Dan Le Batard and the Insane Cauldron of Emotions

DAVID GREENE, HOST: So, as we’ve talked about a lot, the WNBA has been having such a moment. I mean, moment doesn’t even describe it. The league is just in a great chapter right now, a journey, gaining growth, gaining popularity, incredible players, incredible stories, incredible personalities, and then we see this. The league seems, at the moment at least, to be getting dragged into our nation’s culture wars. And I want to talk about if there’s a serious risk here, if this might just be a blip in the league’s journey. You know, we always talk about on our show how sports are a window into the state of our society, for better or for worse. Sports are also a stage where these unbelievable stories unfold, and today we’re talking to two people who really lean into that. And for that reason, they’re two of the most respected figures in sports media today. Later, we’re gonna talk to legendary host and podcaster Dan Le Batard from Meadowlark Media. But first, one of the sharpest storytellers in the business right now, Elle Duncan. You might know her from her years at ESPN covering women’s basketball and so much else. She’s now helping to build Netflix’s live sports coverage from the ground up, hosting everything from opening day baseball to some of the biggest live events on the platform, including Major League Baseball’s Field of Dreams game. Elle, you are a busy, busy woman. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us. We really appreciate it.

ELLE DUNCAN: Awe, always got time for you. Thank you for having me.

DG: Can we start with the WNBA?

ED: Sure.

DG: Yeah, I mean, it is more in conversation right now around our country than I think it’s even used to because it’s really getting tangled in our politics. And before we dive into a few of the specifics, I just wonder, are you worried?

ED: Uh, worried is one way to put it. Exhausted, tired, trepidatious. It’s a cacophony of feelings, David, because I think, I remember how much passion, energy, and excitement there was for the attention that these women were finally getting and the ratings and this new crop of superstars that were gonna come into the league and help elevate this game even more. And it would finally be all of these women sowing everything or reaping everything that they had sown through all these years. And very quickly over the course of the last three years, it’s just turned into, as you said, a sticking point for sides to continue to politicize things that shouldn’t be, to be as divisive as possible. To put it frankly, David, and this is not just me speaking; this is me as a person who covers a lot of sports and has a lot of friends that cover a lot of sports. Right now, the WNBA is the most toxic space to cover, and that’s incredibly frustrating and sad.

DG: Say more about what you mean by toxic and why this league is even more toxic than any other sports leagues?

ED: Because it’s so frustrating. Because when we are in the off-season, when you don’t have things, the basketball to actually talk about, I understand, right? Like we’ve got a 24-hour news cycle. I get it. I’m a broadcaster. You have to bring up literally anything to keep that conversation going. And there was so much conversation, David, about, you know, early on, like, “Hey, this is maybe not a bad thing, right?” Like, “No such bad thing as publicity,” right, like it’s all good. “Now we’re like the men’s sports.” We’ve got stupid narratives and discourse, and we’ve got like false things being said- uh-oh, we’ve made it! We’re like the men! And I think very quickly that’s turned into, oh my goodness, everything that people revered and loved about this space is essentially being hijacked. And I mean that to say, there is really, really, really good basketball happening right now, you guys. There’s no reason to manufacture storylines. Olivia Miles is maybe the most exciting rookie that we’ve seen since Candice Parker won MVP her rookie year, which no one had ever done, and still has never done. She’s must-see television. A’ja Wilson’s out here still being the most dominant player on the planet, somehow elevating her game, even though she already has four MVPs. The Dallas Wings are so fun. The Fever are on an absolute tear right now. And if they can get their defense together, they’re gonna contend for a championship. Here comes the Liberty. Like, there is so much that we should and could be talking about. And instead, every other day, it’s an examination of what this foul means. And a generalization of what this league is about, and an admonishment of the women before. And it just feels like we are in a perpetual cycle that we can’t break out of. And every single time there is some ammunition added onto this fire, I know at least for me personally, I put my hands in the air just like I did on Sunday, and I go, “Here we go again.” And it just, it’s the worst timeline right now.

DG: Where does the cycle break? I mean, I think about some of the stories that have happened. Of course, you have Sophie Cunningham from the Indiana Fever, who made some comments questioning whether trans athletes should be playing and whether that’s safe, and that became a firestorm. There have been protests, and people who supported what she said, and people didn’t support what she said. And then we have DiJonai Carrington from the Chicago Sky. She fouls Sophie Cunningham, gets ejected from the game, goes into the locker room, and goes on social media and says that her ejection was because of white privilege and tags the Indiana Fever. Is it on players to avoid saying things that they know are going to get attention? Or are they just being human, and us in sports media and in media in general should just be focusing on the kinds of things that you’re talking about and ignore these little moments?

ED: I think it’s on everybody, David. It’s on absolutely everybody. Yes, it’s on the players to understand that, like, I get it. It’s a very emotional, passionate space, and like sometimes we’re reactive, right? Like, sometimes you don’t— it’s maybe not the best time ever to give someone a phone right after an emotional moment after a game. Because whether that be a press conference where they say things maybe that they wish they didn’t, or they tweet things that they didn’t as well. I think the onus and responsibility is on the league. I think that the onus and the responsibility is on the fans. The fans that keep clamoring to get it back to the basketball, then you have to stop clicking on these stories that are anything about basketball. You have to start feeding into it. You have to stop feeding into the generalization that is seeding— that is actually, I think, precipitating some of this animosity and resentment that’s building in the league. Like it is the responsibility of all of us. But I will say that it’s, we’ve lost the plot, David. We’ve just lost the plot. It’s like, I can’t, you know, whether you’re a fan of someone, not a fan of someone, I think we can all agree that this is supposed to be about the women in the space. It’s supposed to be about highlighting these incredible athletic feats, these stories, we’re closing it on the playoffs. The playoff race is incredibly tight. Like one and a half game separates four teams. And if that’s the case, then we all have a responsibility to make sure that we’re getting back to the basketball. And some of that means not engaging with social media or with stories that are purely there. to rage-bait you, and so I do. I don’t have any solutions to this, David, because if I did, God knows I would’ve pulled that lever already, because I’m tired of it. I am. I’m sick of it. I know everybody that I work with is exhausted by this space right now, and I think the players included, but I do think that it’s not just the media to blame, just the league to blame, or just the players. Collectively, we’ve got to put our heads together and figure out how we write this ship, because we have an opportunity here to celebrate this monumentous moment. And this movement in the WNBA, and I think that we are wasting it by muddying it down with everything else that’s bothering us in this country right now.

DG: Could some of the players basically send a message, like, don’t stick your politics here? I mean, I think about Caitlin Clark, and among a lot of conservatives, it’s like they’re not happy with the way she’s been treated on the court, and they think that that’s a political thing. Like, could she stand up and say, stop using me as a vessel for your politics; just let’s focus on the game, or is that putting too much pressure on one person?

ED: Yeah, I’ve been really clear from the beginning that I did not feel like it was Caitlin’s responsibility to speak for people who are using her name, bad faith characters that will use anyone as an avatar to get off their thoughts or to denigrate a subgroup of the population or a marginalized community. I would say at this point, though, I don’t think she bears a responsibility, but I do think that if I, again, if I’m Caitlin Clark, I’m going, oh my God, I’m having the best year of my career, right? I just had a 45-point game. Me and Kelsey Mitchell are out here both putting up 25 each game. Like this is, we are good, and all anybody wants to talk about is whether there should be a congressional hearing on a hard foul. And so I think that because she is one of the faces of the league and because people have been using her name, I’m just wondering like what else she can do. But the truth is, she has spoken out. Like she has said numerous times, “I don’t stand by this.” You know, “People are painting me in a light that is not true. They do not know me, and they’re using me in a negative way.” I don’t know. I honestly don’t know how this stops. Unfortunately, I think that we’ve, the toothpaste can’t go back into the tube at this point.

DG: How worried are you? I mean, could this stop a lot of that great momentum that the WNBA has had in these recent years in terms of growth and popularity? And they’ve just been in this great space and great place. How much risk is there here?

ED: I’m not worried about the ratings. We’ve been dealing with these divisive sort of narratives and discourse around the WNBA for the last three years, and the ratings keep climbing, and the ratings are doing really well. They’ve got more broadcast partners now. I’m not worried about that. The concern for me is something that is not something that shows up on a sheet. And that is this space, what it used to be, and it used to feel like a community, and it used to feel like family. And yes, you would argue, and you would have debates, and you disagree. But it felt like this inclusive space that was welcoming of all kinds of people. Like the WNBA has always represented, if you feel like you have no other place in the world, you belong here. If you feel you’re an outcast in the world or that you can’t go with your family to a sporting event for fear of how you might be perceived, you are welcome here. We want all of you here. Every marginalized community, every mainstream community, you’re welcome here, and I think that that is my concern is that we are losing that. We were losing that inclusive space where we could all come together and taught women’s basketball. It was like an us-against-the-world mentality.

DG: I want to turn a little bit to you and sort of what you’re up to these days. One of the reasons I’m so excited about our episode today is talking to you, talking to Dan Le Batard about what sports media looks like in 2026. You’ve made the move to Netflix; you’re helping to build their live sports. What does it feel like? How different is what you are doing now at Netflix compared to your career so far?

ED: It’s very different. I’m doing a different sports than I’ve ever done before. I did my first combat sports, which is super cool. I mean, hell, I had to do play-by-play commentary of a guy climbing a building. So I would say.

DG: How was that?

ED It was uh, yeah, it was, nerve-wracking. It was really nerve-wracking because it’s like, you know, the stakes have never been higher. This dude could actually die…

DG Climbing a building, yeah, and death could be imminent.

ED: It was wild, like exactly. But I think it’s so cool because this is the most, I stand on the fact that a big part of wanting to take this job was a bevy of lifestyle reasons, but also because this is and remains the most unique job in sports broadcasting, because Netflix is essentially in this space with sports and live events, a startup, but they’re Netflix.

DG: Yeah, like a startup with a lot of money and like a great reputation already, but a startup.

ED: A startup that already like dominates one space, like knows what they’re doing, has a lot of money, has really, really competent, great people running it. And now you get to be a part of something that’s building. So you get all that excitement and, like, yes, the trials and tribulations that come with it. But just feeling like everything that you do, every contribution you make, really matters because it is so small and because you are building something. And that is so unique. Most people like to go to a startup, and they know, like, it means that they’re gonna have to bring their own toilet paper from home. But with Netflix…

DG: You didn’t have to bring your own toilet paper, I’m gonna assume?

ED: I didn’t have to do any of that! They even provide toilet paper, you guys!

DG: Amazing. (Laughs) Well, let me finish by asking you just about one of the events that you’re closely involved in, which was the Field of Dreams game. It’s a Major League Baseball game, you know, Phillies, Twins, in that stadium in Iowa, where the Field of Dreams was filmed. What is that game, that setting, tell us about baseball in 2026?

[MUSIC]

ED: I mean, I think that no matter how much they change in baseball, the pitch clock or the this, or revolutionize the sport and bring it into this millennium, which I think is important. And like, I understand all that. Baseball, at its core, has always been about nostalgia and the sentimentality of just playing catch with your dad or playing catch with your mom or your brother in the backyard. And, like, that’s what Field of Dreams is about, is a reminder of not just the movie, which was amazing and we all loved it, but watching these grown-ups with playoff implications, because this is a game that means something, right? Phillies-Twins, both playoff implications are heavy there. But to watch these like crone men, like the look on their face when they’re like walking through the cornfield or looking around and like, they’re literally playing this game in a cornfield in someone’s backyard is just, I think it just really highlights what is so special about sports in general is that, yeah, the competition is great and the result is important and everybody cares about that, but it’s how it makes you feel. And watching something like that, whether you like baseball or not, like who can’t relate to wanting to connect with their parent, who can relate to something so cool as watching them build a field in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa, in Dyersville, Iowa. It’s just, it’s about community. That community now uses that field for all of these different, really large events. So now these kids in high school get to play on the Field of Dreams field for their high school championships, like, it’s just all around super special. And I think it reminds people of what sports is really about, which is connection and making you feel something.

DG: Well, I hope you get to keep doing work that makes you proud. It’s great to hear about all of this. Elle Duncan, thanks so much for talking to us.

ED: Thanks, David.

DG: And we’ll be right back with our conversation with Dan Le Batard; we’re gonna come back with more Sports in America.

[MUSIC]

DG: Back in the day, in a time of stodgier news, sports media spoke with one authoritative voice. One anchor simply telling us what happened, deliberately drained of color and editorializing. It sounded like this.

BROADCASTER: On to sports and basketball ratings out today. PC and Holy Cross moved up in both polls.

DG: Dan Le Batard had a different idea, one that was kind of revolutionary in its time. Whether he was writing columns for the Miami Herald or hosting shows like Highly Questionable at ESPN, he kept pulling sports off the pedestal, making room for jokes, arguments, and awkward silences. Over three decades, as a columnist, TV personality, radio host, podcaster, and now founder of Meadowlark Media, he’s built shows that sound less like broadcasts and more like family dinners: loud, unpredictable, full of friends talking over one another.

GUEST 1: We didn’t do enough about how embarrassing of a look that was for

Patrick Mahomes.

DL: Wait a minute, so both are embarrassing, caring too little, and caring too much.

You can’t love ants, though to the way that you love other animals.

GUEST 1: I do love ants

[DAN SINGING]

GUEST 2: When’s the last time Dan was in a scrum?

DL: This is the thing, right? The interviews get to be…

GUEST 2: 2005.

DL: It has been a really…

GUEST 2: Megastuffed Oreo day.

DL: Really?

GUEST 2: I’m defensive.

DL: Really?

DG: Dan’s approach is not just for clicks and likes. It’s really a reflection of how Dan sees sports in the first place as a way to understand people. And people, after all, are wonderfully messy. It’s also the idea behind Meadowlark Media, the company that Dan co-founded, to make room for stories that don’t fit neatly into the sports pages. Dan and I spoke during an extraordinarily difficult week at his company, Meadowlark. One of his closest colleagues, David Sampson, had just suddenly lost his young daughter to a rare form of brain cancer, and the grief was still fresh. It actually shaped every part of our conversation.

First of all, it sounds like you guys have been through a really heartbreaking time at Meadowlark. Your colleague David losing his daughter, that sounds like something unimaginable. I just want to send our condolences from all of us.

DL: Thank you, we appreciate that. Obviously, this is not our hardship, it’s a bit of borrowed pain, but somebody we cared about, care about, just went through something unspeakably cruel: losing his daughter at 28 without any kind of warning, to a really super rare brain cancer. So thank you for your condolences. Yes, there are a lot of people crawling around here after a weekend of mourning, and I don’t know how much of this you do with your audience, but grief is quite the weighty vest, and I’ve only experienced it this kind of way over the last five years. So I’m very grateful that I haven’t had too much of this in my life because it’s pretty unbearable.

DG: Yeah, no, I think it’s something that people can’t even begin to understand if they haven’t suffered through it themselves. So we’re really thinking about you and the whole company.

DL: Thank you. Most people don’t want to talk about anything close to this. Marcellus Wiley, a former football player, as tough a human being as I know, when he looked into his mother’s casket, he just sort of was like, “No, not going to do this. Not going to ever think about this, talk about it again,” because men, particularly, can push this stuff down into places and cover it in brown alcohol.

DG: Yeah, no, I lost my mom 20 years ago, and it’s like still reliving the moments and the days around it. I don’t feel like I’m equipped to even deal with the grief 20 years on, let alone whatever I was dealing with in those moments

DL: There is some beauty though, that can be found around all of this when you sort of go straight through the pain of understanding that the thing that keeps the love alive after someone has passed is that the loss is something that has to hurt in a way that’s sort of directly proportional to how much you loved. So keeping the pain alive keeps the love alive, keeps the memory alive, keeps the people the way that you felt about them alive. I know in the case of my brother, it’s not a pain I want to ever forget because the love is something that was sizable enough that it risks the most painful of loss. So anyways, thank you for the sentiment here as we get off to a very serious start here. I thought, what are we talking about? Are we talking? We’re not here to talk. I don’t think— this is not a grief podcast, is it?

DG: It’s not a grief podcast, but you know, grief doesn’t make reservations at a certain time. So, you know, I just wanted to honor the fact that you guys are in a certain mindset now. But no, I really wanted to dig a lot into you, what you’ve done at Meadowlark, where you are today, what you think of sports media, and it strikes me— I saw you say recently that being different is what you try to do every single day. And I wonder if you could say a little more about what you mean by that. What is different about you, and what are you striving for in your work?

DL: Well, these are things that are all sorts of tied together because I’ve gotten a sort of unreasonable amount of my identity from my work over the years, as most workaholics, I think, probably would say that they are lopsided in some way and just get a lot of their defining inside of their work. So, my career, now strange as it is to say, is going on 40 years, where once upon a time I dreamt of just, how do I get paid to write about people who play sports? That seems like a fun way to make a living.

DG: Yeah.

DL: I was at a dinner table most of my childhood, sitting with my mother and my father, and my father was complaining about being unhappy at work, unhappy with this boss. There was always something. And my parents came from Cuba, and my father had to choose sort of the safe route of, when you’re an exile or an immigrant in this country, it’s law, architecture, engineering, medicine, the safe ones, but it’s not exactly what he loved doing. And so I would say at that dinner table in front of my parents that what I wanted to be when I grew up was somebody who was getting paid for doing something that they enjoyed doing. And my father’s response was, “Good luck with that, kid.” And so, if I’d become an engineer like he wanted me to, the safest path, I would have been very unhappy. And so my mom fought for me to be able to do something writing because people in high school told me that I was good at that, pretty good at it, and it’s the only thing that they told me I was good at. So I had my path early on, and writing— I found after doing some good work for a young person, making a living in newspapers, writing was super lonely. And so then I chose the different path of how is it that I continue to grow my career from sports writer to radio person to television person to now, in my 50s, a bit of an entrepreneur, and so it’s been by choosing different paths, different things within the realm where I had my expertise as a writer. And so some of the zigs were established in sports that allowed me to do some stuff that was zagging or that was counterculture, or was anti-establishment from within the establishment. And so it’s not that different, but it’s just different within the confines of this particular playpen, where, odd as it is to say. People, I don’t know if your audience knows very much about the fun and games sports business, but you would think it would be more fun. You would think the people talking about it in the playpen would be having more fun, but very often, you know, it’s treated as a church or some place sacred. And so it wasn’t that hard to be different if you’re gonna be super serious about the fun and games. It’s not that counterculture to be like, “Can I interest you in some fun over here? Some laughs, some stuff that isn’t quite so serious.” And so we found just different places to be slightly different, where it looked like growth along the path. It’s a long answer, but that’s 35 years of career you’re talking about. And over time, I’ve gotten to respect the particulars less and less because I don’t respect television. I think it’s kind of silly, self-important, and so we’ve been able to play some in the margin.

DG: Dan has always had a knack for making sports feel, you know, a little less precious underneath the chaos, and the jokes, though, he’s built something that is surprisingly hard to fake: genuine closeness with his audience.

[MUSIC]

You’ve really carved out a space, and I love a word that you often use, which is intimacy, like the relationship between, you know, you and your audience, and also the people you are interviewing when you do it one-on-one. I mean, intimacy feels like a big part of it. And I think in this crazy media environment, intimacy and people who practice it is, it’s becoming more and more important and distinctive.

DL: I mean what a treasure though a literal treasure chest our audience has provided for our company as the centerpiece of our business because this particular medium that you and I are in right now while it has a video form now the deepest relationships I have with audience in this business go back to when it was all just in your head you’re imagining what’s happening, but you can’t see it. And it just connects you to an audience in a way that’s just really unique. People are spending three hours a day with you. Every day with you, very often in bad jobs that they need you to carry them through because they don’t like the jobs that they’re in. Please give me three hours of relief because you can allow me to escape, and now I’m on your jogs when you’re exercising or trying to make time go away or go faster. And then we become just, you know, friends in your head, and so it’s the entire lifeblood of our company is that the connection with the audience, which has to be an intimate one

DG: If you wanna understand why Dan connects so deeply with people, it helps to go back to where he came from and the two people who believed in him first. His parents fled Cuba after Fidel Castro came to power, leaving behind nearly everything they knew to start over in Miami. That backdrop shaped the way Dan thinks about opportunity and belonging.

I love this image of you growing up and your dad being the one who’s like, “Oh, you want to go into sports writing? Like, good luck with that.” And your mom being the one who’s trying to find a way for you to follow this dream. I wonder, like, you know, you mentioned, obviously, your parents were Cuban exiles. What did being in an exile family and that culture teach you, you know, even before journalism taught you anything?

DL: So I don’t know how to do much of anything else other than what it is that I’m doing. I don’t know how to hang stuff up in my house. I was not taught some very basic things by my parents, but the one thing that I was taught, and it stood above all others, and its second place is not particularly close, work equals freedom. Whatever you do, better be exceptional. The work better be exceptional, because freedom means a great deal to our people when we don’t have freedom in our country. We’ve had our childhood and our land stolen. And if you want freedom, work is the way to freedom. And the work ethic is obviously something that’s taught, but also almost equally important right next to it. My brother and I, to the degree I can be self-aggrandizing and call what I do art, my brother and I make our living, or made our livings, in artistic things that are almost not available to you in Cuba.

DG: For parents who risk everything to build a more secure life, watching both of their sons choose uncertain creative careers, I mean, that could not have been easy.

Well, your dad, Papi, who many of us know from being with you on the air all those years, I just wonder, like, having two sons who carved out such successful paths that were based on art and expression and not necessarily based on taking those safe routes that he was encouraging you to do as a as a boy, like w hat has he said about you and your brother and what you became?

DL: My father did not approve of my career choice. Look, I wouldn’t approve, even seeing how it worked out. If I were the father of a child, I would think it unsafe to go into writing as a profession. Who’s going to pay you to write? Like, it’s not— I understand why it is that he was mad at me. He worked with great sacrifice to send me to a private school with a car that had a hole in the floorboard, and the glove compartment would pop open every time we hit a bump because he could not afford the school he was sending me to, and he wanted me to be an engineer. And I had engineering scholarships, and I might as well have told him that I wanted to go get addicted to meth, like it just wasn’t— It’s not a prudent choice, the one that I made.

[MUSIC]

DG: That relentless drive to tell stories that matter has shaped Dan’s entire career. But his relationship with his younger brother, David, an artist whose murals and paintings became part of Miami’s identity, was the story that upended and ultimately defined his life.

Coming up, we will have more from our conversation with Dan Le Batard.

Welcome back to Sports in America, and let’s dive right back into our conversation with Dan Le Batard.

Dan, what’s a story you have told in your career that you feel like changed you more than it even changed your audience?

[MUSIC]

DL: A story that I have told, and you’re not asking me here, of the most recent story where my brother’s death has altered me in a way that I’ve chosen to share that with an audience that…

DG: Yeah, I mean, if you want to tell us about that, it’s your brother David. I mean, you lost him about three years ago, right?

DL: It is, you’re gonna have to forgive me because pandemic time sort of screws up, but yes, I believe it’ll be three years here in August. I don’t have an experience more painful than being at my brother’s bedside for the last 10 months of his life that would lead to more growth because you’re going straight through the pain than that one. It’s just altering in the ways that would turn almost your life perspective upside down because it challenges some of the base principles of who you are, including whether or not you can feel joy late in life because your brother has left that as his final gift to you. Because the horrors of doing all of that with my little brother is something I never imagined. Left me appreciating life more than I did before that, and having an access to happiness that I did not have before that, and I don’t know how to explain this to anybody without you living it next to me. All of the particulars, including like seeing three people hold him up so he could go to the bathroom in a bucket because the most vibrant personality I’ve ever known was fighting to stay here but rotting from the inside, to seeing him resuscitated by several nurses and thinking he had died before he had died. Getting to spend all of that time that close to the stale stench of death and sickness. And have it be the person that I love the most and have the biggest connection with and practically raised because of what my role was as an older brother to him.

DG: That’s an amazing thought to kind of contemplate. I mean, that his loss gave you an access to happiness. That’s a kind of an interpretation of grief that I’m not sure I’ve ever really thought about before.

DL: So I can be cynical about some of this stuff, and I can just be generally scientifically agnostic about an assortment of things. But I will tell you that the pain of this was so profound that it led me on a search, that I won’t bore you with all of the details of it, but I am going to an assortment of healers. Three times acupuncture a week, I’m doing NAET energy work, I am doing an assortment of vibration work that is meant to help with brain chemistry, and all of it is in pursuit of the thawing of the grief. I don’t understand what I’m doing, I’m going to an assortment of people who have dedicated their lives to some form of— there’s a very thin layer between life and death and whatever it is that you imagine after is and whatever these people are doing through sciences that are much older than us and sciences that would be dismissed by many people living now because they would just be cynical. I’ve been one of them; they would be cynical about everything. I’m talking about it’s just a lot of foofery, nonsense. I don’t understand what these people are doing. I do not understand the science of what they are doing. I do know that they have dedicated the entirety of their life to being healers. And one of these people, the one who does the NAET, the energy work. I said to her, with skepticism upon meeting her, “Is this science or spiritual?” And she said, “Yes.” Yes was her answer.

DG: Good answer.

DL: And she also said something that surprised me, which was, I’m telling her, ‘I’m here to heal myself. I’m broken. I don’t know how to heal this. I am here to heal my relationship with my brother.” And her answer was, “And he’s here to heal it with himself.” And like, it’s not something I ever would have believed before walking into that room. On tough days, I can get forgetful about believing it, but I know what she’s dedicated her life to. And while I don’t know what it is, I know she’s here to help me. And there are an assortment of people here doing an assortment of things that I can take no credit, other than continuing to show up when you say what an amazing way to have a grief process to turn it into a greater, an even greater love. It’s legitimately the work that I’ve been doing, and it’s and it might as well be a full-time job because I’m trudging to stuff that I don’t want to necessarily be doing every day that I only do because the rewards are that obvious

DG: That idea from his healing process keeps showing up even when there might be an internal skepticism extends beyond Dan’s personal life. It’s also the philosophy that carried him into the next chapter of his career, rolling the dice by building his own media company without being sure how it would play out. The gamble worked. Meadowlark has grown into a thriving independent media company home to a wide range of shows and some of the most distinctive voices in sports, including Pulitzer Prize winner Pablo Torre. When we talked to Pablo a couple of months ago, he talked about balancing the substance of sports reporting with a sense of lightness and irreverence, which feels like a core tenet of the whole Meadowlark brand. For Dan, it took being at the top of the mountain at ESPN to learn to not take himself or the work too seriously.

I think too about what you were talking about a little while ago about, you know, our tendency sometimes to take sports too seriously. And you know, I think about Pablo talking about you want the broccoli and the cheese. Like, you know, to be looking at what you guys are bringing to sort of sports: the very serious journalism and storytelling, but also, like, a lightness, like a laughter. I mean, say more about that approach and say more about what it says about how we do normally treat sports and the stories around it?

[MUSIC]

DL: So I get to 30 years old, to what I thought were the top of my dreams. I’m in Times Square. I’m on ESPN Sports Reporters. It’s about as high as I can climb in my career. However, it is what other people would define as success. I’m working three jobs, and this would be the pinnacle of my career, and I’m looking around at 30-years-old at an ESPN zone that still smells like urine and vomit from the night before in Times Square with, you know, chairs on the tables upside down, you know, a stale box of bagels over there

DG: I’ve sadly been in that very scene, like (Laughs)

DL: Yeah.

DG: That smell, I know that smell.

DL: Yeah, I’m looking around like, okay, this is it? This is the pinnacle? And so I’ve got a couple of things there, right? The best views are shared the best views. So I’m in a place, and I’m by myself, and I’m also within the loneliness of writing, which is fulfilling. But I don’t enjoy the process of writing. It hurts. So, I’m just generally lonely within everything that I’m just describing to you while I’m at the pinnacles of my dreams, and so from there I decided to chase community laughter because of how the depth of the loneliness was sort of ringing in my ears. Wait a minute, you’re a boy prodigy at writing; everyone is celebrating your career, you’re at the top of, you know, whatever this silly thing is, you’re making a living in something your dad never thought would be possible. How are you not happy? How are you lonely? How are you— Now, the writing is part of it, right? I’d have to go into an obsessive-compulsive cocoon. I didn’t have to, but that’s how I was doing it. It is how I had to write with, it wasn’t an expression that was free. It was an expression that was constipated. It was sculpted. It was, I’m writing in a form that is meant to be obsessive-compulsive in a way that’s not mentally healthy, but it got me all the rewards. Rewards that didn’t make me happy. So the long answer to your question is the laughter was important to me, and I was confused as I changed careers, how sports radio is an example. The bar was so low in sports radio that the host of the show was farming out his work to Julio on a mobile to give his opinion on the Dolphins from a car phone, because that’s what sports radio entertainment was: the lowest rung of the show business ladder. So I’m like, if I’m gonna alter my career, if I wanna take a different path, if I want to try and find something that’s community, fun, laughter, that’s a low bar I can jump over if I am gonna go from the pain of writing to something that’s more shared and has more people in it. And is laughter, like the one I don’t know how many people listening to this have at work, daily laughter with people that they care about, people who they admire, people who they want to make laugh. But if you can have something that feels like friendship at work, I’m guessing you’re working better. I’m guessing you are working happier, and I’m guessing you have a better relationship with work than most people.

DG: I think back to what you were saying about what you learned from having exile parents: that work is what gets you to freedom. And I think of what you’ve built now at Meadowlark and Pablo Torre’s success. Have you reached a point of freedom, moving on from ESPN, being a founder of one of the most impactful companies in sports media right now? Is this freedom? And if it is, or if it isn’t, what does it feel like?

DL: So that’s a great question for a number of different reasons, because among the biggest surprises in the entirety of my career, and I will tell you, I am very much of a reluctant entrepreneur. Like, it does not suit me. I am not interested in business in almost any way. Among the greatest surprises of founding a company was that I thought I was just going to go into total, complete freedom, and everyone else would handle the business stuff. In the last five years, in some respects, have represented less freedom than I have ever had in work, with all of the conundrums that people who are much smarter about business than I am would tell you, yes, this is what being an entrepreneur is. It’s leaving 40 hours working for somebody else to work 100 hours for yourself. It’s leaving a job that has safety and payment to make less than that, working a lot harder than you were before. But all of that said, with all of the learning within it, because I’ve come out on the other side and have now been able, after a great deal of pain, because I don’t know anything about startups and I don’t t know anything about business. We are now a stable, stable media thing in a very, very unstable media climate and we’re a stable media thing that is trusted by its audience to do good journalism when everyone’s going the other way on that and fake news is winning and disinformation is everywhere but trust is more valuable in America than I ever thought it would be, because I thought I was living in a country that could not possibly have happened to it what has happened over the last 10 years that have allowed us the opening to truly be free. But you’re talking to me now after five years of just an unholy battering on a bunch of things that I did not know, and making it even harder still coming from somebody whose life success had been filled with the privilege of linear success, where I’ve learned that failure is just learning in disguise. And there was no freedom in failing before, and punching myself in the face with unforgiveness because I was striving for a perfectionism that is not human or sustainable. And so the answer to your question is yes, I am freer today than I have ever been, only after going through the most unholy years of my life in terms of pain. And I wouldn’t have answered that question that way as recently as maybe 18 months ago, before I started doing all of this other work that was meant to sort of lubricate me emotionally and give me access to a whole bunch of [EXPLETIVES] I just didn’t have access to before because I was, I don’t know, hardened, formed, cynical, and just didn’t know what I didn’t know.

DG: The joke was never the whole point. For Dan, the humor was a way into a much bigger question. Why do we care so much about these games? And what do they reveal about us?

What in the sports world makes it a place where there’s opportunity for laughter?

[MUSIC]

DL: I can tell the entirety of your audience. You’ve never jumped up and down at the birth of your child the way you have at a television on a fourth down at the football Sunday because sports does weird things to people. It just, it’s just an insane cauldron in the emotions business. I think more people should be having fun within that. I am grateful that more people are not, because somehow we stand out, because we’re being flippant or blasphemous or, you know, it’s viewed as fearless. But it’s the dumbest possible thing to be fearless about, the idea that you can, you know, I mean, we did a lot of things that were anti-establishment at ESPN, but pissing off a baseball commissioner because of X, or just that— I’ll tell you a story. I’ll tell you one story quickly that will sort of explain to you where it is that I have been since the original year of the Marlins, 1993. I’m out of college, I’m reporting on a team, and everything around me is very important, very serious. It’s expansion baseball; it’s a team that’ll go on to lose nearly a hundred games, but this is Miami’s major league, and this is very important, and I’m covering game, I think 61 in a way that’s questioning the managerial decisions and making jokes, etc. And Rene Lachemann, the manager, comes over to me in the clubhouse and is very serious, and is yelling at me about, “Are you going to cover us this way all year? You know, “Smart-ass, like joking around. This is serious. What we do around here is serious. I’ve dedicated my life to this; this is serious!” And I’m young 20s, don’t know anything. And I look at him, and I say, “Lach, you’re in your underwear. Like what? What do you mean this is serious? What we were doing is not serious! Like, this is not, this is not a serious thing we’re doing.” So here I am 30 years later, explaining to you like those people take it very seriously, the people jump around in front of the television, yelling and screaming more than they do at the birth of the children; they take it very seriously. It’s all very important, and I get to be sacrilegious because it’s less important. I value it. It’s immensely valuable. The way that people care about this thing creates a trough of money for everybody that I just don’t understand. Talking about sports is lucrative. Just being near it, enough to talk about it, can be lucrative, and so all of it seems crazy to me, and it’s a crazy upside-down blessing.

DG: Dan, I’m a long-time live radio guy, and I live by the clock. I got to get you out of here, but that’s a great story, and I really appreciate you chatting.

DL: Thank you for your time. I was a little more long-winded than I would have liked to have been.

DG: Not at all. Are you kidding me? I loved it. I love interviews as much as you do, and doing one with you is a treat.

DL: Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you for the time, the interest, the curiosity, and the compliment

DG: Next time, on Sports in America.

[MUSIC]

DG: How many times have you found yourself sitting in front of the TV for a football game, absolutely furious — because your team’s kicker just missed a game-changing field goal?

STEFAN FATSIS: I mean, the most common shticky thing is to, like, look at a football game on TV and watch a kicker miss one and go, “I could have done that.” Like, “I can make a field goal. I can make an extra point.”

DG: Maybe you said to yourself, “Man, even I could’ve done a better job than that guy.” You wouldn’t have been the first to think that. My friend Stefan Fatsis, a longtime journalist and sports reporter, once thought he had what it took to join the National Football League as a kicker.

SF: If I could get the players to believe that I looked like a kicker and that I was trying, that I was sincere, then that was a way to get inside their brains, to get them to trust me and talk to me and open up to me and let me write stuff down in my notebook.

DG: Stefan convinced the Denver Broncos to let him join the team for pre-season training camp. Then he wrote a book about it called “A Few Seconds of Panic.”

As this year’s NFL rosters are finalized, Stefan shares what it’s actually like when you get the chance to get off the couch and attempt one of the highest-pressure, most make-or-break positions in football.

That’s next time, on Sports in America.

[THEME MUSIC]

DG: This is Sports in America. I’m your host, David Greene.

Our executive producers are Joan Isabella and Tom Grahsler. Our senior producer is Michael Olcott. Our producer is Michaela Winberg, and our associate producer is Bibiana Correa.

Our engineers are Mike Villers and Charlie Kaier. Our theme music is composed by Emma Munger. Our talent booker is Britt Kahn. Our tile artwork was created by Bea Walling.

Sports in America is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia and is distributed by PRX. Some of our interviews were originally created by Religion of Sports with special thanks to Adam Schlossman. You can find Sports in America on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, the iHeartRadio app, wherever you get your podcasts.

And we also wanna hear from you. How about you drop us a line? You can write us at sportsinamerica@whyy.org. That’s sportsinamerica@whyy.org. Thanks, everyone. And we will see you next time for Sports in America.

Host: David Greene
Executive Producers: Joan Isabella, Tom Grahsler
Senior Producer: Michael Olcott
Producer: Michaela Winberg
Associate Producer: Bibiana Correa
Talent Booker: Britt Kahn
Engineers: Mike Villers, Charlie Kaier
Tile Art: Bea Walling
Theme Song: Emma Munger
Sports in America is a production of WHYY, distributed by PRX, and part of the NPR podcast network.