A very well-written profile on Adrian Wojnarowski was published by Chris Mannix in Sports Illustrated last week.
What followed was revelations about Wojnarowski’s health and career — as well as effusive praise across the industry. It was one of the better sports media pieces you’ll read this year, which elevated the idea that Wojnarowski saw the light and realized that insiderdom was meaningless.
While Mannix acknowledged that the article’s reception was “pretty big,” he told host Brandon Contes on the Awful Announcing Podcast that he wasn’t surprised by the reaction. After all, Woj has become such a singular figure in the world of sports media that any deep dive into his life and career is bound to resonate with the masses.
“I think that there’s always a fascination with sports media figures, and Adrian is one of the biggest ever — given his platform and what he did with that platform,” said Mannix. “I still think there was some outstanding questions about why he decided to walk away from ESPN. And I think in that piece, we answered a lot of them, whether it was the expanding why he felt kind of ground down from years of covering the NBA the way he did to the health issues that I articulated there, to what his life is like and what it means for him to be at St. Bonaventure.
“The way that story began with him in that apartment of a bar is really remarkable. He has come complete full circle, and is now living above the old bar he used to go to… it really is a full-circle moment for him.”
The profile’s most compelling moment came in illustrating Wojnarowski’s full-circle journey. As Mannix recounted, Woj now rents a modest $1,500-a-month apartment above The Burton, a bar near St. Bonaventure University — a place closely tied to his upbringing and the origins of his journalism career.
And that apartment?
Far from glamorous.
Mannix described it as something straight out of a college student’s playbook: sparsely furnished, complete with an outdated microwave and well-worn appliances. A tour video accompanying the piece gave viewers an authentic look at Woj’s space, including a booth-turned-chair lifted straight from the bar downstairs.
Mannix joked that while it probably wasn’t IKEA furniture, it definitely looked like it.
But that’s exactly how Woj wants it.
“It’s just exactly what he wants,” Mannix explained. “He wants to be in close proximity to the students, the campus, to everything that’s going on at St. Bonaventure. It’s definitely not a remote job. He’s at every single home game. And a lot of days in between, when he’s not at home games, he’s on the road scouting junior college kids and high school kids and even going over to Europe to look at some prospects that might be in that St. Bonaventure range. He’s thrown himself in with both feet into this new job.”
And for Mannix, who has known Woj for years, this shift was an eye-opener. Though he was familiar with most of the profile’s content, he hadn’t fully grasped the depth of Woj’s transformation.
“Over the last couple of years, as his friend and someone that works in the business with him, like I knew it was starting to wear him down some,” Mannix said. “I knew there was going to be an expiration date on his career that was not going to be 10 years into the future. I didn’t know it was going to be this quickly. And I didn’t really know how much it was starting to wear on him — just missing out on all the kind of family things you have to miss out on to do that job.
“I mean, just the day-to-day stuff. Some of the stuff that I wrote about a family movie night: you’ve got to leave to break Evan Mobley’s contract extension. These little things start to pile up and pile up, and eventually just kind of broke him down.”
But as far as Wojnarowski’s prostate cancer diagnosis was concerned, Mannix was acutely aware, but he didn’t know all the details. He told Contes during the full episode, which will be released on Friday that he tried to get as many details out there as humanly possible.
“I didn’t know the extent of his health concerns, but most of the stuff I did know,” Mannix added. “The Kamala Harris stuff was interesting. We did the whole reporting of the story over three days up in Olean [New York]. And over the course of the next week, I call him and fact check a whole bunch of different things… And during one fact-check session, he’s just like, ‘I just thought of something,’ and gave me the Kamala Harris [tidbit].
“The story was effectively written, like I had already written 3,000 words in the story. He’s like, ‘I got this note from Kamala Harris. I heard from one of her people, and they want me to break the story.’ I didn’t put this in the story… he didn’t know that it was going to be Tim Walz. They wouldn’t tell him who the VP pick was. So, what he did was create three graphics with the three frontrunners — Mark Kelly was on that list, Tim Walz was on that list, and Josh Shapiro from Pennsylvania was on the list.
“He sent me the graphics; I have them on my phone. There’s three ready-to-go for when he was going to get the information and was allowed to tweet about it, but somebody — I think it was CNN — broke it before he could get there.”
And it didn’t take much convincing for Mannix to do this profile.
“I know he had some interest from other people to do something similar, but I think our relationship helped with that,” Mannix added. “Obviously, I worked with him for a couple of years at Yahoo when he launched The Vertical, and we’ve known each other for the better part of the last 20 years. So, I think that certainly helped move this thing along. But once we started talking, there was nothing off-limits; there was nothing he didn’t want to talk about.
“At various times, when discussing his health, he did get emotional talking about. Look, even though it is something that — as he says, he’ll be fine; he’s got control over it. It’s nothing something that would be deemed life-threatening. It’s not something he’s even getting treatment for at the moment. It’s still cancer. And it’s still something in your body that you didn’t know about before.
“I wrote in the story that the doctor that he went to said, ‘You can have surgery, but the only reason to have surgery now is if mentally you cannot handle the idea of having cancer in your body.’ And I’m sure a lot of people have that feeling. I might have that feeling… There were various times he got emotional talking about that. Talking to him, spent some time talking to his wife, Amy, as well. It was definitely hard to talk about at times, but he was always open about everything that was going on.”
Listen to the full episode of the Awful Announcing Podcast featuring Chris Mannix beginning Friday, Dec. 13. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. For more content, subscribe to AA’s YouTube page.
