Top 88 ESPN Quotes

If you’re a sports fan and you’re home and you’re washing dishes, usually your TV is on ESPN and you’re just getting the highlights and keeping up-to-date with all of the sports going around, all of the news.

I’m different than another person who wants to lay back and do nothing for rest of the life and talk nonsense on ESPN… I will not do that. I want to achieve something else.

On that Sunday of the Masters I remember turning on ESPN to find people talking about me. I switched over to the Golf Channel and people were talking about me. It was hard to escape.

ESPN is a great organization to work for.

If something touches on the world of sports, ESPN has never told me that I cannot discuss a sports-related matter.

For 10 years while I was at ESPN, I lived at the Residence Inn in Southington, Connecticut, near Bristol. I did that because my wife had a great job in New York City, and we had a place in New York City, at 54th and 8th. On Friday, I would come back, and then on Sunday evening I would go back to the Residence Inn.

I got fired – November 8, 1979. And all of a sudden, I got a call, two weeks later, about doing a game on ESPN. And I truly said – Scotty Connal, the head of ESPN production at the time, was the guy that called me – I said, ‘Man, ESPN sounds like a disease. What is ESPN? I know nothing about it, never heard of it.’

Even though Rush is not me and the situations were very different, I think, in the Rush Limbaugh thing, ESPN was criticized for not acting, and you remember that after a couple days of controversy over Rush.

ESPN truly is a game changer and has the ability to unite the world through sports, which is something I’m incredibly passionate about.

I’m in talk radio. A story breaks, I need an opinion. I’m not ESPN News.

I think for me, personally, I’m a guy who has watched ESPN ever since I’ve been growing up. You turn it on, and it’s one of the first stories – the Blackhawks and hockey, which you don’t really see on that station. That’s cool to see.

I love what I am doing on ‘SportsNation’ and to now have the opportunity to do even more on ‘Winners Bracket’ as part of ESPN Sports Saturday on ABC is the perfect situation.

I was at an ESPN event in the United States, the awards ceremony, and I got approached by the WWE. I had just retired, and, it’s a form of competition, but of course, it’s also scripted, so I don’t know if I’d be willing to relive that. Perhaps for a special event, so I could taste it.

I watch ESPN all day long.

TV critics came after me for overhyping LeBron. A lot of people don’t know this, but I didn’t want to do the game. I told ESPN, ‘We’re making this kid into something special.’ I always follow orders, whatever my people want me to do.

We at ESPN like competition. It makes us better. It makes us sharper.

Revolt is my new – cable music network. It’s distributed through Time Warner and Comcast. And to put it simply, it is the ESPN of music.

I got into a fight in my 10th-grade year, and it was on ESPN. It was a mistake, and you learn from it. Starting from the seventh grade, everything’s been magnified like that. It’s kind of like you have no childhood.

If you sign a big contract, everybody knows. They’re going to print it in the paper. It’s on ESPN. You can go online and check player salaries and all that. You’re a target.

Not once at ESPN was I ever told not to talk about something and I would extend that beyond my radio show to ‘First Take,’ as well.

Seriously, until I was 16 or 17, I didn’t care about anything other than ESPN.

My background in promoting martial arts started in 1985 when we were doing PK Karate, which was on ESPN. Fast forward to when mixed martial arts became legal in California. I made the jump to MMA and never looked back.

I am someone who, for many years on ESPN criticized Kyrie Irving mercilessly.

The consumption of highlights on ESPN is greater than everybody else’s combined. Fifty-six percent of all news and information consumed in sports is consumed on the ESPN platforms.

ESPN wants to scrutinize everyone, but if they’re scrutinized, they run and hide.

I loved my time at ESPN and deeply appreciated everybody who listened to the ‘Will Cain Show’ everyday.

I don’t watch ESPN, don’t listen to the radio. I just go home and deal with my family.

I told another ESPN friend here, I love all sports. I can’t think of any I don’t love. I’ve even come to appreciate cricket. Maybe I could play a sportswriter. I don’t know. Anything in the sports realm is appealing.

If I didn’t work at ESPN, which I didn’t until 2014, I would still be watching a psychotic amount of football for someone that doesn’t do this for a living. I hope that never changes.

I didn’t have cable growing up. I never saw ESPN or GameDay.

Brand matters. And ESPN is, by far, the most popular sports brand. People trust ESPN.

From a small market, nobody had heard of me. ESPN had guts, they had courage, they rolled the dice. A guy flew into Portland, we got a rare snowstorm, he was stuck there four days, John McConnell listened to me, and he recommended me.

I don’t watch ESPN.

SportsCenter’ is the legacy brand at ESPN, I had a great year doing the show. But it was not a fit for me because ultimately I had a lot of things that I really wanted to say and wanted to express, and the ‘SportsCenter’ vehicle is not necessarily set up for that.

It’ll be up to ESPN when I leave. And when ESPN says they’re going to move in another direction, I’ll say, ‘Thank you very much. It’s been a great run.’ Because it has.

Ten years from now, we’ll still be talked about as the first gay couple that ESPN had in ‘The Body Issue.’ You might not realize, in the moment, the impact that something like that can have. Every now and then, when you talk to people and hear the reactions, maybe we helped somebody.

Ultimately, college football is a huge passion of mine. In my opinion, I really feel ESPN owns college football. The only way I think I could have left ESPN was for an opportunity to call NFL games. That was the opportunity I had at Fox.

I did radio for a year and did some TV things, and I was already in place at ESPN before ‘The Bachelorette’ started.

Broadcasts from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange have propelled once-obscure financial journalists such as Maria Bartiromo to celebrity status and made CNBC to investors what ESPN is to sports fans.

I never covered Barack Obama watching ESPN at night, because he wasn’t making life or death choices based on the basketball games.

The days of the heavyweight champion as civil rights leader are long gone. You think you’d see Ali rolling around on the floor of an ESPN Zone? I don’t think so.

But the rising chorus urging ESPN to change its stripes is missing something: The intersection of sports and politics is natural. And the left-wing lean of ESPN is inevitable. Conservatives bothered by the slant should stop hand-wringing and start their own network.

I started 20 years without missing a race and ESPN started broadcasting on the air waves.

Staying connected to the game and working for ESPN are very meaningful to me.

ESPN puts out anything for clicks now, it kind of seems like.

Oh, I still get a little anxiety when I’m doing NFL live for ESPN.

Right before I left ESPN, someone suggested doing a NFL story in the spring. The person was laughed out of the room.

I look at the artists as mini media companies, like if Beyonce is ESPN and Lady Gaga is Discovery.

Fox does the NFL a lot like they program the rest of the network. There’s sort of a locker room sense of humor that prevails. With ESPN, it’s more like a pat-you-on-the-back kind of comedy. I mean, they’ll all get on each other a little bit, but it’s never mean-spirited.

I’m working for ESPN and ABC doing college football. I do NFL stuff for TSN in Canada. I’m so lucky to have this job.

For almost 20 years, I’ve reported on some amazing feats of athleticism for ESPN. But the one thing that stood out, game after game, is that it takes a team to win. When I got cancer, that lesson got personal. And Team Livestrong became my team.

ESPN is the exact network Deadspin desired. It’s diverse on its surface, progressive in its point of view, and more concerned with spinning media narratives than with the quality of its product.

When I was at ESPN, I would say in April, ‘We should be doing something on the NFL,’ and they laughed at me.

I want to give myself options and maybe be able to work at ESPN, or do blogs at NBC or be a sports reporter.

E! didn’t like it when we’d make fun of clips from ESPN – they’d be like, ‘That’s sports! That’s not our audience!’

I’m never going to be on ESPN, probably. I’ve burned too many bridges. That’s fine.

When the great jazz and blues clubs closed – joints where the cash register rang loudly and there wasn’t ESPN on TV over the bandstand, and people smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey and hollered ‘Play on!’ – When those places closed, I was pretty much done.

When they put me on ESPN and they talk about negative things, or when they put me on TMZ and they talk about negative things, I’m just glad that I’m relevant; to have lasted this long being relevant.