As ‘Around the Horn’ ends, Tony Reali debates what went wrong

NEW YORK — In a Manhattan studio one recent morning, Tony Reali, the host of ESPN’s afternoon debate show “Around the Horn,” was staring at the faces of four journalists on that day’s panel, preparing to discuss, what else, the Los Angeles Lakers.

Before that, though, Reali introduced the panel to a guest in the studio, pointing to each on a wall-sized video screen.

“People say, ‘Yo T-bone, who’s your favorite panelist?’ I say Courtney Cronin!”

“People go, ‘Hey T-dog, who’s your favorite panelist?’ I say Justin Tinsley!”

“People say, ‘T-money, who’s your favorite panelist?’ I say Kevin Clark!”

Then came the grizzled columnist from the Gazette in Colorado Springs, Woody Paige, a two-decade staple of the show.

“People always ask me, well I don’t know what they ask me,” Reali said. “But Woody’s the GOAT.”

On the screen, Paige raised a middle finger.

There isn’t much time left for these kinds of moments. The last episode of “Around the Horn” is Friday, 23 years after its debut. Reali, 46, has been the host for 21 years, almost the entirety of his adult life.

What premiered as a novelty — sportswriters beaming in from their newsrooms around the country, a host armed with a mute button and points to score their arguments — has been a staple of ESPN for decades, along with “Pardon the Interruption,” which followed it in the 5 p.m. hour. It helped usher in the debate era of sports TV, made stars out of sportswriters and helped define for a generation of fans how to talk about sports. Nick Wright, a talking head at Fox Sports, recently called “Around the Horn” “the single most important sports show that ever existed.”

The past few weeks have been a celebration of that legacy. Panelists have cried on air. Contributors to the show from a bygone era of ESPN, including Jemele Hill, Sarah Spain and Izzy Gutierrez, have returned for cameos.

But there will be no grand wrap party to mark the end, Reali said, and ESPN is moving on, too. At the network’s preview event for advertisers this month, it pumped up new hire Rich Eisen and a new women’s sports show.

Reali is a noted empath who wears all black to honor a stillborn son and has shared his mental health journey on social media. An Italian from New Jersey with a shock of black hair that has tinged gray at the edges over the years, he faces the new prospect of job hunting. But he’s also wrestling with a question: Why did the show get canceled?

“I don’t really have an answer for that,” Reali said.

As ‘Around the Horn’ ends, Tony Reali debates what went wrong

EARLIER THAT MORNING, Reali was sipping a red-eye (with an extra shot of espresso) at a Brooklyn coffee shop. “I get it,” he said. “You want to know how the most feeling person in sports media is feeling?”

The answer is he’s feeling a lot.

“I was sad about how sad I felt,” he said about the show’s end. “I built myself in so many ways to know I could deal with this — deal being a relative word — that when it came I’d be fine. I’m an NBA coach. I know the show is going to get canceled one day. I’m going to be fine, you know, blah, blah, blah. But I also thought I could save it. And I said to people, ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t save it.’”

Reali is a bona fide TV star but not in a traditional way. He was only a few years out of Fordham when, after a short stint as the fact-checker on PTI (affectionately known as “Stat Boy”), he replaced Max Kellerman at “Around the Horn.” He spent the next several years just trying to keep the job. He went years without taking a day off, he said, terrified a day’s fill-in might turn into a permanent replacement. He never went to the mat in contract negotiations, and his salary showed it: He took a pay cut a few years ago and was making less than $1 million, according to multiple people familiar with the figures, a modest sum for the host of a cable show that has run for 20 years.

Tony Reali holds a photograph from his earlier days at ESPN. He's not sure whether he will stay at the network.

This was also part of his longevity strategy. Some of the cast of the show joked among themselves that “Around the Horn” would be the last TV show. The show’s ratings were solid, it was easy to produce, and it functioned mostly on autopilot.

But last summer, the New York Post reported that ESPN was considering ending it. Reali didn’t fight back in the press; he reached out to higher-ups in Bristol, Connecticut. He was open to changing the show, he said.

“‘You want games? I can do games! You don’t like the mute button? It’s gone,’” Reali recalled telling producers and executives. “‘You want me to bring streamers? I can bring streamers!’ I wanted to put our heads together. But the message was just keep doing what you’re doing.”

Last December brought another meeting. He was told the show was ending.

“We’re seven to 10 minutes in, and computers are getting moved into a bag, and it’s like this is the meeting that you hear about your whole life,” he explained. “But I know who I am, a person whose heart is outside their body. I want to be the kindest person all the time. I don’t want to be a doormat, but I don’t want to go out without having my voice out there, too. So I’m like, ‘Our ratings are up; there are other shows that aren’t touching us.’ I’m saying these things.”

He asked an executive, Dave Roberts, for another meeting the next day, hoping for some closure. He’s not sure he got it. In hindsight, Reali wonders whether he did enough for the show. Did he tell the world how successful it was? Did ESPN tell the world how great it was?

“This is now a place I’ve gotten to in my life where I used to not allow myself to say these things out loud or think these things under a guise of, oh, I have to be the most humble person in the world,” Reali said. “But I’ve been aware that press releases or posts come out when any show is up 2 to 3 percent. Not every show got that.”

“Around the Horn” made stars of local sports columnists — none bigger than Woody Paige.

“AROUND THE HORN” CAME into the world as a showcase for sportswriters, who back then were still the stars of their local sports-media ecosystems. Bill Plaschke showed up from the Los Angeles Times newsroom, Jay Mariotti from the Chicago Sun-Times and Paige then from the Denver Post. On the show’s first episode, Paige promptly declared that Yao Ming was the biggest bust in the history of the NBA.

The show made those columnists famous — none more so than Paige, who wrote quirky messages on a blackboard he displayed behind him and bickered with the other panelists. He recalled soon after the show debuted a woman recognized him at a Colorado football game. “She said: ‘My boyfriend watches you every day. Even when we’re making love, he watches you,’” Paige said. “I said that’s too much information!” (Kevin B. Blackistone, another early panelist and a Washington Post columnist, described the new sensation of walking into locker rooms and players recognizing him.)

Paige said his initial fee was $500 per episode that grew over the years to $2,000. For a time, he starred on other ESPN shows, too. “The show changed how I approached life,” he said. “I made $1 million one year.”

As a result, for a generation of aspiring sportswriters, “Around the Horn” was far more than 30 minutes of afternoon TV. It was the possibility of what sports journalism could be.

Tinsley, a writer for Andscape and a regular panelist on the show, used to watch every day in his dorm room with friends. They would listen to the questions and then mute the TV as they argued among themselves. Pablo Torre, a former ESPN pundit who now hosts his own podcast, said he still has the voicemail in which Reali invited him to join the show for the first time.

Over time and as many of those newspapers struggled, the show evolved to include non-columnist personalities, including Bomani Jones, Torre and Mina Kimes. Another wave followed after that: Monica McNutt, Tinsley, Cronin, Clark, David Dennis Jr. The show got younger, more diverse.

Tony Reali jokes with sports commentator Kevin Clark.

“Tony is mixing four generations, from the boomers to the zoomers,” Jones said. “It’s different people on the show every day, and he’s got to make it work. It’s amazing.”

To Reali, it was working. ESPN executives, though, saw a declining brand. The critiques in Bristol fall into a few buckets. The show felt old-fashioned. Its segments didn’t go viral enough. (Reali said the show used to have a thriving YouTube page but ESPN asked the show to stop posting.)

“Around the Horn” prided itself on its breadth of coverage of baseball, women’s sports, hockey. But some felt ESPN wanted more NFL and NBA. The show didn’t shy away from social issues, and that made it, at times, a punching bag for right-wing critics.

“It confounds me that they are canceling it,” said Spain, who spent years as a panelist and now hosts a daily podcast focused on women’s sports. “The format allows for a continuous stream of new people, to highlight reporters on your network. I’m admittedly biased, but this is progressive voices and people of color you’re taking off TV. I don’t know for sure that’s their intention, but are you so scared of getting called ‘woke’?”

Reali scores answers with a point system he insists isn't as random as it seems.

The economics of the show also depend on whom you ask. As of a few years ago, the show was profitable, according to a person with knowledge of the figures. But according to another person familiar with advertising at ESPN, most of the network’s daytime ads are sold as blocks throughout the day. Assigning profits and losses to any daytime show is more art than science, and the ratings of 30 minutes in the afternoon don’t make much of a revenue impact.

The ultimate takeaway is probably that numbers can spin a financial case for or against “Around the Horn” and most any other daytime show, too.

“During the day, it’s about relevance and brand,” said Burke Magnus, ESPN’s head of programming.

Some connected to “Around the Horn” noted that the brand ambassadors ESPN has chosen lately, such as Pat McAfee and Shannon Sharpe, pose their own risks to the company. Others at the network say talent’s most important job today is to resonate, to borrow a favorite word of Stephen A. Smith.

“‘Around the Horn’ was launched at a time when credibility in sports as a nonathlete meant journalism,” said Torre, who left ESPN and launched his own podcast with Meadowlark Media. “It meant that you worked your way up through some pipeline inside some institution. I just think we’re in the influencer era across the board now in that your ability to generate attention today is the credibility.”

Reali has been at the controls for two decades.

FOR 20 YEARS, REALI has been getting the same question: How do the points work?

It’s one of the hallmarks of “Around the Horn”: a scoring system controlled solely, and seemingly almost haphazardly, by Reali. He loves the question.

He always gives a few points for a good stat or some insight from a locker room, he said. But it depends on the day. He subtracts a few for relying on hackneyed words that he hates: nuance, narrative, elite. (A few years ago, the show bought a new control board for him that cost more than $100,000.) Reali says he has tilted the scales for winners only a few times: if they had a charity event they wanted to promote or if a kid came to the studio.

“Really,” he said, “I scored on vibes” because he liked to think about how the show made people feel.

Now he has to figure out what to do with his vibe. The week after the show ends, he plans to launch a website, tonyreali.com, where he wants to build a community. Perhaps it could be something centered on youth sports. Reali has three kids and coaches his son’s soccer team, the Super Seahorses. (Person after person connected to “Around the Horn” talked about the family atmosphere Reali fostered.) Maybe, he said, he will host a digital version of “Around the Horn” with fans.

He is also looking for another job and said he hasn’t made much headway at ESPN. He has taken meeting after meeting over the past few weeks. He is interested in game shows and met with NBC about Olympics coverage. (Reali’s feel-good exuberance struck several industry observers as a natural fit there.)

Reali, a dad, is mulling his future, including wanting to build a website about youth sports.

ESPN will move on without “Around the Horn.” For now, it will plug in a “SportsCenter.” According to people familiar with the plans, the network approached Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon about doing an hour of “Pardon the Interruption.” But the offer didn’t include much of a raise, which played a role in no deal getting done. The hour of PTI is mostly off the table now, but that show remains important to the network and executives intend to keep it running after Kornheiser and Wilbon retire.

Around Bristol, newly signed Peter Schrager has been mentioned as a possibility to fill one of the seats.

For a few more days, though, Reali will take the ferry to work. It’s a four-minute commute from Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan, and he walks past the dock where both of his grandfathers unloaded bananas off cargo ships two generations ago at Pier 15. Reali used to keep fake bananas on set. “I’m a sentimental person,” he said.

Ten years ago, Reali recalled, someone asked whether he wanted to start a podcast. “I laughed. I said: ‘A podcast? I already have a TV show,’” he said.

Recently he has noted that podcasts are selling for tens of millions of dollars after, in some cases, only a few hundred episodes.

“We’ve done 4,900 episodes, and now the show goes away,” he said. “I never want to be in that position again, of not being aware of the business.”