More than 15 years after its final episode aired on June 30, 2009,The Best Damn Sports Show Period is back in a new way. Several key figures from that show, including Chris Rose, Tom Arnold, John Salley, Michael Irvin, and more, plus special guests, will take part in a reunion panel at Fanatics Fest NYC:
The Best Damn Sports Show is back and reunited once again on Center Stage at FFNYC!
Don’t miss out on watching your favorite names such as Chris Rose, Tom Arnold, John Salley, Jalen Rose, Michael Irvin, CC Sabathia and more live!
🎫: https://t.co/aL8uQ1tzNW pic.twitter.com/cYSu1I0l8r
— Fanatics Fest (@FanaticsFest) July 25, 2024
Ahead of that panel, Arnold, Rose, former Fox Sports vice president (talent relations) and lead Best Damn booker Laura Marcus, and formerBest Damn producer and eventual showrunner Graham Hughes spoke to AA about the show and its legacy. Here are some highlights from those conversations, broken out by subject.
Part I: Why ‘Best Damn’ was so memorable’(below)
Part II: The specific voices
Part III: The RSN model’s challenges and benefits
Part IV: The ‘Best Damn’ legacy
You wouldn’t think a sports show would stand out to a Hollywood star amongst their credits, right? Well, in this case, it did. Arnold, known for his work onRoseanne, movies including True Lies and Nine Months, and much more, cited Best Damn as the “best job I ever had.”
“Well, I personally have always been interested in a reunion. I love these guys, I loved working with these guys. It was the best job I ever had: you come in, you talk about sports, you get paid. You meet all your heroes. You know, I sat there one day and Willie Mays was on one side, just amazing, amazing, and Mr. Cub [Ernie Banks] was on the other side.”
Rose, who has gone on to notable work with Fox, NFL Network, MLB Network, BattleBots and more, said this also remains a career highlight for him.
“All I can tell you is I’ve had several jobs, obviously, since Best Damnshut its doors in ’09, and this is still the show I get asked about the most. It’s not close. It’s because it was so different.”
Rose said management’s willingness to let them try new things was key to what made the show work.
“And that was the beauty of the show. Our boss, George Greenberg, he said ‘Listen, guys, there’s no blueprint. We’ll tell you after it’s done ‘Don’t do that again.’ They didn’t put any parameters on the show, which for 99.9 percent, a Michael Jordan number, of it was great. There was a .001.”
Marcus said she feltBest Damn [a show created by famed Fox Sports figure David Hill, and named by Scott Ackerson] found new territory by going beyond the scores and the lines in a way that was uncommon at the time.
“I thought it was great because I am not a crazy sports geek,” she said. “I enjoy sports a lot, but this show was for people who like sports but also more of a human interest type of show. I enjoy laughing, and I thought this show had it all: it was funny, and it was clever,. It was a little bit raunchy. But I thought it was different.
“It didn’t take itself seriously, which was what I liked, which is what a lot of people didn’t like. And what I liked about working on this was that it was so varied. We got to work on every sport, all the major events, and on any given day, you were talking to athletes from every sport, entertainers, artists. It was just an interesting mix.”
And Hughes said working at Best Damn was incredibly refreshing for him after he came over to Fox from a then-straitlaced ESPN.
“Coming from that four-letter network…what was interesting to me was that it seemed like a show that you could let breathe a little bit,” he said. “At SportsCenter at that time it was highlight, highlight, highlight, catchphrase. The anchors were the identity of the show, as they should be, they’re in front of the camera. I mean, my old joke is always like nobody’s ever going to say to Tom Arnold or Chris Rose ‘Why did your producer make you say that?’
“But I think Best Damn offered people the opportunity to be free, which at the time, we really hadn’t. Now, if you look at the sports landscape and the shows, there’s a lot of opinions in there. But I feel Best Damn was the first show that really kind of let people say…now, it’s okay to say, if you’re Matt Damon or Ben Affleck, just f****** say ‘I hate the f****** Yankees!'”
Hughes said those kinds of fandom-on-the-sleeve comments, especially the more off-color ones, may be common now on podcasts and even TV shows, but they used to be verboten.
“You couldn’t do that. You had to be kind of PC, before there was PC. When I was in Bristol, there was a mandate like you had to sign a thing saying you couldn’t wear any sports paraphernalia for fear of being seen as biased. Whereas at Best Damn, one of our producers would show up in his Yankees’ jersey before a playoff game, and people would talk **** about their teams. So I think it was just that freedom, and that also came across in front of the camera. And I think that’s what resonated.”
He said he thinks even ESPN has come around towards that perspective now, with their loosened rules on on-air fandom and opinion.
“Today, I think the reason [Scott] Van Pelt’s show works so well at ESPN is because it’s okay to let some of that opinion seep in. It makes it more real. I know with journalists, everybody’s like, ‘Oh, you got to tow the line and and make sure,’ but it’s okay. I mean, everybody knows that Van Pelt is a Maryland fan. Everybody knows that Chris Rose is a Cleveland guy. Everybody knows that Tom Arnold likes whoever’s winning the championship this year [laughs]. It really was a show that for me, wasn’t just covering sports, but it was the stories behind the scores.”
Arnold said the lack of rules at the start of BestDamnwas a highlight for him, and it led to memorable moments.
“It was great fun. And when we started, we didn’t really have any rules: you could do whatever, it was great. Like, John Kruk did not want to fly home to Philadelphia or wherever he was living on vacation, he wanted to drive. So he’s driving back, he’s going through Iowa, where I’m from, and my Little League coach died, and so we sent him to the wake [without telling him what it was]. And all his kids who played with him are coming up to John Kruk like, ‘Wow, what an honor for my dad.’
“…And I remember George Greenberg said, in our production meeting, to me ‘Hey, whatever you do, don’t make fun of Jerry Jones’ facelift, he’s coming on the show.’ I didn’t know he’d had a facelift! So that was a little out of control.”
Arnold also spotlighted one particular moment with Michael Irvin’s introduction as a regular panelist.
“Another thing that happened, we all knew that Michael Irvin was going to be there, but we had to wait a little bit for him. He had some legal issues at first. And so he comes on, he was added to production meetings, and they’re like ‘Hey, maybe let’s not talk about those. Whatever happened, whatever, it’s done.’
“And so, Chris starts talking to him, like ‘How’s it feel like to be back and be okay?’ and and he goes, ‘Oh yeah, I did a lot of cocaine, and a lot of women, and it was fun. But I’m over that.’ Like, you said it on the air, what they said don’t say! But he was incredibly awesome.
Rose said that kind of unpredictability and differentiation from more traditional sports shows was a selling point for Best Damn.
“I think that was the charm of the show, to be honest. At that point when it started, in 2001, and this was obviously a couple months before 9/11, was that sports had become really serious. And we kind of took it 180 degrees from there.
“The strength of this show was having your favorite athletes and entertainers and presenting them as human beings. We didn’t need to talk about the three-two slider that they took for strike three, we didn’t need to talk about the missed throw in the back of the end zone, because there are other shows that would have done that lot better. But what we could do was put guys in different situations.
“You know, we had Kobe Bryant come on one time and play a show called ‘Guess How Much?,’ where it was almost like a Price Is Right thing for regular items to see whether or not all these millionaires did know what a gallon of milk cost. It was just different. And that’s what I loved most about it. And the fact that we did love each other: we are from very different backgrounds, we are very different people, but it worked, man. When the light came on, it just worked.”
Read on for more on Best Damn’s specific voices, the RSN distribution model, and the show’s legacy.
