NEW YORK — Mike Greenberg is frustrated. He's days away from the premiere of his new ESPN morning show, "Get Up" with Michelle Beadle and Jalen Rose, and all anybody wants to ask him is how "woke" the program will be politically.
Greenberg rarely shared his political views during his successful 18-year run with Mike Golic on ESPN Radio's "Mike & Mike in the Morning," but the culture wars are still raging. Greenberg doesn't want "Get Up," which will air from 7-10 a.m. ET beginning Monday, April 2, to be seen as having a political agenda.
Yes, if President Donald Trump tweets about sports, the show will cover it, he says, but "Get Up" is going to be "exclusively" about sports, he adds, with a side order of humor courtesy of himself, the wisecracking Beadle and Rose, the former NBA and Michigan basketball star.
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"I believe that when a person turns on ESPN, that person has a right to expect that we’re going to be talking about sports," Greenberg told Sporting News, "so what people will see when we debut on Monday, and every single day thereafter, is that we are a sports show first, last and always."
That's easier said then done, Greeny. Beadle and Rose have never been shy about tackling social issues.
Given the reported big salaries of the "Get Up" panelists (Greenberg makes $6.5 million, according to The Hollywood Reporter, while Beadle and Rose are earning $5 million and $3 million, respectively), there will be people inside and outside ESPN rooting for this show to fail.
The stakes are high for the network as "Get Up" challenges morning sports shows such as NFL Network's "Good Morning Football" and Fox Sports 1's "First Things First," not to mention traditional morning TV powerhouses such as ABC's "Good Morning America" and NBC's "Today."
"Get Up" was developed during the reign of former ESPN president John Skipper, but it will be the first big show launched under new president Jimmy Pitaro. ESPN content czar Connor Schell made the risky decision to break up the long-running "Mike & Mike." If "Get Up" flops, then Schell's ESPN future will be on the line. Ditto the future of "Get Up" show runner Bill Wolff, who rejoined ESPN after stints as executive producer of ABC's "The View" and MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show" and "Tucker."
Additionally, ESPN spent millions of dollars to build a new studio at Manhattan's South Street Seaport that will be the home of "Get Up" and, eventually, "First Take" with Stephen A. Smith, Max Kellerman and Molly Querim (10 a.m. to noon) and the planned "High Noon" with Bomani Jones and Pablo Torre (noon to 1 p.m.), as the network was laying off hundreds of employees at its corporate campus in Bristol, Conn.
Sporting News interviewed Greenberg, the 50-year old native New Yorker, about "Get Up," his homecoming to the Big Apple, and more. Excerpts:
SPORTING NEWS: How do you like the new studio?
MIKE GREENBERG: I love it. I'm sitting here right now in my office. To my left I see the Brooklyn Bridge. To my right I see the Statue of Liberty. It doesn’t get any better than this. . . . One of the best parts of all of this to me: My dad’s office was about a five-minute walk from where I am this minute. The apartment I grew up in, where my mother still lives, is about a 15-minute walk for me. It's a thrill for me in every way that I imagined it being. It's just great. Only one place can be your hometown and this is mine. I moved away from here in 1985 and I never came back. To have the opportunity to come back is just unbelievable.
SN: On any new show, casting is the key. How's the chemistry between you, Beadle and Jalen?
MG: Sensational. It has been so much fun. . . . Our executive producer, Bill Wolff, always says if we're having fun, it will come through on the air. If we're having fun, then the audience will feel it, and relate to it, and enjoy it. It’s been great. I'm thrilled because I knew Jalen really well. Jalen and I have worked together many times. Back in the day, before (ESPN's) NBA (coverage) used to move out to LA, he used to fill in with me all the time. When Mike (Golic) would be off, Jalen would host with me, so I've done a million shows with Jalen. But I've really barely ever worked with Beadle. So I've had, and have, extraordinary respect for her talents, but that doesn’t always mean when you put two people together it's going to work. I was confident it would, but I didn’t really know it would until we tried it. It's been just so much fun. She’s just so good. She’s incredibly smart and she's incredibly funny, so it's been a thrill. I feel great about it. I hope that that comes through on the air, starting on Monday.
SN: This show was originally described as "Greeny & Friends," with you as the clear No. 1. Is it now more of an ensemble?
MG: It was only described that way by people who weren’t involved in the conversations. This was never going to be "Greeny & Friends." They made the decision they wanted to do a morning show, then they made the decision they wanted me to be a part of it. Then, because I was the only person attached it, it started being "Greeny’s show." It became "Mike Greenberg’s new morning show." I was trying to tell anybody, I think including you, who would listen, (that) that's not the conceit here. No one wants that. There is no one in the world, in my opinion, talented enough to host a show by themselves in the morning. It's impossible. People's expectations of what's going on the morning is that there (will) be a lot of stuff going on. You need a wide variety of opinion and of voices and of experiences. There’s no one person who can do that. If there is, it certainly isn’t me. So that was never the idea . . .
When I first met Bill Wolff, and we first started talking about this, he started describing it as a sitcom. He said, "If you were casting a sitcom, everyone plays their role. Every one knows who you are. The sports audience in the morning, fortunately, has some familiarity with you, Greeny, because you've been on all these years, so we know what role you’re going to play. Now, what other roles do we need to fill? Then we're going to cast those, and we're going to create a character play like you would do a television show that was a script show." So that's what it has been. It has always been that, from my very first conversation I ever had with Bill, it has always been that.
SN: Describe the show. Sports? Humor? News?
MG: It is exclusively sports. It’s amazing to me, Mike, how many interviews I've done and I am asked so frequently: "So, is this a sports show?" My answer to that is, if I walked into McDonald’s and they said to me, "We don’t have hamburgers today," I would be very disappointed, because I walked into McDonald's to get a hamburger. No one goes to McDonald's if they feel like pizza or sushi. I believe that when a person turns on ESPN, that person has a right to expect that we're going to be talking about sports, so what people will see when we debut on Monday, and every single day thereafter, is that we are a sports show first, last and always.
We have our own sort of personal spin on highlights and news and analysis and debate. Hopefully it is all done with some humor because that's one of the things in my presentation I've always felt best about. It's definitely a strong suit of Michelle's and of Jalen's. I think that’s an appropriate thing. Sports frequently lends itself to light-hearted humorous conversation, but that's what we’re talking about. We’re talking about sports. I get the sense a lot of people don't seem to think that’s what it’s going to be, but I can assure you that when anyone starts watching the show on Monday, that’s what they're going to see. They're going to see a sports talk show.
SN: What about the story in The Hollywood Reporter that talked about the show being ‘"woke" politically?
MG: I don't want to call anyone out, OK? I don't know how that happened. I can tell you I was on that call, I was in that interview. What Jalen said was, "If the president tweets something about sports while we're on the air, then we will talk about it." Somehow that became a headline that we're going to be a "woke" talk show. I don’t even know what that means, much less how it relates to what we were talking about. That, in my opinion, was a very misleading headline relative to the intention of the show. . . . If you read the article, we talk at great length about how our plan is to do a sports show. That is 100 percent what we are going to do.
SN: "Get Up"'s premiere was delayed four months. Did that help or hurt?
MG: I never want to say it helped it. It's been a shame for me not to have been working all this time, but I certainly think the product that we’re going to go on the air with, it helped it. We’ve had so much time to prepare. I think in the big picture it has helped. It gave us more time to sit back and breathe. It gave Beadle time to move to New York and get herself situated here and comfortable, so I think, in that regard, it probably helped. I think in the long run it won't make any difference. I think the show you'll see on the air in a month after we launch will be exactly the same as it would have been if we launched in January. In the big picture, I don't think it makes any difference at all. As far as having more time to prepare, I think it's hard to imagine that would be a bad thing. More time to prepare is probably, generally speaking, a good thing.
SN: Are there new bits or segments that you're excited about?
MG: I'm excited about all of it. What’s interesting is if you were to look at a tape of a rehearsal we did last Wednesday, and then look at what we did today, it would look markedly different. It has evolved like crazy through the only tried and true practice of improving anything, and that is trial and error, so when we launch on April 2, a lot of the things we do, we’ll figure out, are even better than we thought, and we’ll increase them. Other things will have to be tweaked. Other things will have to be scrapped completely. You can't get married to any of these ideas, because all of it is a constantly changing process, which I learned over the course of 18 years of hosting a show. . . . I think the single thing that people will like, hopefully, the most right off the bat is (that) every hour, with the 7 o’clock hour, the 8 o’clock hour and the 9 o’clock hour, will all start with something called "Get Up and Go."
In a very, very fast-paced way you will catch up on everything that has happened in sports. We fly through all of the headlines in sports. About in a six- or seven-minute block, we will give you everything you need, so if you get up in the morning at 7 a.m. and you want to know what happened in sports yesterday, what happened last night, get me the highlights, get me the scores, get me a little insight, get me what were the big stories of the day, you will get all of that lightning-fast right off the top of every hour. I think that is a nod to the changing environment in which we live. People are looking for things quickly. We are going to give them an entire day of sports news and information extremely quickly. If I were to give you one headline of what our plans are, that would be the one.
SN: On "Mike & Mike," you and Mike (Golic) had lots of recurring guests from ESPN — everybody from Damien Woody, Booger McFarland and Louis Riddick talking pro/college football, to Cassidy Hubbarth delivering news updates. Who will we see on this new show?
MG: I think a lot of the same people. ESPN is ESPN, in large part, because of the people. We have overwhelmingly the best roster of opinionists and analysts and former players, coaches, etc. It would be criminally stupid not to take advantage of that, so on a day to day basis, based upon the news and information of the day and what's going on in a big way, you are going to get a lot of those same people. For example, the first month that we launch, the big build-up, one of the top stories every day through the month of April, will be the lead-up to the NFL Draft. I can assure you every single day there will be someone on our show talking about the NFL Draft authoritatively. You can never forget about (it).
Then, of course, the NBA playoffs will start, so you break out our NBA people. Baseball season is starting, so we'll get our baseball people fired up. You'll see Alex Rodriguez on our show right near the beginning, the first week and on from there. The way that we will use guests might not be exactly the same, but you will see a lot of the same people and get a lot of the same kind of insight from them that we would do on our old show or any show.
SN: Last time we talked, you admitted it was risky to break up "Mike & Mike," but you felt it was a risk worth taking. How do you feel now?
MG: I feel really enthusiastic and excited. . . . I'm back into the rhythm of doing something every day now. When you are doing a show like this every single day, I know from experience, there’s really no time to think about anything else. . . . If you’ve ever seen those old movies where there's a train pulling out of a station, and there's a guy running behind it holding his hat on trying to catch up to the train, that’s what doing a daily sports talk show or any daily show like this is. You are just constantly running behind that train and you never catch up, but you don't have the choice to just give up. You just have to keep running after it to try to catch up. So that what it is. We're back in this now. We've been rehearsing every single day as if we're on the air for the last several weeks, so all I have time to worry about, even though it’s not going to be on television for anyone to see tomorrow, is what I’m doing at 7:01 tomorrow morning, so that's really my only concern.
People have been asking me questions like, "How important do you think is this to the network?" and, "What do you feel the stakes are?" I don't know. I really don't know. I know that my job has not really changed. It's to be ready to go. When that red light goes on tomorrow morning, it is my job to be ready. If I'm not, it is no one's fault but mine. I've got to be ready to do the best show I possibly can. That was my job on "Mike & Mike" when the show was a big deal, it was my job on "Mike & Mike" when we were the only people who knew we had a show, and it was my job on anything I ever did before that, so I don't feel any different than I did then. I feel like I have to do the best I can tomorrow morning. Starting Monday, when it becomes for real, it will become even more so, I guess. I feel very much the same as I ever did before. For a while there, I had some time there to sort of reflect and enjoy. I spent a lot of time with my kids. I really enjoyed the time off, but I’ve been back to work on a daily basis for the last three weeks. I feel very much in the rhythm of it.
SN: You’re a long-suffering Jets fan, so who do you want Gang Green to take No. 3 (in the first round) at the NFL Draft?
MG: It’s a really complicated thing. I depend upon Mel Kiper, Todd McShay and people like that who study all these players, so I will grant that my assessment of all the players is based on what I've heard from our experts and I'm not an expert, but I was hoping the Jets would get a veteran quarterback, to be honest with you. I hold out some hope that maybe the Teddy Bridgewater thing will turn out to be catching lightning in a bottle. That’s the guy who, before he got hurt, was trending toward being a pretty good player. That’s the guy people were tanking for not so long ago. I remember the expression, "Tanking for Teddy," long before they were "Sucking for Sam" and everything else, so I know I've heard from a lot of people (that) that (knee) injury that he has is one from which there is legitimate concern he never fully recovers. I get that. A. That would be, for him, a terrible shame and, B. That probably would put an end to this line of thinking, but if he does recapture his health, (then) he’s a pretty good player, so maybe they catch lightning in a bottle with him at a reasonable price.
That said, they are very obviously going to draft a quarterback at the top of this draft. There’s no way they would have traded up if they weren't going to. I think all these guys come with a good deal of risk, from what I hear from our analysts. If I had to pick the one I liked, it would be Josh Rosen, because he just goes out there and flings it. When I watch him throw the football I think that looks like an NFL quarterback throwing the football. There are reasons to be nervous about everybody, from Baker Mayfield’s height to Sam Darnold leaving all of this eligibility on the table to Josh Allen's completion percentage and the level of competition that he faced, but if history tells us anything, it's that if four guys go at the very top, two of them turn out to be good and two of them turn out to be busts. There isn't any (way) to project right now which they are. A lot of it will probably have to do with the circumstances they find themselves in. . . . Whoever they wind up picking, I will root for the best. If I were making the pick based on what I think I know now, I think I would take Josh Rosen, but I very well could end up being completely wrong.