Rachel Nichols left ESPN amid controversy in 2021 and recently re-emerged covering the NBA for multiple outlets. But leaving ESPN for the second time helped Nichols reconnect with the sports media industry and reclaim her future.
In a recent interview with Dan Le Batard, Nichols did not give details of her departure from ESPN. She did, however, open up about how her mindset has evolved in this new chapter.
At a base level, Nichols moved forward because she was never married to ESPN in the first place.
“The thing that was really helpful was I didn’t start at ESPN, I left ESPN one other time,” she told Le Batard on South Beach Sessions. “I went to go work for Turner and CNN, I came back. So this was me leaving again. ESPN didn’t give me my card to be a journalist, they didn’t punch my ticket. I had worked other places for a decade before I even got there. I had established my identity and who I was. I had worked at multiple big media companies.”
Nichols added that getting back out of the ESPN world allowed her to zoom out again for the first time in a while.
“I had the perspective and had always seen it as, I’ll work here for a while and then I’ll work somewhere else,” Nichols explained. “I worked other places before I got here and I’ll work other places after I leave here, that kind of thing. I think some people in the ESPN system, it feels so big it’s sort of all you can see, you don’t have that perspective.”
Nichols pointed to the rapid rise and fall of The National, the infamous sports newspaper that collapsed in the early 1990s. She highlighted countless significant scandals that media personalities have come back from.
Before she left ESPN, Nichols was working seven days a week and chasing the top of a business that she felt did not always reward her for her hard work.
“You almost think that’s like a point of pride. It’s not. It’s dumb,” Nichols said. “And I think some of the mechanics of working at a big company and the egos and the fighting for resources and scraps and the way women are pitted against each other at those companies … is just something I took for granted. That it had to be that way. And the wake of that whole experience for me really opened up my eyes.”
Nichols compared the hyperspeed hunger among ESPN talent with “Stockholm syndrome.”
“When you’re in that ESPN world, there is a lot of sort of Stockholm syndrome of, this is the only thing that matters. Cable television is still where things are at,” she told Le Batard. “I didn’t really understand that what had been the downsides and the restrictions of living your life [at one company].”
After an ESPN executive told her nobody would watch her NBA show The Jump on their phone, she realized ESPN was beginning to fall behind modern digital media businesses.
“Taking a step back allowed me to really see this new media world and realize, oh I’ve been here before,” Nichols said. “I lived through the change and shift of newspapers. And I lived through the dinosaur days of, you’re going to have to shift to a different industry. And I was able to recognize, oh, this is happening again. And I don’t think I was outside of it enough to fully see that, and now it’s just so obvious.”
Now, Nichols works at Monumental Sports Network in Washington, D.C. She also hosts an NBA interview show called Headliners for Showtime and spars with Skip Bayless on Undisputed.
A leaked phone call with a business advisor in the NBA Bubble led to allegations of racism and sexism against Nichols. As ESPN’s lead NBA host and anchor, Nichols could be heard staking a claim to those roles (which she has argued were contractually assigned to her) while colleague Maria Taylor rose at the network.
While Nichols apologized on-air for the comments, ESPN canceled The Jump and demoted Nichols. They parted ways in 2021. Taylor left the network around the same time.
Malika Andrews has risen to host NBA Today and NBA studio coverage for the worldwide leader.
[South Beach Sessions on YouTube]
