The end of Around the Horn, the long-running sports game show on ESPN, became a massive news story this spring in part because its typically quiet host Tony Reali finally came out of the shadows to discuss the show and his career.
Suddenly, as ATH headed toward its finale in late May, Reali was everywhere. But the jovial host wasn’t just bathing in celebration of himself to feel good.
As Reali revealed this week in an interview on South Beach Sessions with Dan Le Batard, he was also trying to get in front of a message he was seeing in the reporting about the end of ATH that he found to be dead wrong.
Reali said that he processed his own disappointment with the show’s cancelation slowly, but became frustrated when he saw his life’s work be relegated to a footnote in comparison to other figures involved with ATH and broader trends at ESPN.
“‘Around the Horn, which was first hosted by Max Kellerman,’ or ‘Around the Horn, which was produced by Erik Rydholm,'” Reali recalled reading. “I’m like, those things are factual sentences. But if someone knows the story and is writing the story, that’s not the story.”
Reali became defensive of his role in the show he had poured himself into and the connection he had developed with ATH‘s audience. Looking back, Reali believes media reporters did a poor job explaining the context around the show’s cancelation.
“How do you write, ‘Around the Horn is possibly, looks like it’s going to be canceled end of next year.’ How is the next sentence not, ‘The show, whose ratings were up 5 percent this year’?” Reali questioned.
“Because if you’re writing that article as a journalist, you’d be like, ‘Oh Around the Horn is getting canceled, let’s look at the ratings.’ Oh it’s up 5 percent? That’s an interesting sentence to have. But instead it’s, the show is getting canceled, it’s currently hosted — currently hosted — by this other person. And then the next one is ‘expendable’ and ‘overpriced.’ And I don’t know which one I was more insulted by because neither of those are true. To have those things written about you, I recognize they weren’t coming from nowhere. Somebody was feeding this. And it’s like, OK so I get this game is being played.”
So in response, Reali jumped in at every turn. He appeared with Le Batard, on The Dan Patrick Show and The Awful Announcing Podcast and in countless magazine and newspaper profiles.
Reali addressed every question about the show’s history, from the idea that it went too “woke” to his relationship with castoff Jay Mariotti and former host Max Kellerman.
Reasonable minds can differ about whether ATH was cost effective or drawing a big enough audience. ESPN management clearly feels differently than Reali, no matter what was reported.
But we now have more of an understanding for why Reali did such an aggressive press tour as the show was ending, and how, despite his positive energy, he was clearly bothered, not only by ATH ending, but with how its ending was characterized publicly.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.