Twenty-five years into Pardon the Interruption, Michael Wilbon has a theory about why the show is still running: ESPN never let it move in.
Appearing on the Awful Announcing Podcast with host Brandon Contes, Wilbon credited PTI’s Washington, D.C. home base — and the distance it created from ESPN’s Connecticut campus — as the reason the show has outlasted nearly everything else on the network’s daytime schedule.
“The show would not have existed,” he said. “The meddling alone would have driven both of us out.”
Wilbon credited that autonomy back to the show’s original architects. Mark Shapiro conceived the format and pitched it to Wilbon over dinner in Los Angeles, while Wilbon was covering the NBA Finals, before Shapiro had officially been named ESPN’s head of programming. Eric Rydholm then built it out and, according to Wilbon, ran interference for the hosts once it launched.
“He kept the people off of us in Bristol,” the longtime Washington Post columnist said. “We didn’t have to deal with it. We didn’t have to deal with their meddling.”
That insulation extended to editorial control, too. Wilbon said neither he nor Tony Kornheiser were ever willing to take marching orders on which teams or storylines to cover, using the Dallas Cowboys as his standing example.
“We don’t have to deal with somebody suggesting you got to talk more about the Cowboys,” Wilbon added. “That gets a middle finger from me and Tony. And we’re not shy about it.
The disdain, Wilbon said, ran both directions in the show’s early years. Staffers in Bristol reportedly saw Wilbon and Kornheiser as outsiders muscling in on television real estate they hadn’t earned through the network’s usual pipeline, and some advised D.C.-based hires to rent rather than buy, betting the show wouldn’t last.
“They saw us as interlopers, as intruders in their business,” said Wilbon. “We saw them a certain way.
Wilbon’s arrival at PTI wasn’t inevitable in the first place. As he’s previously said, it took prodding from Charles Barkley and former Maryland basketball coach Gary Williams to get him to say yes to the format at all.
Even then, Wilbon admitted he didn’t expect the show to reach its current run when he and Kornheiser signed their original deal.
“I said, ‘Look, Tony, the worst possible scenario is we got two years of money, and they’ll get rid of us.’ He goes, ‘That’s your worst case. That’s my best case.'”
PTI has aired more than 3,000 episodes since its October 2001 debut, and as Dan Le Batard revealed last summer, the expectation inside ESPN is that Wilbon and Kornheiser will be allowed to host the show for as long as they want, regardless of how their contract negotiations at the time played out.
Whether that arrangement endures hinges less on ESPN’s willingness than on how much longer Kornheiser, 77, cares to keep showing up. Wilbon, for his part, gave no indication he’s anywhere close to walking away.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.