Sports Media Watch caught up with ESPN reporter Lisa Salters Tuesday afternoon for an interview about her new role on E:60, Monday Night Football, sticking to sports, and the perception of sideline reporters. She begins her new role as co-host of E:60 in October.
SMW: You have been with ESPN for 20 years as of next year, you before then had the career with ABC [from 1995-2000] and in local news as well [with WBAL in Baltimore from 1988-95]. You are a capital “J” journalist.
At the same time, I was wondering — even with all the accolades that you have — if there is any feeling of pressure to replace someone as enormous as Bob Ley on E:60. Is there any feeling of ‘big shoes to fill’?
Salters: Oh no, I don’t feel like I’m replacing Bob Ley, my goodness. No, I just feel like I’m joining Jeremy, to be honest. When [E:60] was conceived, John Skipper came to Jeremy Schaap and I and said he was interested in this sports-magazine show and he wanted Jeremy and I to be the hosts of it. In that first iteration of the show, that’s not how it evolved. But from its inception that’s how it was sold to us. And now I feel like it’s kind of come full circle with me and Jeremy teaming up together. But by no means do I believe I’m replacing Bob Ley. Bob Ley is the general, I don’t think I’m replacing him at all.
SMW: As you said, you’ve done E:60 before, you’ve been part of the cast the entire time. This is a bit of a different role for you though, hosting it. How do you plan to balance that with Monday Night Football, this grind of every single week?
Salters: Monday Night Football is something I’ve done now for eight years, so it’s kind of a part of me now. The reboot every August and September is difficult. But come October, you’re kind of in it.
I don’t think it’s going to be a problem, most of [E:60] I can do remotely, watching pieces from my iPad and going up to Bristol once a month to tape the show. So for that week that we’re taping, it’s probably going to be pretty intense with football. Football’s over for us in January, so that’s October, November, December, three months, four months that I’ll have one week that’s pretty intense, once a month.
And E:60 is a show that, if you’re a storyteller, it’s a privilege really to be a part of it. So whatever the sacrifice to be able to participate and be part of a show like that, to be teamed up with someone like Jeremy Schaap, I consider it a privilege.
SMW: You mentioned how long you’ve been on Monday Night Football, dating back to 2012. You are the longest-tenured part of the cast right now, and you’ve been there for [Mike] Tirico and [Jon] Gruden, [Sean] McDonough and Gruden —
Salters: — and [Jason] Witt[en] and [Joe] Tess[itore] and Booger [Macfarland], and now Tess and Booger.
SMW: Is it difficult at all to adjust to the changes that happen?
Salters: No, you just kind of go with the flow. If you’re working with jerks, they would be hard to adjust [to]. But they’re all good guys. You’re getting used to new family members, but they’re all good people and good family members, so it just works. It takes some time obviously to get to know someone professionally. What does Tirico like that’s different than what McDonough liked from his sideline reporter, which is different from what Tess would like from his sideline reporter. So that’s what preseason is about. We talk about — it’s not like we just show up on Monday morning and then do a game that evening — we talk about ‘what do you want,’ ‘how can I help you.’
My role is really just an extension of the booth, I’m just eyes and ears to be able to add whatever I can from down there on the field and help the guys out. It’s not about me, it’s about making the booth better, making the broadcast better. So it really hasn’t been that big of an adjustment, and I’ve liked all the teams that I’ve been with.
SMW: You make an interesting point that ‘it’s not that you just show up on Monday and do the game.’ I wonder if from the outside looking in, people who don’t work in the industry think —
Salters: That is what they think. They think you show up on Monday morning and do the game on Monday night, and that could not be further from the truth. Once Monday comes, it’s a culmination of a week’s worth of preparation. I liken it to studying for a final exam every week or preparing for the Super Bowl every week. Your preparation is the same, the amount of study — intense study — and most of the time you overprepare. I like to think that all the work that we put in, that it shows up when stuff goes down.
I think we’re the most prepared team out of all of them, and that’s no disrespect to any other broadcast. But I just can’t imagine any other team putting in the kind of work that my guys do. And that’s behind the scenes as well, producer, director, graphics, everybody. These people, they work so hard. That’s why it was annoying last year to hear the criticism that the broadcast was getting. If people realize how hard these people work, you’ll find it difficult to find fault that they’re not perfect. They work so hard and put so much into it that people just don’t even realize.
SMW: That work ethic, it’s something that I don’t necessarily know everyone would have the stomach for.
Salters: No.
SMW: I was reading an interview you did with The Washington Post about your Kareem Hunt interview last year. It was fascinating to me — you were out on a Saturday night with your son at 5:30 and you get a call that you need to be in Kansas City to interview Kareem Hunt the next morning. I don’t feel like that’s a turnaround that a lot of people would be willing to make.
Salters: It’s just kind of part of it. Certainly, my son wasn’t thrilled about it. We were out having a good time and I had to leave immediately. But it’s just kind of part of it and you make up for it in other ways.
We were out at Dave & Buster’s having a good time, talking about going back to the hotel, the facility, and ordering room service, and going to the pool possibly — and I’m always away from my son on the weekends during football season. Because this was in Philadelphia, it was kind of like a home game almost. I’m from outside of Philadelphia. He was actually able to be with me for the weekend, so we had this whole weekend planned around working meetings and production meetings, and then it all blows up.
But you try to make up for it in other ways. All families are different, and people ask me all the time, ‘you spend so much time away from your kid.’ Well I spend Saturday, Sunday, Monday, away from my child. But then the other days of the week, when people are at work or dropping their kids off at before-care and picking them up at 6, 6:30, I’m with my kid all day. I’m with him in the morning, with him from 2:30 on when he comes home from school, there’s no before-care, no after-care, nothing like that. So I think in amount of time spent, it’s probably about the same. It’s just that my time away is in a big chunk. But all families are different, people’s work schedules are different, and that’s just what we’re used to. And we’ve made it work.
SMW: In your journalism career at the NBC affiliate in Baltimore and at ABC, you covered a lot of stories that I don’t think a lot of other people in the industry have ever covered, the Rwandan genocide being the most notable of those. Where would you stand on the issue that is kind of the biggest one right now in sports journalism, which is, how much do you stick to sports, and how much do you talk about the broader issues?
Salters: I stick to sports. I stay in my lane. I’m not very political, I never have been. My job is to cover sports and that’s what I do. I have opinions about things that I share with my family and my friends. But I choose not to have my personal life and my personal views become a part of who I am as the sideline reporter for Monday Night Football, or co-host of E:60, or courtside reporter for the NBA. I keep them separate.
SMW: Is that difficult sometimes? I was watching some footage of the Pacers-Pistons brawl today, so it’s top of mind for me. I remember how emotional John Saunders was when they went back to the studio immediately after. He was so emotionally affected by what he had just seen. As much of a pro as he was, he couldn’t help but let what he felt be known.
Salters: No, that’s different. He was part of a breaking news story when it happened. He was part of a news story. Now to talk about the 2020 election, I think is something different. Talking about personal political views, that’s different.
If something would have happened at a sporting event that I’m covering, I don’t know if I would … I’m thinking about Jim Gray [the sideline reporter on Pacers-Pistons]. John Saunders was kind of like a fan watching, he was in-studio, so he was reacting like everyone else. Jim Gray was in a different position, he was a sideline reporter, reporting. So you don’t really have time to be affected personally.
Afterwards? I can remember back in my news days covering the Oklahoma City bombing and being sent to that scene just hours after it happened and staying there for nine days. It wasn’t until my flight home nine days later, I cried like a baby on the airplane thinking about what the last nine days had been like for those people in Oklahoma and that I was leaving. I felt like I was just leaving them, like survivor’s guilt almost. I get to go back to my life and these people are still in this trauma and this misery.
When you’re in the heat of work, your adrenaline kind of kicks in, and it’s really only after that you get a chance to reflect upon what may have transpired. I’m sure Michele Tafoya wasn’t panicked or emotional when Gary Kubiak [passed out] at halftime a couple of years ago. In fact I talked to her about it, and she just went into reporter mode – just reporting, doing the story, getting the facts, translating them, getting them on the air. It probably wasn’t until after that she’s like ‘oh my gosh,’ or ‘I can’t believe that happened.’ The concern for Gary Kubiak and ‘I’m so glad he’s okay’ and all of that came in afterwards. In the heat of the moment you just, like Bill Belichick said, you just do your job.
SMW: The closest thing for you — covering sports — to a breaking story like that would probably be the Draymond Green halftime thing.
Salters: Yeah. That to me was, I had never witnessed anything like that before. To see people’s reaction from me just doing my job and reporting what happened was interesting. Draymond and I talked about it, [Steve] Kerr and I talked about it, they were all fine with my reporting. Draymond took issue, he’s like, ‘I just think you [made it] a little bit more than it was,’ and I was like, if I had a recording that somebody could play back what I heard, you would not think that. I was honestly worried for you, just because you sounded like you were in such emotional pain. I was worried about you as a person. And he’s like ‘okay, well.’ I was like, I know you think I overhyped it, but I think I underhyped it because I was worried about you.
So yeah, that was interesting. You never know when things like that are going to happen. They just kind of happen, and then you react.
SMW: What do you think the future is of sports journalism? One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is that sports journalism is inconvenient for a lot of people. It’s inconvenient at times for the networks because of the relationships that are had with the leagues, it’s inconvenient for the leagues, it’s inconvenient for the players at times. Do you think there could come a day where things like the Players Tribune — the direct dissemination of the message without going through a gatekeeper — could become the rule?
Salters: No, because I think you’re always going to want a gatekeeper, you’re always going to want an objective voice. What I worry about is how blurry the lines have become between being a commentator and being a journalist. They’re not the same. As a journalist, my opinion should never be part of any story that I do.
More and more, we’re asking our journalists to have this schtick, to have this position, to be sensational, to be out there. And that’s fine, if you’re a commentator. But you cannot ask for reporters and journalists to do that. So that’s what I worry about more. I stay away from it at all times. If I’m doing an interview leading up to a game and someone asks me, ‘what is your opinion about …’ — my job is not to give you my opinion. I’m going to just respectfully decline. It’s not my job to give you my opinion on who is going to win the Super Bowl. I can tell you how each team is doing and preparing, but making a prediction, that is not my job.
SMW: How do you feel perceptions of the sideline reporter role have changed? There was a time a few years ago, maybe in the mid-2000s, when it was considered a role that was not necessary, a role that could be mocked — and sometimes was mocked on the air. Do you feel like that’s changed over the years?
Salters: I don’t know. It’s not something that I’ve really worried about. I think I have proven my worth, I think Michele Tafoya has proven her worth, I think Pam Oliver has proven her worth, I think there are sideline reporters who have proven their value. I think there are others who have not, and who have made it easy to make a mockery of the position. But that’s no different than, I think there are some play-by-play people and some analysts that have done the same. Some are really good, some aren’t. Would we ever say, well we don’t need analysts anymore? No, probably not. But there are probably some that we could stand to do without.
It’s the same with the sideline, I think. You know who the good ones are, and you know who the not-so-good ones are. And I would like to think that I’m in the former group. It’s my aspiration to be thought of in the same vein as Michele Tafoya, Suzy Kolber — who was one of my resources when I first started doing this — and Pam, people like that.