SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT
Scott Van Pelt is hosting “SportsCenter” without sports. With no late-breaking games, his usual midnight show is now at 11 p.m. One of its most consistently affecting segments is “Senior Night,” highlighting high school and college seasons cut short by the coronavirus pandemic.
Van Pelt, 53, has been one of ESPN’s most popular personalities for nearly two decades. He talked to the Daily News from Bristol about making live sports television right now.
SVP: We were doing the Thursday show last week and it was one interview after another about everything was canceled. It was a bummer and everything sucked and it was just really grim. After our show was done, I said ‘We gotta do something to be a light here, something that’s positive.’
At that point I was just thinking about smaller schools. I was thinking about Ivy lacrosse — they’ve got three top-five teams, I think.
I get home, and there’s an email chain from the people who run ESPN’s social media and there’s an idea and the hashtag was #SeniorNight. I came to find out that our president, Jimmy Pitaro, had been emailing people that night with the same kind of idea.
It’s a beautiful reminder of what sports represent. Sports is the greatest connector we have as a society. This is just proof of it again.
We did Army baseball and Navy lacrosse the other day. That’s pretty heavy. At the end of their time, they go serve our country — that’s what they go do. That’s a stark realization.
There was a kid in Illinois just sitting by himself at midcourt. I don’t care what sport you played, you can relate to the idea of being alone in the gym, the amount of hours you spent in the pursuit of refining what you did for a moment and a chance. And that chance just goes. You didn’t lose the game. You just lost the chance to play the game.
Are there bigger concerns in the world? Obviously. But this matters to a lot of people, and it hurts when you’re robbed of that.
ESPN’s coverage has been remarkably sober and proportionate. The network that told its talent to “stick to sports” has consistently recognized that sports are a comparatively minor concern during a pandemic.
SVP: No one’s talked to us. It’s not like we had a powwow of how to do it. I think it’s common sense to recognize that in times of great crisis, people turn to sports as a place to feel normal. And absent that, for the first time ever, people are looking around like “What the f—k do we do?”
Look, in New York City, [there might be] a shelter in place. OK, we get it. You have to understand the gravity of this, the weight that this carries, and that there are far more important things in life than sports. We recognize how important sports are, and how the absence of sports makes things feel so abnormal.
Van Pelt was anchoring SportsCenter when Rudy Gobert’s positive test for coronavirus and kicked off the wave of cancellations that shut down the sports world. ESPN consistently delivered new and accurate information from the field; the Washington Post later compared Van Pelt to Walter Cronkite.
SVP: Going back to last Wednesday night when all of this was happening… I don’t know why but in that moment, even though this was clearly a big moment, I felt like our job was to be reasonable, don’t be hysterical.
[SportsCenter] is a place people come. We’re like that sweatshirt, that hoodie you throw over the corner of your door. It’s old and it’s comfortable and you just throw it on. That’s who we are to people, we’re that comfortable thing. I don’t want to suddenly become this uncomfortable thing, even in the midst of all this.
I think you’re trying to project the sense of how things are as you understand them. We’re not a news channel. I’m just trying to be who I am to the people who are turning in for maybe something that doesn’t feel quite so grim.
Most white-collar workplaces are emptied out at this