Sports

As it turns 20 on Sunday, ESPN's The Sports Reporters (6:30 a.m.) is a still-sprightly elder among a gaggle of sports-yak shows.

But it was an anomaly at birth. Joe Valerio, the show's independent producer for the past 19 years, said it was the first sports TV show based on the less-than-telegenic notion of having sportswriters sit around mulling national stories.

Valerio, who had worked at CBS, ABC and the New York Post, said his first question when he was approached about overseeing the show was simple: "What's Dick Schaap's commitment to it?"

ESPN's Gary Thorne had been the original host. (An anecdote illustrating the show's groundbreaking tack: The first reporter to speak on the debut Reporters was a woman - Jackie MacMullan of the Boston Globe.) But Valerio wanted the sportswriter as host - "he was one of my heroes growing up" - and an assurance the show would run year-round without pre-emption.

The show's four-person panel also went beyond sportswriters to include sportscasters as panelists, including Howard Cosell, Bob Costas, Al Michaels and Jim Nantz. He tried to get ESPN's Dick Vitale and CBS' Billy Packer on together - "but that was never going to work."

The show, taped Sunday mornings in New York, gradually added sports highlights to complement the chatter. But its look and feel has remained largely unchanged even as sports talk on radio and TV had become more theatrical.

"We didn't want fake passion just to get into yelling and screaming," Valerio said.

The big change resulted from Schaap's death in 2001 of complications from surgery. Longtime ABC/ESPN studio host John Saunders, after pinch-hitting for Schaap with panelists Mike Lupica, Tony Kornheiser and Bill Conlin when Schaap was absent for the scheduled surgery, said he went home and told his wife that he'd "never do that again. I felt like I was baby-sitting 12-year-olds. Dick was expected back and I honestly thought I was one and done."

Said Valerio, "He thought they were egotistical."

That's something that often comes across on the show, which attracts about 1 million TV homes each week - and helped spawn the ever-expending sports-talk universe.

Day and night job

In preparing for Saturday's Stanford-Notre Dame game (11:43 a.m.), NBC game analyst Pat Haden was understandably distracted. As a partner in a private equity firm overseeing $500 million in investments, he said, "It's become more than a day job, it's become a night job, too. In 25 years in private equity, I've never seen markets like this. And the past few weeks, you never get away from it."

He had to at times. Haden this week watched game tapes of Stanford - which he nearly attended before opting for USC, where he quarterbacked the Trojans to national titles in 1972 and 1974 - as he worked out on a treadmill and flew to South Bend, Ind.

Not that you'd see anything about that on the Riordan, Lewis & Haden Equity Partners Web site. On rlhinvestors.com, Haden's biography but doesn't mention football even in the section noting what he does on weekends. It says only that he plays golf, enjoys being a grandfather - he's expecting his third grandchild this weekend - and "listening to a cappella music."

And, sometimes, the Notre Dame band, which, he suggests, can celebrate a growth in game-day productivity: "Notre Dame had its subprime mortgage meltdown last season. But they've turned it around without a bailout."