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Credit: SportsCenter
Linda Cohn anchored her final SportsCenter on Friday night.
Sitting alongside Madelyn Burke, Cohn was asked what the secret was to lasting 34 years at the top of her field, and her answer was the same way she had apparently been approaching every broadcast for three and a half decades.
“Even though I was on SportsCenter for 34 years, I make believe somebody is watching me for the very first time, and I have to prove to them that I belong and that I earned a seat in this chair,” Cohn said.
Burke compared the mindset to Michael Jordan’s line from The Last Dance — that there’s always someone in the gym who’s never seen you play — and Cohn didn’t push back on the comparison. Staying a genuine fan of the sport, she added, was the other half of the formula. A lot of people in the business become jaded over time, she said. She never did.
The conversation turned to legacy, and specifically to a line from her farewell that had resonated widely, that what she was most proud of was that her career lasted long enough to watch little girls who grew up seeing her on SportsCenter enter the business and succeed in it. Burke, who is one of those women, asked why that thread meant so much. Cohn said she came to realize during her time in the chair that young people were watching and drawing conclusions about what was possible. The men who grew up watching her often told her the same thing — that she was the first person from whom they had taken sports coverage from a woman.
“How can I take that the wrong way?” Cohn said. “That’s the greatest compliment I could get.”
As Awful Announcing reported earlier this week, Cohn’s departure from ESPN was described as a mutual decision, largely rooted in the network’s decision to move the late-night Los Angeles SportsCenter back to Bristol. She had been anchoring from the West Coast, and when ESPN gave her and colleague Stan Verrett six weeks to decide whether to follow the show east, she signed a one-year extension rather than make a rushed decision. That extension expired at the end of June.
“I didn’t want to go back to Bristol, Connecticut,” she told the Sports Media Watch podcast. “I really enjoyed the lifestyle in Southern California, and living by the beach, and it’s so healthy and so stress-free — and I didn’t want to go back to anything that might have felt toxic.”
She also told the New York Post she’s excited about what comes next and plans to announce a new project in July that will go beyond sports.
“I don’t want people to see the retirement word and think I’m going off into the sunset,” she said.
The retirement drew widespread reaction across the industry, with Charles Barkley calling her directly to say that today’s women in broadcasting owe her a debt. As we noted shortly after the news broke, Cohn’s exit marks the end of the last direct connection to SportsCenter’s cultural peak, the era of Keith Olbermann, Dan Patrick, Stuart Scott, and Rich Eisen, when the show was the center of the sports media universe rather than a corner of it.
She anchored her first edition on July 11, 1992. She anchored her last on Friday.
The post Linda Cohn reveals mindset that fueled 34 years at ESPN during final ‘SportsCenter’ appeared first on Awful Announcing.
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