Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon are best known nationally as the hosts of ESPN’s hit studio show “Pardon the Interruption,” which will celebrate its 15th anniversary next month. Like many of us who grew up in Washington, D.C., I still view Kornheiser and Wilbon as newspaper columnists more than television stars, even though Kornheiser left The Washington Post in 2008 and Wilbon left two years later.
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Sports columnists Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser found TV stardom on ESPN’s “PTI.”
Photo by: ESPN IMAGES
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I asked Kornheiser if his career, which took him from being an ink-stained wretch to a makeup-wearing talking head, followed any kind of plan.
“Did I have a plan? No. I didn’t want it to happen like this,” he said. “When I was really young, all I wanted to do was write sports for a newspaper. Well, I got that when I was really young. It was my first job. I did it at Newsday, and at the New York Times and at The Washington Post. Along the way, I expanded so my writing wasn’t just about sports.”
Kornheiser said a radio and television career was not even an afterthought. It was something he never considered.
“Radio and television dropped from the sky,” he said. “I didn’t expect it. I didn’t seek it. I didn’t particularly want it. But when I got the opportunity to do it, I was thrilled to do it.”
Kornheiser’s electronic media career started with local radio and television appearances in the Washington, D.C., market. In 1992, he hosted his own radio show for a newly launched sports radio station in the D.C. market. Even at that time, Kornheiser was best known for his regular newspaper columns. He expressed shock that his career now is more defined by television and radio than newspapers.
“The unbelievable part is if you say, OK, at this advanced age in your mid-to-late 60s, did you think you’d be looking back on a career that would mostly be known for television and radio? No. Absolutely not,” he said. “Newspaper guys in the 1970s and 1980s had total disdain for radio and TV. We all thought, who are these people? What do they know? Were they even covering anything? Now everybody who ever worked for a newspaper is on radio and television it seems.
“No, I had no idea. If you talked to 90-plus percent of people who are wildly more successful than they ever imagined, they would say they had no idea. I’m happy. Grateful. But no, I had no idea.”
— John Ourand
