TNT’s Ernie Johnson Exhibits Humility and Perspective on ‘Inside the NBA’

When consumers think about a studio program surrounding national sports broadcasts, segments centered on milking a cow, conducting a blind soda taste test or a mystery box challenge generally do not come to mind. Inside the NBA, however, does things differently and presents these unique moments in its segment, “EJ’s Neat-O Stat of the Night,” famously unsullied by sponsorship since 1989. The segment began as a way for host Ernie Johnson to implement unique statistics into the show, conveying more esoteric knowledge to the audience. It gradually transformed over the years to become an allocated time for storylines or gimmicks to be played out on a show that largely neglects bonafide structure.

While he was presenting the statistic in the segment’s original iteration, Johnson would often regard it as ‘neat,’ articulating such to the audience as a rhetorical question. There are several basketball-centric recurrences today – rarely including an actual statistic – such as ‘Who He Play For?’ and ‘Gone Fishin’.’ No matter the topic, the concluding segment looks to showcase charisma, equipping self-deprecating humor and bringing levity to the audience.

“It’s a stat in name only really; in title only, although every now and then we will throw a couple of numbers in there,” Johnson said, “but now it’s just kind of a, ‘What are these guys going to do to end the show?,’ and we love it.”

As a member of the company for the last 35 years – currently within the TNT Sports division – Johnson recognizes a familial environment. anchoring the prominent NBA studio program with Kenny “The Jet” Smith, Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal, he knows that his job is predicated on helping the group become greater than the sum of its parts.

“I’m an information-giver and I’m a facilitator of conversation – that’s me,” Johnson articulated. “I’m trying to get us from point A to point B to point C, [and] I’m not the one to say, ‘This is what they’re saying in the huddle here with 1.3 seconds to go.’ No, I’ve got three guys who played the game who were there for that.”

Although Johnson has become synonymous with Inside the NBA, it was not the role for which he was originally hired at the company. In fact, he originally arrived at TBS in 1989 to host the Goodwill Games, an international sports competition organized by media executive Ted Turner. Johnson started appearing in the studio to anchor U.S. Olympic Gold, a program that recapped sports around the country meant to prepare him for the Goodwill Games. His jump to national television occurred with years of persistence after Johnson fell short of attaining his baseball dreams.

Johnson’s father, Ernie Johnson Sr., played nine seasons in Major League Baseball as a pitcher and won the 1957 World Series as a member of the Milwaukee Braves. Shortly after his retirement, he became a broadcaster for Braves games on radio and television where he worked for parts of three decades. Looking to follow in the footsteps of his father, Johnson played baseball growing up and was a walk-on member of the team at the University of Georgia. One year later though, his time on the diamond ended, and he was pondering over his next steps.

“I kind of centered on, as an English major, being an English teacher and a baseball coach in a high school,” Johnson said. “I thought, ‘That would be a pretty cool way to keep baseball in my life,’ so I thought about that.”

Skip Caray, a longtime broadcaster who Johnson’s father worked alongside, encouraged Johnson to try the campus radio station and deemed that he had a good voice. Johnson ultimately changed his major to journalism and became rooted in the broadcast concentration of the school. Covering sports games and watching the action enticed him, and he yearned to hone his craft as graduation approached.

“While my dad didn’t push me in that direction, I learned everything I needed to know about this from watching him,” Johnson said. “I always tell people when I speak, I [say], ‘We know this about kids – they see and hear everything; that’s their superpower,’ and I speak from experience because I remember going to the ballpark with my dad and watching how he prepared for each broadcast.”

In observing the mannerisms and conduct of his father, Johnson quickly gained an understanding of professionalism, respect and humility. Eradicating potential tendencies and pitfalls kept Johnson grounded and permitted his work to shine through.

Throughout his time in college, Johnson heard the maxim of starting in a small market and gradually working one’s way to larger, more populous locales. While he was in school, Johnson commuted to WAGQ-FM early in the morning to deliver morning drive news and sports updates as the director of both genres. He served in a similar role at the campus radio station, WUOG-AM, granting him continuous repetitions and blending collegiate and professional-level experience.

By the time he was applying for jobs, Johnson possessed versatility and wanted to transition to television. As a result, he sent videotapes to several television stations to try and land an interview. Following a difficult audition to anchor sports in Albany, Ga., Johnson succeeded in his quest when he landed a news reporting role with WMAZ-TV in nearby Macon.

“I’m anchoring without a teleprompter, and I look like a bobblehead doll when I’m doing it,” Johnson said. “I also look like I’m about 8 years old, just fresh out of college, but man, the things you learn there in that first job. Just having the opportunity to make mistakes; to go out and do stories and experience all this stuff for the first time – that’s all huge.”

Johnson continued collecting experience when he moved to Spartanburg, S.C. as a news reporter on WSPA-TV where he sought to perform his role to the best of his ability. In turn, he built trust and rapport with the audience while cultivating his own style, studying from industry titans such as Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather.

In his second year with the outlet, Johnson was tasked to fill in for one of the sportscasters who was on vacation by doing a live shot of the Braves game for the 6 p.m. news. This fill-in assignment happened to coincide with Rabun Matthews’ first day on the job as news director of the station. During the next day, Johnson was informed that Matthews wanted to meet with him, causing him to fear that he may be fired in favor of bringing in other people. Much to his surprise, Matthews revealed that he had watched Johnson and asked if he had ever thought about doing sports.

“I said, ‘Well, I did sports on the radio and I kind of grew up in [that] environment, but I kind of thought I was set now after making it in Spartanburg and here in Atlanta as a news guy,’” Johnson recalled. “He said, ‘I’d like to move you into the weekend sports anchor spot,’ so that changes the entire trajectory of [my] career.”

Over the next six years, Johnson covered local sports in the area and became more established on the air. Executives from the Turner Broadcasting Company took notice of his abilities and hired him in 1989. As he was preparing to host the Goodwill Games though, a change in the hierarchy of the event resulted in Johnson’s role being completely changed.

“All these great plans when I signed – they were not going to come off as we envisioned it,” Johnson said. “It was only then really that was like, ‘Hey look – TNT is just now coming on the air, and so we want you involved in our basketball coverage.’”

Johnson began anchoring Inside the NBA during its sophomore campaign and was joined by Reggie Theus, Cheryl Miller and Chris Webber on his first episode. The program included various panelists in its early days, and there were also times when he hosted the show solo. Much of the program was scripted and centered on delivering highlights surrounding the games, keeping viewers in the know about the latest in the Association.

Inside the NBA eventually reduced its dependance on a teleprompter, its elimination occurring during an episode that forced Johnson to adapt on the fly and harken his days at WMAZ-TV. After several guest appearances by Houston Rockets guard Kenny “The Jet” Smith in the forthcoming years, Johnson and show producer Tim Kiely knew that he would thrive on the program upon retiring.

A few years after Smith joined the show, Hall of Fame forward Charles Barkley announced his retirement and drew interest from various networks. Barkley ultimately joined TNT and made his on-air debut in October 2000 after nearly signing with NBC. From there, aspects of the show began to move towards being unscripted and became somewhat unpredictable.

Legendary Hall of Fame center and four-time NBA champion Shaquille O’Neal joined the show in 2011, introducing his “Shaqtin’ a Fool” segment and completing a quartet that has worked together ever since. While there is a palpable congeniality and accord between the cast, only Johnson is allowed to attend the network’s production meetings.

“Even if they wanted to, they can’t [come to production meetings] because we don’t want them to know exactly all the things we have in store,” Johnson said of his colleagues. “We don’t want them to know that we’ve got a clip from 1988 of Kenny and we’re just going to crack that out at a certain point if we can.”

Ahead of a night of basketball on the network, Johnson gathers information to remain knowledgeable regarding the games around the league and concurrent in-studio tournament. From pouring over box scores to handwriting statistics, tendencies and storylines, he makes sure he is ready with quantitative metrics to substantiate assertions. The surrounding discourse is permeated with witty conversation, and the gift of gab from the sublime to the ridiculous.

“I’m trying to generate conversation and knowing my colleagues enough to know that if I throw this back or this point out there, Charles is going to love to talk about it and Shaq is going to broadside it, so that’s the kind of thinking that I have when I do my preparation,” Johnson explained. “I say, ‘What kind of information here on this game will generate the best conversation?’”

Johnson believes the show serves as a viable distraction from the visceral reality of the interconnected globe. Johnson seeks to grant people a reprieve from reality through the lens of sports, which he affirms can unite people of different backgrounds and interests. In the end, the show serves multiple interests and takes viewers on a journey.

“If you’re a big-time sports fan and you’re really into hoops, we’re there for you,” Johnson said. “And if you’re kind of on the fringe, we’re there for you too because there’s absolutely no guarantee that it’s going to be 100% basketball talk; in fact, I can guarantee it’s not going to be 100% basketball talk.”

The media industry has endured many changes, but nonetheless there has been an Ernie Johnson working with the Turner broadcast entity for 50 years contributing to its sports coverage. While he spends the basketball season on TNT, Johnson is also on TBS throughout the baseball campaign as a studio host of MLB on TBS Leadoff and also occasionally returns to the broadcast booth as a play-by-play announcer.

“We’re an entertainment network; we’re not a true sports outlet, though we have sports but nobody would ever say, ‘Oh yeah, TNT – that’s the sports channel,’” Johnson stated. “It’s a huge part of what we do, but there’s always been this kind of a feeling like, ‘We’ve really got to fight for everything.’”

The company is currently in long-term media rights agreements with Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League, both of which expire in 2028 and also partners with CBS to broadcast the NCAA Division I men’s basketball championship. Moreover, the company produces original sports content and digital programming through a variety of distribution mediums, including Bleacher Report, which it acquired in 2012 for $175 million. For Johnson, he is somewhat incredulous regarding the current media landscape, remarking that he did not initially recognize all of the possibilities.

“When I started hosting the show, it was like, ‘We’re always going to be putting this thing on TV and this will be the way you watch it,’ and things are so different now, and so who knows?,” Johnson said. “One of these days you may just be able to think hard enough and just conjure up the game and it will appear in front of your very eyes.”

Since the 1989-90 season, the company has had television broadcast rights to the National Basketball Association, but it is now in the penultimate season of its existing deal. As Warner Bros. Discovery continues to bolster Max concurrent with a reported inclination by the league to consider linear and digital means of distribution, there is an enigma surrounding the future of game broadcasts. The two sides have the ability to begin formal discussions with the commencement of a 45-day exclusive negotiating window beginning on March 9, 2024.

“I’m very confident,” Johnson said of the company keeping broadcast rights for the NBA. “Our relationship with the NBA has been so strong and so long-lasting that I couldn’t even envision the league without us in it.”

Throughout his broadcast career, Johnson has persevered through hardship and loss, remaining committed to the craft and audience. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2003 and remained on the air through much of his diagnosis amid chemotherapy treatments, surviving the disease and raising awareness and funds for research.

Johnson underwent surgery after a prostate cancer diagnosis in 2019, and he received the Vince Lombardi Award of Excellence from the Vince Lombardi Cancer Foundation last year for embodying a spirit of commitment and excellence. Through these health challenges – along with the loss of his father in 2011 due to complications from a long-term illness – Johnson leaned on his faith, family and friends but refused to belabor the viewers nor abandon his work ethic.

“You’ve got to work your ass off,” Johnson said. “You’ve got to be the hardest worker in the room, and you’ve got to prepare like crazy and those are the things that will carry you through. In some ways, things have changed a great deal, and in others the foundation is the same.”

Johnson and his wife adopted their son, Michael, from Romania and helped provide a loving and comfortable home for three decades as he battled muscular dystrophy causing respiratory complications that required use of a ventilator. Even though he passed away in 2021, Michael’s spirit lives on through the Love You Too Foundation, created several years earlier to assist in the health and well-being of children, disadvantaged adults and benefit faith-based organizations in the community.

“We learned a lot from Michael when he was alive; we’re learning a lot now that we’ve been without him for two years,” Johnson said. “It’s been really difficult; it really is. Nothing prepares you for that. Nothing prepares you for losing one of your kids, and so that’s just one of those things that we’re grateful for – the years he gave us – and we’re just trying to pass on his spirit of, ‘Love you too.’”

After learning of his induction into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame live on the air during Capital One’s The Match, Johnson accepted the immense honor last month at a ceremony in New York City. As he went to begin his speech, Smith, Barkley and O’Neal emerged to surprise the host and officially hand him the trophy.

The seminal moment was quite powerful for Johnson and his family, but it was simply an addendum to what he truly plays for. Being able to work in the industry and spend time with his colleagues is an award in and of itself, he divulged, and gaining the recognition was beyond gratifying; however, it occurred while the current construction of the show continues to persist.

“Your success is not measured in hardware and that kind of thing,” Johnson said. “Success to me is, ‘What kind of relationships are you building at work? How have you impacted the rest of the world today.’ I tell my kids, ‘When you wake up in the morning, wake up and say, ‘How am I going to make somebody’s life better today?’’ That’s a goal, and so if I’ve done that I’m a success; the day’s a success.”

Johnson and his colleagues left their egos at the door from the beginning, demonstrating a passion and care for their jobs. Nobody has tried to make Inside the NBA about themselves; instead, it serves as both a conduit of information and entertainment. Through it all, Johnson helps keep the show on track, rendering it appointment viewing for sports fans and other consumers alike.

“The job is not who you are, it’s what you do,” Johnson said, echoing the sentiments of his father. “So people can look at me and say, ‘Oh hey, you’re the TNT guy.’ Well, TNT is where I work, but this is who I am. And so I think once you get a good handle on who you are, that makes doing your job a lot easier.”