Former ESPN exec Mark Shapiro reveals Mike Lupica turned down ‘PTI’

For over two decades, Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon have owned the airwaves with Pardon the Interruption. But the decision to put the two former Washington Post columnists on-air together wasn’t always how it was envisioned.

That was revealed by Mark Shapiro, the executive vice president of programming and production at ESPN at the time, who was part of PTI’s founding production team.

Appearing on the Marchand Sports Media podcast, Shapiro revealed that Wilbon and Kornheiser were the first two to start, but he didn’t think he would get the latter. He told host Andrew Marchand of The Athletic that he would have quickly pivoted to Mike Lupica, the New York Daily News columnist who was a rotating panelist on The Sports Reporters.

“And as soon as we made the first call to Kornheiser, he sh*t all over it,” Shapiro says. “And I would just tell you that when he said, ‘No,’ I immediately went and called Mike Lupica, who I worked a ton with on SportsCentury, and he was always one of my go-to dudes, like Dick Schaap, like Bob Costas. You want to get perspective or context on anything in sports history, whether he was alive or not, Mike Lupica’s gonna give you an informed and knowledgeable testament.

“And he was also super opinionated, and I knew he’d be great for TV. He was on Sports Reporters, and he was a huge winner there. Mike was not interested in doing a daily show. We pivoted back to Kornheiser. I flew out to L.A., I had dinner with Mike Wilbon, and we strategized how we were gonna convince Kornheiser to do this, which required him coming into the office every day.

“So, he’s writing for The Post, one or two columns a week — sometimes three. He’s writing (in) the styles section; he wrote a column there. Obviously, he did ESPN Radio. He was well-versed in anything from Broadway to sports, even though he’ll tell you it was just sports, certainly books, etc., and had a million relationships. But, most importantly, during the SportsCentury years, I would listen to these two guys call me every other week and argue about our ranking of the 50 greatest athletes.

“If you remember, it was the precursor to 30 for 30 — we did documentaries on the 50 greatest athletes in a countdown fashion across the year. Big ratings, and big debate, which is what fueled sports and sports radio, for that matter, and these two guys argued all the time. And it just said to me how great they would be in a crossfire setting, and that’s really the genesis for PTI.”

While PTI is a beloved institution, it’s fun to speculate about what could have been. It’s also fair to wonder if fiery debates between Lupica and Wilbon would have ignited the sports world in the same way. Who’s to say? But ESPN and Shapiro certainly didn’t miss when they circled back to Kornheiser.

But we did miss out on what could’ve been the first iteration of Mike & Mike.

[Marchand Sports Media]