Inside ‘SportsCenter’ On the Day We Lost Sports
On the day everything went to shit, SportsCenter anchor Elle Duncan drove to ESPN’s offices in Bristol, CT, thinking she’d be on air for a half hour, noon to 12:30, no co-anchor required. All she had to do was bridge First Take and the ACC Tournament. Easy.
Lights, cameras, THIS… IS… SPORTSCENTER, 10 minutes go by, all good. A producer, through Elle’s earpiece: ACC Tournament is shut down. All right, go to the college hoops guy, Rece Davis. We’re back. Producer, again: Big 12 Tournament, that’s done too. Break that. We’re going to Jeff Passan, looks like MLB is suspending operations. Back again. NHL is doing the same thing. Fuck. Thirty minutes turns into four hours, leagues dropping one by one. SportsCenter is losing the first half of its name in real time.
When Duncan got off the air,
!["You have to have 100% confidence in your hand if you're going to go all-in against Michael [Jordan]," Charles Barkley said on SportsCenter Sunday.](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/HqBACOXGU59SS4dTIggZEA--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTcwNTtoPTUyOC45NzMzODQwMzA0MTgz/https://s.yimg.com/uu/api/res/1.2/1o2qSBNpxKsNhSL7bpTBaQ--~B/aD0xMTg0O3c9MTU3ODtzbT0xO2FwcGlkPXl0YWNoeW9u/https://media.zenfs.com/EN/insider_articles_922/79ee5d9a43eb36cdcb4cd698f14e8935)