My Calling to be a SportsCenter Anchor
Reflecting on the Greatest Show Ever, Catchphrases, and the Gift of Being Ourselves
I read a book called The Call: Finding and Fulfilling The Central Purpose of Your Life at one point in high school. I know that is a strange choice for your average high schooler, but I think behind closed doors we all had plenty of weird quirks.
Fortunately, this particular quirk pulled forth a glimpse of my future. In the margins of one of the pages I wrote the following:
Announcing.
Speaking.
(Photographic proof - of both my 1998 thoughts and the fact that my handwriting has been irredeemably bad for a really long time).
And I remember writing those because it was clear as day what they meant: I was to be an SportsCenter anchor on ESPN.
In the era before SportsCenter, sports highlights were fine, but dry. Enjoyable, but certainly nothing like the real thing. SportsCenter took highlights to whole new level, and I could not get enough of it. I watched religiously every single morning before school began.
One day I will sit at that desk!
—
Parker Palmer asks, “When we lose track of our true self, how can we pick up the trail? One way is to seek clues in stories from our younger years, years when we lived closer to our birthright gifts.”1
Which is to say, if and when the day comes where we wonder about our soul and who we really are and what it looks like to most fully offer that gift in the world…maybe start with the back-in-the-day stories and see what they might reveal.
One looks upon my countless hours of SportsCenter and the fact that I literally wrote my future in the margins of a book about calling, and you might say, "Oh no! He has missed his calling…He’s not an anchor! He doesn’t even do a thing with sports!”
Or perhaps a bit more perceptively, “Ah! No wonder he is a preacher. Maybe he is not announcing sports. But he is most surely announcing!”
Fair enough, but I think there is more.
In fact, Palmer himself presses here. He says that while the stories of our younger years can help us see who our true self is they rarely provide an obvious, ready-made answer to who we are and the direction we take. These stories - at best - contain “clues.”
And “clues, by definition, are coded and must be deciphered.”2
For me, the biggest clue about all those hours of watching SportsCenter resides in the fact that to this day I have kept and treasured a SportsCenter baseball that my dad gave me one Christmas during those high school years. Emblazoned on that baseball? The trademark sayings of the anchors.
Anybody remember some of these?
“Cool as the other side of the pillow!” - Stuart Scott
“Boo Yah!” - Stuart Scott
"It's deep, and I don't think it's playable." – Keith Olbermann
"You can't stop him, you can only hope to contain him." - Dan Patrick
''He's en fuego.'' - Dan Patrick
''He's listed as day-to-day, but then again, aren't we all?'' - Dan Patrick
''He must be butta 'cause he's on a roll.'' - Stuart Scott
Anchors did not robotically rehash the games from yesterday, they commented with flair! They were funny and personable, witty and self-deprecating. Which is to say, they were human.
In fact, when it comes right down to it, the magic ingredient that took SportsCenter to another level was deceptively simply: they let the anchors be themselves.3
Sure, I had some inner sense early on that the speaking/announcing thing rang true, but the gift of SportsCenter was that it clarified the central ingredient that makes that offering life-giving: you have to be yourself.
That comes off as one of the more pedestrian insights I have offered, but the truth is that took many years to understand. There are just so many ways that other people and institutions want us to be someone or something else. Or, sometimes we ourselves prefer not to risk our full selves lest we are rejected, shamed, or made no longer welcome. Too many are the ways we can robotically offer the “right” movements and “right” words in this lifetime.
In the offering of your gifts and work in this world, what would you say?
In all of your giftedness, foibles, and still-incomplete-but-growing-ness - are you yourself?
And where would other say your ‘voice’ comes through most genuinely and fully in that offering of yourself?
Or, are there ways that you are beholden to what others want or need you to be? Ways where it’s more ‘robotically right’ rather than fully you?
In our parenting or mentoring…
Do we let the children be/become themselves?
Do we watch for the spark of their personality and interest help us know how to best nourish and guide them?
Or, are their trajectories, interests, activities, clothing etc. really what we want/need them to be?
(The same set of questions can be asked of any people or organizations we lead - are they becoming their best, true selves or being made in the image of what we need/want them to be?)
It doesn’t matter if its anchoring, preaching, teaching, nursing, parenting, barista-ing, administering, gardening, lawyering, acting or otherwise… the magnetism of any of these endeavors is found to the degree we risk fully being ourselves.
And wouldn’t it be something if at the end of our lives we had a baseball (or pick your favorite object) that had emblazoned upon it all the small stories and big stories and catch phrases and bits of humor and grief and courage and all the rest from our lifetime? A ball that lacked a single thing from our resume but instead was chock-full of all the ways we genuinely offered the unique gift of our person?
That would surely be a treasured gift for present and future generations alike.
Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, 13.
Palmer, 13.
To be sure, I recognize via interviews many years later that some SportsCenter anchors felt the whole show eventually became too scripted. Many moved on from that work so that they could more fully offer their own voice.
What an affirming piece. My favorite line was, “In the offering of your gifts and work in this world, what would you say?
In all of your giftedness, foibles, and still-incomplete-but-growing-ness - are you yourself?”
Very thoughtful and great questions- thank you!
Don't forget Chris Berman! "He could, go, all, the, way!" and "Rumblin', bumblin', stumblin'"