing sadder than a bouncy house without air,” Reali said to Le Batard later in the segment. “I mean, really, and this is the place you sometimes occupy in my life. You are the literal bouncy house without air in my life.”
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