After almost three decades at ESPN, Kenny Mayne is leaving the company. Mayne (seen above in 2014) announced that news on Twitter Monday:
I am leaving ESPN.
Salary cap casualty.
Thanks for the opportunity Vince Doria & Al Jaffe & for taking my solicitations
Herman/Stinton/Lynch.I will miss the people.
I will miss the vending machine set up over by the old Van Pelt joint.
We had everything.IntoTheGreatWideOpen#
— Kenny Mayne (@Kenny_Mayne) May 10, 2021
Mayne joined ESPN on a full-time basis in 1994. He had previously worked for Seattle’s KSTW from 1982-89, then did odd jobs including telemarketing, sales, and even garbage can assembly, but he repeatedly pitched ESPN, and eventually got some freelance work there and then a full-time job there. At ESPN, he worked on SportSmash and RPM2Nite on ESPN2, then on the main network’s SportsCenter, then did horse racing and Sunday NFL Countdown features called The Mayne Event, then scripted series Mayne Street and then the world-traveling Kenny Mayne’s Wider World of Sports before rejoining SportsCenter in 2013. Here’s a classic The Mayne Event clip:
Here’s a fun Wider World Of Sports segment:
And here’s another good Mayne Event one, riffing on the Cowboys and The Sopranos:
In recent years, Mayne had done some SportsCenter work, including both hosting shows himself and appearing in segments on Scott Van Pelt’s show. He also memorably led ESPN’s upfronts in 2017 as the flying “angel of advertising.” We’ll see where he winds up next, but he becomes yet another prominent long-time ESPN figure exiting the company.
[Kenny Mayne on Twitter]
