Mike Tirico
speaker
1,317 appearances
6 recordings
5 series
first heard Jul 2024
last heard 16 Jul
Mike Tirico’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I got a tryout on the air for six weeks, got hired after four weeks, spent four years there, and then got to ESPN in 91. I was there for 25 years, and now eight years at NBC starting my ninth year.
There was somebody who actually is still a friend, and we work in a different capacity now, who saw me doing local TV and was an executive at ESPN. And they told me, send a tape in a year. I sent a tape in 10 months. got hired a few months later and, you know, did SportsCenter. And I was there like in the salad days. Yeah, SportsCenter. I was with Chris Myers, who works at Fox now.
The weekends were Carl Ravitch and Linda Cohn, who are still there at ESPN all these years later. And the main group was Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann and Bob Lee and Charlie Steiner, Robin Roberts, Gary Miller. We just had like this – that is still, for the most part, all on TV doing national sports almost 25, 30 years later. I love that.
It did stand for the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network. Because you know the story at the start. In September of 1979, a little bit before that, they went up on a satellite and had a satellite. And the original idea was they're going to broadcast Connecticut sports around the state. And they're like, wait a minute, this can be seen everywhere. So let's expand out the idea.
And when I was mentioning all the names, I did mention the godfather of it all. Chris. Chris Berman, who, you know, Chris with the nicknames and the schtick and the whole deal, the back, back, back. Chris made it cool. And a lot of people tried to emulate Chris or be like Chris.
But I think the ones who succeeded, like Rich Eisen, Craig Kilbourn, Stuart Scott, guys who came on after the main group I talked about, they found their own schtick, right? Yeah, yeah.
And there was room for somebody like me, who's a serious, call the sports, you know, have a little fun with it, but it's not about me cracking one-liners, all the way to the guys who, you know, truly came out of comedy, like Rich Eisen and Kilbourn, the Rich was a stand-up comedian before he came to SportsCenter.
that's exactly so here's here's a stupid story so we so Syracuse is uh big for sportscasters and a lot of kids who want to be sportscasters go there and 30 some years later it's almost 40 years later now god um it's still the case so we had just a bunch of nerds and that was our fraternity we were all want to be sportscasters and a bunch of us turned out to be so we would keep a legal pad by our tv and write down every Chris Berman nickname when it
There was like a community list and we sent it to ESPN. We were pissed because ESPN never sent a thank you note back, whatever. You know, months later, ESPN put out a list of all the Chris Berman nicknames. So we take credit for that, at least in our own hearts.
You know what? One... Well, it's a couple of things. Fortunately, you're at games almost all the time. Yeah. And it's 50, 60,000 people. So you guys have performed in front of audiences. There are nights everybody doesn't have it. Something's going on. Family, you're sick. You've traveled for 15 weeks. Nobody cares, right?
You're always trying to make sure that you reach a standard that you've established over the year.
A little bit of that, but also the crowd.
Exactly. But even like, where do you look for just the raw energy for you if your energy is a little bit low? Look at these people. They tailgated. They parked. They've been there for eight hours. And now they're screaming at the top of their lungs. They painted their faces. They're wearing their jersey. That gets you going. How does it not? So when it's a bad day or it's not the best day,
That usually picks me up.
I do. And I'm going to say that, you know, this amateur psychological analysis of this, I think it's the generation that's grown up in front of cameras.
They know where the camera is, how to play to it. They know I score a touchdown. This is my marketing moment. You know, you got guys who have their... TD celebrations all rehearsed. They know it's on me right now and point to the name on the back of their jersey.
So there was like a fan cam, so you could watch the game on a Zoom, and you sit there, and you're watching the game, and hey, in the third quarter, your face will be in the end zone, and then they're going, yay, into their computers. And the guys were seeing them because they were just trying to find a way to create some atmosphere.
than a sniper had taken. My two favorites are the triple barrel roll. When the guy goes down, he rolls, and he rolls, and he rolls again.
And then when they bring out these million, million pound players in terms of their financial remuneration, and they're kind of carrying them on this rickety little thing with two wood sticks and a piece of canvas, they carry them over to the sideline, and all of a sudden they realize their team has the ball. They're right back in the game.
The thing with soccer, football, soccer, whatever. Sure. We're in America, soccer. The thing with that is, It starts, it's rooted in tribalism. It's those small towns, like a Sunderland, which you mentioned in England, the city, like you end up going to the grounds and a lot of kids walk there and it becomes part of you.
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