Around the Horn is set to end its 23-year run in ESPN’s “Happy Hour” on Friday. Naturally, viewers want to know what the people involved think of the sports debate show’s cancellation. Longtime ATH host Tony Reali joined FOS Today to reflect on the end of the iconic show, which aired more than 4,900 episodes since its debut on Nov. 4, 2002.
Reali has hosted the show that scores the argument since Max Kellerman left it in early 2004.
FOS asked him about comments made by former panelist Jay Mariotti, who previously suggested to FOS’s Michael McCarthy that one of the reasons for the show’s cancellation was that it veered “too woke.”
“Do you know if that was true, and do you know why ESPN decided to end the show?” FOS Today cohost Baker Machado asked.
“I don’t know if I have an answer; I don’t know if I need an answer,” Reali said. “A creative difference in network decision-making? That’s understandable. I can live with that. Make your best opinion and prove it. If you think the show was one thing or the other, show me, give me 20 to 30 examples. That’s how I feel. We’ve done 50,000 topics. I don’t believe the show is too anything, honestly.”
Mariotti had also said he was “flabbergasted” by the decision for Around the Horn to go from having 6–8 rotating panelists to a much larger group.
“Maybe we had a lot of people,” Reali said. “I believe that was a strength of the show. Maybe we hit a lot of topics other shows on our network weren’t doing. I believe that would be a strength of our show and of the network—that we had a host that was very heartfelt and too feel-y and too serious for some topics. Maybe that is a good thing to have when other shows could put on the good-cop/bad-cop hat or cowboy hat and laugh at the Cowboys for losing. I think a network is best having many different things, so I operated in that way.”
Reali said he never got feedback from network management critical of the show’s content.
“But I never got one note other than ‘Keep on doing what you’re doing,’ and I didn’t get many of those, either,” Reali said. “I felt very comfortable that the show was in a safe place. We didn’t have controversies. Never once did I say that we should retract something. Never once did I hear from anybody making decisions—and I know other shows do have that, because I’m aware of the business. I was very proud to have a show at a level that they never had to tell us what we were doing, and when they tell us it’s over? Why do things end? Because they have to end.”
In terms of having any insight into why the show was canceled, Reali said it’s likely more than one reason, but he knows the value ATH brought ESPN. “I know how this show drove ratings,” he said. “I know how this show expanded the universe of the industry to the benefit of the network.”
