Most weekdays, roughly a million viewers tune in to ESPN to watch Bethesda resident Michael Wilbon spar with fellow sportswriter Tony Kornheiser on Pardon the Interruption. A sports columnist for The Washington Post for 20 years, Wilbon insists that he’s just a writer who happens to star on his own television show. However, during the 13 years that Wilbon has co-hosted PTI he has pioneered a new form of sports talk show and become one of the most well-known sports personalities in the country.
A Washingtonian for 34 years, Wilbon is still a Chicagoan at heart. Growing up on that city’s South Side, Wilbon fell in love with baseball—the first sport he was paid to write about at The Washington Post after graduating from St. Ignatius College Prep and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Although he’s covered virtually every sport, he’s most known for basketball and often appears on ABC’s NBA pregame show.
Wilbon, 55, lives with his wife, Sheryl, an attorney, and their son, Matthew, in Bethesda. Matthew, 6, was born two months after Wilbon suffered a heart attack in 2008 while covering the Super Bowl in Arizona, where he also owns a house.
Bethesda Magazine sat down with Wilbon over lunch at Guapo’s on the eve of this year’s NBA playoffs, which wound up matching his hometown Bulls against the Washington Wizards. Wilbon incorrectly picked Chicago to win the first-round series—but as he has shown on PTI, he isn’t afraid to be controversial or wrong.
Q&A
Presumably you were a big sports fan when you were growing up in Chicago. Did you play every sport, too?
We played everything that existed. My first love was baseball. [Cubs Hall of Famer] Ernie Banks was a sponsor of our Little League. I pitched and played first base in high school. I was good. [Cubs Hall of Famer] Billy Williams lived in my neighborhood on the far South Side of Chicago, a place called West Chatham. Ernie Banks lived not far away. Wendell Smith [a sportswriter who famously befriended Jackie Robinson] was writing for The Chicago Defender and he was on WGN. I knew him. The South Side was big, but it was also a small place. You knew everyone. That was the good thing about segregation. People weren’t scattered all over the area.
How many kids were there in your family?
Two. My brother, Don, is two years younger. He has been my best friend through life. He’s a banker in Chicago. We did everything together. We played baseball, touch and tackle football, basketball and hockey. It was the 1960s. Baseball came first. And yes, black kids play hockey in Chicago.
What did your parents do for a living?
My father, Raymond, was a route salesman for soda companies, ice cream companies, bread companies. We had enough ice cream in the house that we could have opened a Good Humor store. He did not graduate from high school. He was from Washington, Ga., the place where The Color Purple was set. My mother, Cleo, is from Tennessee, about 20 miles from Jackson. She taught for 35 years in the Chicago public schools.
My parents valued education. They escaped the segregated South because they believed that education was the great equalizer. There was no question that my brother and I were going to college.
How did you become a sportswriter?
I married my interests in sports and in writing. In elementary school, I could diagram sentences better than the teachers. Mrs. Richards would call me to the board to ask me if the sentence was right. I was always terrible in math and science, but my reading comprehension scores were off the charts.
Were you always going to go to Northwestern? What about an Ivy League school?
Not many kids in the Midwest in the ’60s and ’70s aspired to go to Ivy League schools. I don’t think anybody in my high school class went to an Ivy League school, and I went to one of the best high schools in the country. Plenty of people went to Notre Dame, Northwestern and Illinois. I knew Northwestern had the best journalism school in the country and I wanted to be there.
What was your first beat at The Daily Northwestern?
Intramurals. I look back at some of the stuff I wrote and I cringe, but I went on to cover the basketball team and the football team. I loved being a sportswriter. If you love something and you work at it, you’re going to be good at it. Writing stories about Northwestern getting ready to play Indiana with [legendary coach] Bobby Knight [and stars] Mike Woodson and Randy Wittman, or talking to coaches after practice wasn’t work.
What did you do during your summers in college?
The summer after my freshman year I worked at my uncle’s store. I knew that was going to be my last carefree summer. I rode my bike there, hung out and got paid too much. The next summer I worked in university relations at Northwestern. I hated it. I learned a lot, but I hated PR.
The summer after your junior year you got a job as an intern at The Washington Post. How did you land there?
I applied for all the summer internships in 1979: the Post, The New York Times, Newsweek, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times. I wanted to work at the Trib, but they turned me down. I wanted to be Mike Royko, Bob Verdi, Bob Greene, Roger Simon or David Israel. I wanted to be a columnist in Chicago. That summer I covered the Orioles because the Post had no one full time on that beat. The Orioles won the pennant. I looked it up the other day. I had 33 bylines that summer. That was pretty good for an intern. Jane Leavy and Tony Kornheiser had started working there. Dave Kindred was writing columns. Barry Lorge was covering tennis.Tom Boswell was covering baseball. It was a pretty incredible experience. It was so intoxicating to walk into the newsroom every day, having seen All the President’s Men. I never got over that feeling.
Did you know when you left that you would go back to the Post after graduation?
No, but [then-Deputy Sports Editor] Lenny Shapiro called me in February and asked me to come back. It wasn’t a full-time job, but I was an intern again in the summer of 1980 after I graduated and then I was hired. So I’ve never applied for a job since. I didn’t even have a résumé.
What was your first beat?
Georgetown basketball. [Hoyas coach] John Thompson didn’t talk to me the whole season. With John, it’s all about getting to know him. I was some kid he didn’t know. I was back and forth on the Maryland and Georgetown beats for five, six years. Then I covered college football and basketball and the NFL. There wasn’t offseason everyday NFL coverage in the 1980s like there is now, so I still covered colleges, too. Then I started covering the NBA.
When did baseball get replaced as your favorite sport?
That’s a great question. In the summer of ’85 I was covering the Orioles every day. I hated it. It was the only thing in my career that I’ve hated. It felt like work. I didn’t want to see the same people every single day. I don’t see my wife and my son every day. That’s why covering the NBA and the NFL as leagues were great for me. I was always seeing different people.
Which do you like better, football or basketball?
I love the NFL, but I like covering the NBA better. You have better access to the players and coaches. I have written more columns about Michael Jordan than anyone else. I was a national columnist, so I didn’t have to write about the Bullets/Wizards. If you were in Washington from 1988-2000, you wanted to read about Jordan more than anyone else. I built relationships like that because I showed up.
You know you wrote more about Jordan because he was playing in Chicago and you’re from there.
I am completely prejudiced. Unlike everybody else in the business, I admit it. But that had no bearing on where my editors sent me.
Did you have similar relationships with football players?
Yes, not as many, but a good number of guys, like [former Maryland quarterback] Boomer Esiason and [Redskins Hall of Famer] Darrell Green. But basketball gives you better access. Who gets one-on-one time with [New England star quarterback] Tom Brady? Michael Jordan once called me into a private room while he was getting dressed before a game in the Eastern Conference finals.
You have been here for more than 30 years. When did you begin to feel like less of a Chicagoan and more of a Washingtonian?
People here always talk about going back where they’re from, which makes it different than other places. But just because Chicago is my home doesn’t mean that people haven’t been great to me here. In 1997, the Chicago Tribune made me an incredible offer—to succeed Bob Verdi, with his blessing, and write a column for the newspaper I delivered growing up—but I stayed at the Post because I had the best job in the country. The Chicago Tribune was great, but it wasn’t The Washington Post. I loved working at the Post. I love Don Graham. I love George Solomon. I love Tony Kornheiser. I love Sally Jenkins. Ben Bradlee is like a God to me. Then there are editors that no one knows like Jeanne McManus and Lenny Shapiro. These are my friends. I began working there when I was 21 years old. I don’t have a life without these people. In 1989, I came reasonably close to going to Sports Illustrated to cover football, but I stayed because the Post promised to make me a columnist.
But then you left the ‘‘best job in the country’’ for ESPN in December 2010. Why?
People always ask me if I miss the Post. I miss it every day, but I would’ve missed it even if I was still there because it doesn’t exist in the same way that it used to. No newspaper does. I don’t know if I could write about the same things in the same way and have it matter. You have to tweet and be on camera. Newspapers have become marginalized over the last 10 to 15 years. I loved going all over the country, but columnists aren’t traveling anymore except to cover their home teams. I went to ESPN for the money and the opportunity.
Did you know that PTI was going to be such a hit?
No way. [Then-Sun-Times columnist] Jay Mariotti was the smartest one about this. Even though I would have been his main competition, he called me every day for three weeks to try to get me to take the Tribune job. He kept saying that the next Siskel & Ebert wasn’t going to be at the movies. It was going to be in the press box, and that could be us. I knew he was right, but I didn’t know what to do about it.
So how did it happen?
[Then-ESPN executive] Mark Shapiro agreed with Mariotti that the next Siskel & Ebert would be about sports. He offered me and Tony the platform. I did it for nine years while I was still working at the Post. It was like putting the arguments that Tony and I would have in the newsroom on television. I knew it was a hit when a young receiver came over when I was interviewing [Cowboys Hall of Famer] Emmitt Smith and he couldn’t believe Emmitt knew me! And then players I had known for a long time, like Magic and Charles Barkley, and coaches like Jim Boeheim and Gary Williams told me that the show was going to change my life. Tony and I didn’t understand that. We knew nothing about television. We still really don’t. Thankfully we have great producers. We have a contract with PTI that runs through 2018. That will be 17 years. Tony says he’s going to retire then, but if PTI says I stay, I stay.
You also appear often on ABC’s NBA pregame studio show. That’s a lot of TV work, especially during basketball season, but you’re still writing a column for ESPN. Why?
Because I love it. That’s what I do. I’m a writer. I’m supposed to write 80 pieces a year. But it can take me 3 1/2 hours to write what used to take me 45 minutes. That just means I have to write more often.
When are you going to write a book?
Never. I don’t have a book in me. I don’t see myself as a celebrity like other people do.
How much time do you spend traveling?
I commuted to L.A. for three years to do an NBA show. We used to do 200 PTIs a year. Last year I did 170 [usually taped in a studio in downtown Washington, D.C.]. I’m here 50 percent of the time, with the rest split between Chicago and Arizona. I didn’t change my schedule after my heart attack. I changed my habits. I weighed 252 pounds in 1995. I weighed 218 this morning. I’m trying to get down to 211. We got 10 years’ use out of the house in Arizona, but now that my son’s in school, he can’t be out there very much. Sheryl and I probably only spend 40 percent of the nights together, but that was my life when she signed up for it. I didn’t get married at 24. I got married at 39. I’ll read with Matthew and play basketball with him, watch games and put him to bed, but I’m rarely home to have dinner with him.
What do you do for fun?
I play golf. I belong to Columbia Country Club and to a club in Arizona. I read, but like most men, I don’t read fiction. I’m playing tennis again because Matthew plays.
What do you like about living in Bethesda?
I hate the summers here like I hate the winters in Chicago. But I love Washington’s literacy. I have lived all around the area—Upper Northwest, Arlington, Fairfax. Sheryl grew up in Northwest. She went to Stone Ridge, UVA and Duke Law School. She made the decision for us to live in Bethesda. We live near Stone Ridge. I love the house. I love the neighbors. I love the neighborhood. I love the way Bethesda works. I love its intelligence, the feel of it.
David Elfin is a Bethesda resident and the author of seven books on Washington sports.