Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann co-anchored one of the most popular shows on ESPN back in the day.
The “SportsCenter” anchors formed quite the team that garnered plenty of fans and popularity during the 1980s and ‘90s. They may have even accidentally started the “This is SportsCenter” tagline and ad campaign.
Patrick and Olbermann joined Kenny Mayne on the Audacy Original Podcast “Hey Mayne” and opened up about their early days at ESPN, including how an inside joke turned into one of the network’s biggest calling cards.
“We were originally half an hour still most of the time and on Sundays, we were an hour. One night, the first Sunday I did, we had to fill for a ball game that we were on for like an hour and a half,” Olbermann said (19:23 in player above). “During one of the breaks after reading the same Braves highlight nine times, I turned to Dan and said ‘Jesus, Dan, this is one big f—ing show, isn’t it?’ Dan laughs, and the next break I just went ‘We’ll be back in a moment with more of The Big’ and Dan went white as a sheet thinking I’m not going to say that, and I just go ‘Big Show.’ Every time I called it ‘The Big Show’ was an attempt to make Dan pass out.”
While Olbermann and Patrick knew it was a joke between the two, others did it see it as lightly.
“People who saw the other shows said it was a shot at Charley Steiner and Bob Ley and, it wasn’t that,” Olbermann continued. “It was that this was a lot of show with a very, very limited margin between brilliant success and the Titanic catching fire. We called it ‘The Big Show’ and then they got mad and said call it SportsCenter, so I said ‘This is SportsCenter! This is SportsCenter! This is SportsCenter’ and then they made an ad campaign out of that.”
Whether it was a joke or not, Olbermann and Patrick did in fact anchor the biggest show on ESPN.
“It was ‘The Big Show,’” Mayne said. “It was the show of record, as some shows like to call it, like you guys did a very popular thing and it held a whole country’s attention.”
Like many things that went on between anchors in the earlier days of “SportsCenter,” it started by accident.
“I’d love to take credit for the things that may have seemed like we had a gameplan. I truly think that the show became better because we did it accidentally,” Patrick said. “Now there were things when we put our minds to it, I think we did some really good work, but the other stuff was when we were scolded. Management brought us in, the big conference room, second floor, banging on the table, ‘You will not call it The Big Show, you will call it This is Sportscenter!’ and I’m going oh, God. So we go to break, it’s the first night, and I just know he is ready to go. I just know it and I’m not even going to tip my hand, I’m not going to say anything, I just know as he goes to break and we have three items you got to promote, ‘Coming up blah blah blah, blah blah blah, blah blah blah. THIS IS SPORTSCENTER!’ and I go, alrighty, f–k it, let’s go. We were just ready to go after that. And every night we would say ‘THIS IS SPORTSCENTER!’
It wasn’t just nightly, the duo went all-in.
“What do you mean every night? Every break! We were immersed,” Olbermann said. “It was finally to the point where they said, ‘Could you call it The Big Show occasionally just to mix it up?”
“And then they started the ad campaign called ‘This is SportsCenter’ and I went, oh my God, it was just accidental,” Patrick said.
Although it may have been accidental, every sports fan can hear “This is SportsCenter” in their head or has a favorite “This is SportsCenter” commercial (or a few favorite commercials).
Olbermann and Patrick set the standard at “SportsCenter” and spawned an ad campaign that shaped a generation.