After learning that calling SportsCenter “The Big Show” wasn’t clicking with ESPN executives, longtime host Dan Patrick took matters into his own hands.
Patrick told Peter Schrager of NFL Network this week that the legendary “This Is SportsCenter” ad campaign was in large part his idea, inspired by a joke Keith Olbermann ran with after trying to pivot away from the “Big Show” moniker.
“We were a hot air balloon that was tethered, but we were still drifting pretty high up. I remember we got called in and management really yelled at us,” he explained. “They wanted us to stop calling it the Big Show. Every time you go to the break when you are teasing things, we want you to end with ‘This Is SportsCenter.'”
The pair agreed, and in true Big Show fashion went entirely overboard course-correcting to the new verbiage.
Patrick then asked ESPN president John Walsh why they didn’t market SportsCenter and Walsh responded it wasn’t necessary (how times have changed). But Patrick says he ultimately convinced Walsh and helped recruit athletes to join the commercials.
The tagline? This Is SportsCenter.
“He said, ‘We will do an ad campaign and it was called This Is SportsCenter,” Patrick recalled, saying it began as a joke but quickly turned into the most iconic commercial campaign in the history of ESPN.
Patrick also explained how raising the profile of SportsCenter and ESPN ultimately helped him find his way into music videos from Hootie & the Blowfish as well as as many as 20 Adam Sandler films.
For what it’s worth, four years ago when Patrick and Olbermann celebrated ESPN’s 40th anniversary, Patrick said in a video that the duo “may have inspired the entire series [of commercials] accidentally.”
Whether he directly came up with the idea or “accidentally” inspired the campaign, Patrick surely played a significant role in the creation of those iconic commercials.
[The Season with Peter Schrager]
