Scottsdale’s Barrie grew up watching local news icons; now he’s on ESPN
When he was growing up in Scottsdale, Matt Barrie wanted to be a professional athlete. That’s probably not surprising.
The ESPN “SportsCenter” anchor calls a weekly college football game, hosts a college football podcast and hosts the college-football halftime show. He sometimes covers golf, among other things. Obviously, he loves sports. And he played them at Saguaro High School, both football and baseball.
But his plans hit a glitch.
“I stopped growing,” Barrie told The Arizona Republic during a recent break between production meetings and preparation for another busy week of college football. “I knew I wasn’t going to go to college to play sports.”
Then something dawned on him.
Barrie grew up watching Mark Curtis on Channel 12 in Phoenix
“I remember growing up watching Channel 12, and at the time Mark Curtis was the sports anchor,” Barrie said. “I thought, ‘Man, Mark Curtis has a really good job. He just gets to go to all these live events around Phoenix — Suns, ASU, Cardinals, Diamondbacks. What a great gig that is.’”
It really is. Which gave Barrie an idea. “So let me get this straight — I can go to sporting events and be on TV talking about them and get paid?” he said. “OK, you know what, that’s how I’m going to stay in the world of sports. That’s why I ended up going to ASU and the Cronkite School of Journalism.”
Before joining ESPN in 2013, Barrie worked in local TV in Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Dallas — all big football places, whether college or pro. His assignments along the way helped him prepare for what he does at ESPN, Barrie said.
And what he doesn’t do.
The role of the “SportsCenter” anchor, and by extension local anchors everywhere, didn’t originate with Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick, but they certainly redefined it.
For good and bad. They were funny, sarcastic, knew their stuff but didn’t take anything too seriously. They worked hard at looking like they weren’t working hard. They were great at it, but their legion of imitators in local newsrooms mostly were not.
That’s one of the reasons Barrie is not a member of that legion.
“I grew up watching ESPN like everyone,” Barrie said. “I’m 42, so the heyday of ESPN was when I was out there in Arizona
at Scottsdale Saguaro. You grow up watching these guys and idolizing them. But when I got into local TV, it didn’t really lend itself to doing that for me.”
Why he has no interest in being a ‘catchphrase guy’
For one thing, there simply wasn’t enough time.
“I was always the weekday reporter and then the weekend sports anchor,” Barrie said. “So I was doing stories during the week and then the weekend sportscast, and I was just never into it. I wasn’t into trying to copy someone or be a catchphrase guy. I just did the local sports with high energy, and energy is always kind of how I’ve gone about my career.”
That doesn’t mean Barrie lacks on-air personality. It’s just different than the people who came before him, by temperament and design.
“I don’t script jokes,” he said. “I just kind of go off the cuff with typically a sarcastic remark, something of that nature. But for me it’s always been about the energy and conveying that I love doing this for a living, and less about the catchphrases that these legends have coined over the years, because that’s never going to be replicated.”
Barrie is indeed refreshingly aware of the history of where he works, and the place it holds in the minds of traditional sports fans.
Barrie is a huge ASU football fan. ‘There’s no hiding it’
“One of the biggest challenges working at a place like ESPN is that you are compared to the past,” he said. “You’re compared to all the legends that have walked through those doors. And that era can’t be replicated and it’s not coming back. For those of us who are here now, at least how I look at it, my job is to continue what ESPN is all about in my own way.”
Growing up in Arizona helped shape his career, Barrie said. He grew up a Phoenix Suns fan, and his parents had season tickets to ASU football games. Then the Arizona Cardinals came to town, followed by the Arizona Coyotes and the Arizona Diamondbacks.
“Little by little, our market started to grow into a big sports town,” Barrie said. And while his heart was in college football, where it remains, he couldn’t help but learn from all the other teams, as well.
“It helped,” he said, “because I knew a little bit about every league, just because my hometown teams represented all the pro sports.”
There’s one thing everyone who spends time with or around Barrie knows: he is a die-hard ASU football fan.
“There’s no hiding it,” he said.
Yes, he covers college football, but Barrie keeps the potential conflicts at bay. For one thing, the Sun Devils are perennial underachievers; it’s not like he’s going to have to randomly toss them into the national-championship discussion anytime soon.
“I wish I had that problem,” he said. While Barrie is free to cheer on ASU in his social media accounts, when he’s on the air he knows his limits and observes them.
“You try to keep it as down the middle as you can,” he said, “because that’s what fans expect. But I think that’s the difference in college and pro sports. College is, you were connected to that town, that community, that school, because that’s where you spent some formative years of your life. It’s expected at some point you lean on that a little bit, while maintaining your professionalism.”