I started watching Pardon the Interruption when I moved in with my best friend after college. He was a fan and watching PTI together after we both got home from work became one of our rituals. I wasn’t particularly interested in a lot of the topics covered on the show—at that point I was a die hard NFL fan who was only just dipping his toes back into the NBA and discovering college football—but watching the show allowed me to pick up a basic fluency in a variety of sports. It’s a useful skill to have when you need to make small talk.
In college, I hadn’t really had access to cable television, so most of my sports commentary came from obsessively reading every NFL columnist whose style could be described as omnibus: Peter King, Bill Simmons, and Michael Silver. Occasionally I stomached Pete Prisco. All of those words were read in service of finding one kind word about my woeful Raiders. Anyway, when I watched PTI, I was watching something new to me, something fast moving, mostly playful, and light.
I can’t tell if it’s just me viewing the past through lenses of nostalgia, but when I think back on those early years watching PTI, there seemed to be less bile. The takes didn’t seem to be as hot. Tony Kornheiser might have said something curmudgeonly from time to time or Wilbon might name drop in a particularly egregious way, but I wasn’t angry when I watched the show.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when I turned on PTI. My best friend and I don’t live together anymore, so for a time, I just stopped watching because Wilbon had some wrong-headed take on analytics, and I didn’t need to listen to that nonsense on a regular basis. I know the reason I started watching again was much like the reason I consumed so many long NFL columns back in college: I was desperate for all of the Warriors content I could get.
What I found upon returning was that it had gotten even worse. Wilbon has begun referring to win-loss records as “analytics” and a show without him ranting about Millennials is a rarity. Somehow Wilbon has gone full Clint Eastwood and doubled down on the get off my lawn schtick that used to be Kornheiser’s domain. That’s a problem for a show like this. You can’t have two people with, essentially, the same voice. I’ve gone from watching the show on the couch next to my friend to live texting all of my complaints to him as I watch. It isn’t pretty.
Really, the only saving grace of the show is when either Wilbon or Kornheiser is out golfing, and they have a guest host who can play off one of them in a different way. Dan Lebatard is perfect in this role—and great on his own show with Papi and Bomani. But PTI can even fuck up the guest host thing. Before ESPN cut him loose, since he couldn’t get black Grantland up and running, Jason Whitlock was doing a lot of pinch hitting on PTI, and it was terrible. It was almost pathological. How could he not know that he shouldn’t reach for metaphors about domestic violence?
And yet, for all my objections, I still watch the damn show. Just as I continue watching the NFL despite the myriad reasons not to, there are some things that tickle my reptile brain in ways I find shameful and pleasurable and painful all at once. I put up with all the madness because—speaking of problematic shit—I need the eggs.