We’ve seen a slew of retirements recently of sports media giants – Vin Scully, Dick Enberg, and Brent Musburger stepped away full-time while Verne Lundquist and Chris Berman are taking on reduced roles at CBS and ESPN respectively.
Berman has been the face of ESPN’s NFL coverage for multiple decades. He’s been synonymous with the network as it has grown from tiny upstart to global behemoth. And as Super Bowl week rolls on, ESPN will take the rare step of devoting one hour of primetime coverage to a Berman tribute Thursday night at 10:30 PM ET.
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Details via ESPN:
ESPN will present Chris Berman: He Did Go All The Way on Thursday, Feb. 2, at 10:30 p.m. ET. The one-hour tribute will celebrate Berman’s career with ESPN and his influence on the sports media industry over nearly four decades. Berman joined ESPN on October 1, 1979, just three weeks after the network launched.
The special will include a series of themed features, each focused on a different aspect of Berman’s career, life and personal interests, including:
- His early years at ESPN
- His work on NFL PrimeTime with Tom Jackson
- His play-by-play call of Cal Ripken Jr.’s “Iron Man” streak game
- His love of music
- His family
- His friends and co-workers doing Berman impersonations.
Interview subjects for the special include a Who’s Who of current and former ESPN personalities, company presidents, athletes, coaches, and more. Even former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who joined Berman in the ESPN broadcast booth for Ripken’s record-setting game with the Orioles in September 1995, participated in the special.
Given Berman’s bombastic personality and announcing style, it’s ironic that perhaps his finest moment in broadcasting was his extended silence during the celebration of Cal Ripken breaking Lou Gehrig’s iron man streak of consecutive games played.
It is notable that of the many, many prominent personalities to leave ESPN over the years – Skip Bayless, Colin Cowherd, Mike Tirico, Brad Nessler, Bill Simmons, most recently Brent Musburger, even going back to the likes of Rich Eisen and Dan Patrick – none of them got a primetime goodbye special. That shows the weight and the importance of Berman to ESPN. There is a microscopic list of personalities that ESPN would do this for alongside Berman as Dick Vitale and Bob Ley are the only two (as ESPN originals) that would come to mind.
It’s always been said that the reason why ESPN didn’t want to make any astronomically big stars as the network was so that there would never be another Berman who would be “bigger than the network.” Given that same network is devoting an hour of primetime television to Berman, a good case can be made that the two are at least equals.
[ESPN]
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