After a particularly exciting game in the MLB postseason, Peter Gammons noticed something was missing. The game lacked a discursive postgame report that was loaded with numbers and trivia and that radiated with a hokey-yet-absolutely-genuine love of baseball. In other words, it lacked a Jayson Stark column.
Stark, who was watching the playoffs from his home in Philadelphia, was writing stuff. He was just having trouble publishing it. After Game 2 of the World Series, he tweeted: “I wrote a piece about last night’s WS game and want to post it on Facebook, but it must be too long for one post. Ideas?”
There are lousier stories about the ESPN layoffs. But Jayson Stark being edited by Facebook’s character count may be the most heart-wrenching. (He eventually posted a piece.) Yet last week, when I called Stark and asked how he was getting along, he was as cheerful about his career as he is about his favorite sport. “What am I doing?” he said. “I’m doing exactly what I’ve done since this happened, and that is approach this by saying, ‘I’m not gonna feel sorry for myself. I’m not gonna feel bitter or angry. I had 17 great years there. This is an opportunity to find something great to do next.’”
The ESPN layoffs dumped about 100 writers and TV hosts back into the workforce. Some got new jobs. Some exist in a strange if lucrative state of semi-employment, in which the network is paying them not to work. I wanted to see how a few of them were doing before ESPN begins Round 2 of the layoffs.
I’m not gonna feel sorry for myself. I’m not gonna feel bitter or angry. I had 17 great years there. This is an opportunity to find something great to do next.Jayson Stark
Stark didn’t want to talk about the details of his own ESPN deal. But he is clearly working around it: doing hits on sports radio, writing columns on Facebook, and publishing the odd book review. “I hear from people all the time who miss me,” he said. “Miss my voice, miss my columns, miss my take on things. After a while, I felt like I had an obligation to these people.”
Stark could not not write about baseball. Three weeks after he was laid off, he watched the Orioles blow a six-run lead against the Tigers, go to extras, and then blow another three-run lead before finally winning the game in the 13th inning. Stark told his wife he suspected that no team had ever done that in baseball history. “The next morning,” he told me, “I woke up — and this is what I would have thought if I was still working — I said, ‘I need to know.’” After canvassing Twitter, he wrote a column — short and sweet this time — and posted it to Facebook.
Even if Stark was temporarily without an outlet, he never stopped showing up at the ballpark. His Baseball Writers’ Association of America credential got him into any game. He went to Game 5 of the ALCS and sat in the Yankee Stadium press box. The World Series turned into such an epic that Stark thought of paying his own way to the games before figuring he couldn’t make the logistics work.
Stark has been covering baseball since the 1970s, and manning ESPN shows like Baseball Tonight since 2000. For the first time in more than three decades, he wasn’t a prisoner of baseball’s calendar. In July, Stark went to Cooperstown for Hall of Fame weekend (he’s usually busy with the trade deadline) and was approached by fans and Hall of Famers alike. In August, Stark and two dozen family members went to a mountaintop in Oregon, where they watched the solar eclipse from the center of the totality. “That was pretty much the coolest thing I’ve ever done or seen,” he said.
Laid-off ESPNers report that friends sometimes struggle with how to act around them. These were some of the luckiest people in sports media. Do you say, “I’m sorry?” Tell them, against all available evidence, that their next job will be better?
Stark said his natural sunniness pushes away whatever awkwardness a pal might have. “When I’m back working again, I’ll be a happy man,” he told me. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t be happy in the meantime.”
When Calvin Watkins joined ESPN Dallas, in 2009, it was as if he could hear print journalism’s death rattle. The Dallas Morning News, where Watkins had once worked, was in a period of decline. ESPN Dallas — and its counterparts in Los Angeles and Chicago and Boston — was going to stomp out newspapers like the guy at The Athletic. “We were going to take over the world!” Watkins joked last week. For a time, things were so tense that Watkins’s old Morning News pals were forbidden from talking to him.
Being a print guy at the Worldwide Leader required some adjustments. Watkins could be hauled in front of a TV camera at any moment, so he had to remember to shave at least every other day. He was told that if he didn’t wear a tie, he should wear a V-neck undershirt so that it wouldn’t be visible under his dress shirt.
“There was an interesting thing I discovered after being let go by ESPN,” Watkins said. “People are almost afraid to talk to you about jobs because they think you’re making $2 million a year at ESPN. They think they can’t afford you.” Watkins wasn’t making $2 million a year.
At the outset, ESPN Dallas wanted its writers to blog everything. No bit of news was too small. But after Watkins shifted to the Houston Rockets beat, he noticed a change of directive. The local sites became leaner: His old colleague Todd Archer is now covering the Cowboys beat by himself, while the Morning News is still sending a small army. On a lot of beats, ESPN didn’t want continuous blogging anymore. If the Rockets beat the Pelicans by 30, they didn’t think it was necessary for Watkins to write a gamer.
When he heard about the coming layoffs, Watkins figured that working on the Rockets beat would protect him. “When they cut me,” he said, “I asked [former ESPN editorial director] Chad Millman, ‘Was it my work?’ He told me no. That made me feel a little better. If they’d cut me because I was a terrible reporter or journalist, I’d be like, golly. This was more about the economics of the business. This is how you do it in the business world.”
A sportswriter is never more popular than on the day they’re laid off. Players and fans who called them a liar or a hack retroactively see them as vital cog in the machinery of the free press. This is how it went with Watkins. In December, one of his pieces had pissed off Trevor Ariza. After the layoffs, Ariza recorded a conciliatory video and texted it to him. Watkins was let go the day after the Rockets finished off the Thunder in the first round of the playoffs. Like Stark, he watched the rest of the postseason on TV.
The job market for beat writers was so bleak during the summer that Watkins came close to leaving sportswriting. He was offered a job writing up prospectuses for companies that were courting investors. “I thought, ‘If I take this job, I don’t know that I’m ever going back,’” Watkins said. “‘I don’t know that I can go back.’”
Then Kimberley Martin left Newsday’s Jets beat job. Watkins, who’d started his career stringing for Newsday in the ’90s, replaced her. When we talked, Watkins was still adjusting to the rituals of newspapering. He was writing a lot more than he had been at ESPN. When the Jets played the Bills on Thursday Night Football, Watkins had to file a feature to fill space in Newsday’s first edition, since the paper would be published before he could write his gamer.
Watkins appreciated the irony: Where he’d once fled to ESPN from a shrinking newspaper, now a newspaper was rescuing him from the shrinking Worldwide Leader. “I’m back where I started,” Watkins said. “And it’s weird. It’s weird how things work out.”
If you measure success in terms of appearances on prestige cable, Jaymee Sire has had a better post-ESPN life than just about anybody. Before the layoffs, Sire was hosting SportsCenter. Now — if you haven’t cut your cord — you can flip over to the Food Network and find her as the floor reporter on Iron Chef Showdown.
“In a weird way, it’s similar to doing sidelines for football games,” Sire said. Instead of Joe Tessitore, she is radioing in reports to Alton Brown. The idea is to spot things Brown can’t see and otherwise stay out of the way. Producers have noted that unlike a lot of people who worked on heavily edited reality shows, Sire usually needs only one take.
Five minutes after Sire signed off on the April 26 edition of SportsCenter, her supervisor called her. Sire knew the layoff victims were being announced; she had read Ed Werder’s tweet during a commercial. When her supervisor asked her to meet at a spot on ESPN’s campus, Sire realized that she, too, was on the list. “I did a hyperventilating, ugly cry the whole way to meet him,” she said. She found her supervisor sitting next to an HR representative.
That night, Sire told friends that she was fine and didn’t need them to come over and comfort her. They came over anyway and brought alcohol. When she woke up the next morning (early because she’d been hosting the a.m. SportsCenter), she had 183 new text messages from people telling her how sorry they were.
Sire’s ESPN contract runs until March 2019. (ESPN laid off people whom it continues to pay both for accounting purposes and to move on with a smaller workforce.) But back in the spring, ESPN granted her permission to do some freelance work on the Food Network. She did an episode of Beat Bobby Flay and judged Food Network Star with Jemele Hill. Sire has a food blog and had been thinking about Food TV for years. After she was laid off, she went back to ESPN and got permission to be on Iron Chef.
Sire has moved to New York. (I didn’t meet any former ESPNer who decided to stay in Bristol.) She had time to travel, going to Peru and Paris and taking a three-week road trip across the Pacific Northwest.
What’s different is the contract. “My whole career I’ve had a contract for two or three or four years,” Sire said. “It’s guaranteed, essentially. … Whereas a lot of these food and travel shows, they shoot 10 episodes. They might renew the show and they might renew you. But there’s nothing guaranteed, really.” ESPN is (well, was) a sinecure; Food TV is part of the gig economy.
“It sounds so clichéd and cheesy, but I think things happen for a reason,” Sire said. “I had been thinking about this as a career path at some point. But it’s really hard to leave ESPN and sports when you’ve been doing it for 15 years and that’s what people know you as.”
“It’s a way to remember that sometimes you have to take a leap of faith,” she said. With a slight pause, she added: “This was more like a push off the ledge.”
Last Wednesday, the Tennessee Titans writer Paul Kuharsky was sitting in a sports bar outside Nashville. Two bottles of craft vodka were arranged on either side of him. When Kuharsky started a Periscope Q&A, he made sure to mention the name of the bar. These native ads are hallmarks of Kuharsky’s new gig: The vodka company sponsors his website and the bar is paying him to broadcast there.
Kuharsky worked at ESPN for nine years, covering the Titans and the AFC South. Now, he covers the Titans for PaulKuharsky.com. “I’m a Springsteen fan,” he said, explaining the site’s M.O. “I was thinking, ‘What would I pay bigger dollars for?’ Access to the guy that had access to Springsteen — that would be worth it to me.”
Titans fans treat Kuharsky as their insider, the portal to Marcus “The Boss” Mariota. For $5.99 a month, they can read all the articles on Kuharsky’s site. For $150 a month, they can be part of an elite group that Kuharsky calls his “Starting 22.” Kuharsky will invite you to dinner and give you his phone number and let you add him to your golf foursome and welcome you into a “circle of trust” where he is liable to reveal stuff that is too interesting to print. Basically, you get to be Paul Kuharsky’s friend.
“People were making fun of me and stuff, but [The Starting 22] sold out in two days,” Kuharsky said. He won’t reveal how many $5.99-per-month members he has, arguing that some observers might think the number was small and that, in turn, would insult his readers. “I don’t want to do anything that’ll make them feel small,” Kuharsky said. “I want to make them feel big.”
I don’t think anybody can argue ESPN is a better place in 2017 than it was in 2013.Jay Crawford
Besides having to learn about the business side of journalism (his wife, an accountant, keeps an eye on the numbers), Kuharsky’s biggest adjustment has been transforming into a direct report to his readers. On another Periscope session, Kuharsky solicited questions that he took directly into the Titans’ locker room. He even recorded linebacker Wesley Woodyard answering one of them. Listening to Kuharsky talk to readers on Periscope, you will recognize him offering what Rivals recruiting reporters have offered for years: world-weary fan service. “I’m not going to answer anybody who can’t spell ‘Pittsburgh,’” Kuharsky said on Periscope last week, as he glanced at the questions popping up on his screen.
A few hours after he was laid off, Scott Burnside, who covered hockey for ESPN for 13 years, got a phone call. After some brief negotiations, Burnside had a new job and a new title: He was the senior digital correspondent for the Dallas Stars. “I wish there more words in my title,” he said last week.
Burnside was on the phone from Tampa, where he, too, is doing beat writing in a slightly different form. The Stars hired Burnside to cover them. But unlike a lot of teams’ media operations — which use memes and chatty notebook columns to disguise what’s essentially an ad for the club — the Stars wanted Burnside to do it straight. If goalie Ben Bishop gets pulled from a game, Burnside is expected to record Bishop’s grumbling. Burnside’s articles carry a disclaimer: “This story was not subject to approval of the National Hockey League or Dallas Stars Hockey Club.”
Burnside had experienced the lousiness of layoffs before. In 2001, when he was a Maple Leafs beat writer for Canada’s National Post, he was cut while he was in Newfoundland waiting for training camp to start. “I was completely naive that these things could happen,” he said. “I wasn’t as naive this time.”
Hockey had been a shrinking corner of ESPN’s empire since the network lost NHL TV rights in 2004. Moreover, as newspapers have scaled back their ambitions, hockey coverage is often the first place they trim. Hiring Burnside, with his weekly power rankings and leaguewide coverage, is an attempt to generate more interest in the sport.
“The Dallas Stars are looking at it as, well, the landscape is dominated by the Dallas Cowboys,” Burnside said. “Everyone understands that. How can we tell some hockey stories?”
Anchor Jay Crawford has had one of the best — or, to use his word, the awesomest — post-ESPN lives. When he was laid off, Crawford had more than two and a half years remaining on his contract. That means ESPN is paying him not to be on TV until the end of 2019 — a few weeks before the next set of presidential primaries.
I caught Crawford at Bowling Green State, his alma mater, where he is serving as a mentor to young media types. “They have a million questions, like everyone, about where this mess we call a profession is going,” Crawford said. “No one knows. The only thing everyone can agree on is it’s changing and it’s probably changed since we’ve been on the phone.”
“I’m not a guru or wizard or anything,” he continued. “My big thing is I don’t want anyone getting the idea they’ll be able to master one skill set and forge a meaningful career in television. Those days are gone.”
Crawford came to ESPN in 2003 — as cohost of Cold Pizza, the in utero version of First Take — and caught the last decade-plus of the network’s golden age. He watched as ESPN seemed to anticipate every change in the media landscape, every pivot, until it didn’t. “I just couldn’t help but wonder how it happened, how they went from what they were to what they are,” Crawford said. “I don’t mean that to denigrate them. It’s just factual. I don’t think anybody can argue ESPN is a better place in 2017 than it was in 2013.”
Crawford signed a contract extension two years ago, by which time he was hosting the midday SportsCenter. But last fall, he soured on his job and decided that it would be his last ESPN contract. When Crawford heard the layoffs were coming, he recalled, “I would tell you I never lost a night’s sleep over it. In fact, I had come to the conclusion in the weeks leading up to it that I was hoping my name was on that list.”
Now, Crawford has embarked on what he calls his “practice retirement.” At ESPN, he had money but no free time. “Now, for two and a half years, I have money and time,” he said. “I’m going to take advantage of it.” Crawford and his wife, Tracy, have made several trips to see their son, Corey, who’s training in California to become an Olympic long jumper. Crawford recently told Tracy that he had played so much golf that he’d grown tired of it. “I took up woodworking,” he said.
The Crawfords’ home in Avon, Connecticut, is for sale; they’re thinking of moving to Florida for tax purposes. Crawford said that working for a national network, whatever its spoils, deprived him of a connection with a city he had when he was on local TV. After 2019, he wouldn’t mind having a job in his native Ohio. “I’m pursuing any and all possibilities in Cleveland,” he said.
Crawford gets notes from ESPNers who fear they’re on the list for the next round of cuts. He realizes his situation is better than your average producer or beat writer’s. But he preached Starklike sunniness. As Crawford put it to me: “I got their attention by telling them, look, there is life after ESPN, and it is awesome.”
Crawford felt a single pang of nostalgia about his former career. He was eating out this summer when he glanced up at a TV and saw ESPN’s coverage of the Little League World Series, an event he covered and came to love over four years. This, however, is about the only time Crawford has watched ESPN. After being laid off, he noticed his DirecTV bill was running him hundreds of dollars a month. He became one of the 12 million people since 2011 who have cut the cord.
“I avoid television,” Crawford said. He makes do with the updates and scores that pour into his phone. And thus a guy who was part of ESPN’s news operation realized that news alone could no longer sustain his old network.
“I’m not missing anything,” Crawford said. “And that’s the problem.”
Disclosure: Several Ringer employees were previously employed at ESPN.
