Thirty years ago this week, a 26-year-old Rich Eisen walked into Bristol, Connecticut, in a new sports jacket — from a local warehouse, he suspects — sat down at the SportsCenter desk for the first time alongside Larry Beil, and tried not to fall apart.
It was a Saturday, March Madness round-of-32, and Eisen had 11 or 12 highlights to get through in the show. He had seen exactly one of them going in.
“I could either pee down my leg, or I could just suck it up and do it,” he said on The Rich Eisen Show this week while reflecting on the anniversary. “And I probably did both.”
He got through it. And on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of that first show, he spent some time on Monday tracing the threads that connect that day to the present, starting with two coaches who were doing their jobs that day and are still doing them now. Eisen recalled that among the highlights from March 15, 1996, was UMass — the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Region — beating Stanford 79-74, led by Marcus Camby. The coach on the UMass sideline that day was John Calipari, then in his third year at Amherst, on his way to the Final Four. That same weekend, he said it was entirely possible he ran a highlight of No. 1 seed Kentucky dismantling Virginia Tech 84-60 behind Rick Pitino, who was in his fourth season in Lexington. Kentucky won the national championship that year. UMass made the Final Four.
Thirty years later, Calipari just won the SEC championship with Arkansas. Pitino just won the Big East with St. John’s.
“Calipari, and Pinto, and me,” Eisen said, “30 years apart. I cannot believe it.”
The anniversary arrives at a fitting point in Eisen’s own story. After leaving ESPN in 2003 to help launch NFL Network, Eisen spent more than two decades building The Rich Eisen Show into a daily institution — through DirecTV, Fox Sports Radio, YouTube, NBCSN, Peacock, and eventually The Roku Channel — before bringing it back to ESPN last fall under a licensing deal that put the show at the center of ESPN Radio’s noon slot. Last August, he returned to the SportsCenter desk for the first time in 22 years, with ESPN pulling out the old-school graphics and music, and Eisen paying tribute to his late partner, Stuart Scott, in the highlight package. ESPN has since had him back for periodic special editions, and more are planned.
Eisen has said that a return to ESPN in the earlier years of his career at NFL Network would have felt different. He credited ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro specifically for creating the conditions that made the reunion feel right — a network that, in his words, values content, keeps shows intact, and tells its talent to go do what made them great, which three decades ago came down to just getting through the show without peeing down your leg.
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.