Forward Press: ESPN's Kevin Clark

Issue No. 115 | September 27, 2024

Hey,

For the second week in a row (don’t call it a trend), we’re doing Q&A Friday. Today’s is with Kevin Clark, who hosts This is Football on ESPN (by way of Omaha Productions), a show where he interviews Football People and has fascinating conversations with them a few times a week. He previously wrote at the Wall Street Journal and the Ringer.

That bio, as impressive as it is, still sells KC short. He is a brilliant and thoughtful question asker and somebody I admire in this industry. As you will see, Kevin and I see the world similarly in a lot of ways. We both cover our sport with a lot of emotion and are both curious about the world in general.

He’s also a certified sicko, and we recently chopped it up via email about golf, how he views it, how his childhood was affected by it and how he uses it in conversations with guys like Mahomes and Josh Allen.

Hope you enjoy!

1. I know you loved sports and sports media growing up. Give me one formative thing -- book, show, person, whatever -- from 1. Elementary or middle school 2. high school and 3. college that shaped your career.

Elementary or middle school: College Gameday  — This one is easy. I always say that for quarterbacks, geography is destiny but it’s probably also true for sports journalists. I grew up a few miles away from a new-ish NBA team in Orlando and in the heart of football country. I never learned what those things were, they were just there. I was just born with them, same as I was born with a nose and chin.

I played hockey for ten years, I fell in love with soccer etc. etc. but 30-odd years later my areas of expertise are football and the Orlando Magic. You just become yourself. 

The height of this, for me, was College Gameday, which to me is probably the best pregame show of all time. It managed to teach me about the sport while celebrating it. Some shows do one (or neither) but no one does both.

The chemistry, the crowd, the stories, how the crowd would boo or cheer depending on which teams you mentioned, it just gave you such a sense of place.

The thing I always say about golf is that at the absolute minimum, it’s a travel show. It’s January and I can’t go outside but golf is gonna show me five hours of coverage from Hawaii. The next month I’m looking at Pebble, desperate to be there. College Gameday to me was like that: It transports you to a different world.

Where would you rather be than South Bend before a huge game against USC? Well, they’ll take you there. Florida State-Miami? Alabama-Tennessee? They took you there, and every note was perfect. It’s still perfect because it embodies college football and for all its many faults, that’s still the perfect sport. 

High school: Moneyball by Michael Lewis — I was 15 or 16 when I read this on a family vacation and although I read every Sports Illustrated and ESPN the Magazine cover to cover, I’d never seriously delved into sports books until this one. It changed my life.

Ed. note: I think it changed mine as well.

I’d never really heard anything about advanced stats then you learn there’s a successful team building their entire lives around it. It blew my mind. I realized I wanted to tell stories like that. I have an old colleague who used to refer to “holy s—” stories. The type of feature where it’s just so new and fresh that anyone who reads it says “holy s—” and I think in sports, Moneyball is probably the best “holy s—” book.

Everyone who wrote a sports book after tried to be Moneyball. It’s the Beatles of sports books. I read sports books a lot now, and I often wonder if I’d be as obsessed [with them] without Moneyball. 

On the shortlist of books that changed my life: Moneyball, the Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, The Reckoning by David Halberstam, Paper Lion by George Plimpton, The Sweet Science by AJ Liebling and probably a few more I’m forgetting. They all serve the same purpose: they did the sorta thing I do a very bad version of when I write. 

College: Former Miami Heat forward Michael Beasley — This is a weird one and a story I don’t think I’ve told before. I was working for the Sun-Sentinel as a college junior, and I was at a Heat practice filling in for a beat writer when Michael Beasley was talking. He was struggling and he went on a mini-rant about how felt failed by the American basketball developmental system.

I told my editors I’d like to write it and they felt it clashed too much with a Beasley story they’d recently ran so I wrote something else. No problem. I asked if I could pitch it elsewhere and they said sure. I ended up pitching it to the WSJ and was eventually hired (still in college) for a full time job there. It’s funny, a year or so later, Beasley hit a game winner against the Magic and I remember thinking–if that’s the tax I pay for him making my career, I’ll take the deal.

Anyway, the point of this is that we rely on the honesty of athletes at all times to do our job well. When Rory does interviews with Paul Kimmage I’m blown away with how much he reveals. We need athletes to be vulnerable in order to understand the sport. I love these guys now talking about their work with sports psychologists, you see this with Wyndham Clark in the Netflix doc. If they don’t tell us what they are going through, we think athletes are just robot gladiators and that is intensely boring. 

2. You and I are similar in that we enjoy covering sports with a bit of emotion. Which player in the golf world -- as you cover it and jump in and out of it as a secondary thing to football -- gets your adrenaline going and why?

The easy answer is Bryson because he’s the only one who is compelling, good or bad. He stirs up emotions not normally associated with golf. Of course the best golf rivalry of the last half-decade involved him. I said back then that golf is not conducive to rivalries because golfers (like me) normally just hate ourselves instead of others. We have seen the enemy on the course, and it is us.

But Bryson is just so different that he forces you to feel something, and that was certainly the case with Brooks for a bit. I can’t hate a guy who maximized his chances of winning, he described adding distance with trying to become “the house,” which is all sports teams are trying to do with probability. So I can’t respect the Baltimore Ravens or Boston Celtics and not respect Bryson’s strategy. I also appreciate that in an era of faking the desire to grow the game, Bryson really wants to. He’s meeting people where they are. There are certainly annoying things about him, but I want to watch him every time he plays. 

I’d like to shout out Scottie here as well. I walked with him during the Travelers for PGA Tour live and was struck by how human he was. I wish broadcasts showed it a bit more. He went bunker to bunker on the front nine, hitting some awful shots when I was with him and he was acting like you or I would, which I loved.

I think people think he’s a robot but he’s not, he is surgical in his play but has a little more emotion that we think. My line is that everyone—everyone—sucks at golf and I think sometimes we should lean into that more. 

3. What are some amusing similarities in pro golf and pro football that the rest of us who don't cover both entities have never thought of?

I think the internet has made the personality of all athletes more down to earth. They are just dudes. They all scroll instagram, they all read their mentions. They are rich version of us, really. 

For obvious reasons, you’ll end up finding both living in the offseason in a warm state with low taxes. I don’t know if this is surprising, but if you watch either sport up close for literally a second you understand that you were never going pro, and not only that, but the best golfer you’ve ever met was never going pro. The floor on these guys’ games is so high.

I remember a line once from a football broadcaster who said people come up to him in airports asking for advice for their kid who wants to go pro. The broadcaster said “When your kid plays, do other parents complain about him being able to play?” the parent says no and he said “well then he’s got no shot.” And that’s how I feel about golfers too. 

4. QB/golfer comps, don't think, just react. Go.

Josh Allen: Xander Schauffele
Joe Burrow: Cam Young 
Patrick Mahomes: Scottie Scheffler 
Justin Herbert: Viktor Hovland 
C.J. Stroud: Ludvig Aberg 
Brock Purdy: Wyndham Clark 
Baker Mayfield: Brian Harman 
Dak Prescott: Tony Finau 

5. How much do you use golf as an entry point when you're small talking with executives, coaches, other media members and players in the NFL?

Golf is basically the universal language across all other sports. Last week I was in Bristol and doing radio with Justin Pugh who was wearing a Deepdale polo and when we saw the other ESPN talent I knew some had played Deepdale and mentioned it and all the sudden we’re knee deep in golf talk. There are executives like Brandon Beane who are just golf sickos.

Mahomes, Allen, Travis Kelce, Larry Fitzgerald all huge golfers. It’s a good bridge between players and media. Josh Allen told me he played Cypress a few years ago and I recommended Mark Frost’s “The Match” and he said Nantz already got it for him.

Ed. note: Literally zero surprises.

Allen came on my show and he talked about going to Ohoopee with some friends later that month. I actually asked Mahomes about it, and he said once he got to the NFL he got more serious about golf because he needed a second recreation to put his mind into, which I think is healthy. I view it that way too. I have a much less stressful job than he does, but I still need trivial things to worry about. 

The actual danger is that once we start talking golf we might never stop. Seriously. If I walk up to a Steelers exec who I know spent the day at Latrobe Country Club or whatever during training camp we might go through his back nine and never actually get to Justin Fields. 

6. I'm sure the list is long, but what's your favorite normal sport moment while covering football?

True story: I saw Ryan Grigson pacing up and down the press box the night of the Deflategate playoff game, and it kicked off one of the most ridiculous sagas in the history of the sport. Mark Brunell was crying on camera. PSI and ideal gas law were debated like an amendment to the constitution would be. It was hilarious.

I think the most normal sport moment is Belichick’s press conference just before Super Bowl week where, in an impromptu 23-minute speech about atmospheric conditions, he basically made the scientific case he was innocent, even name-checking Mona Lisa Vito from My Cousin Vinny.

I sometimes think the NFL moves too quickly and we forget our history but we should never forget how weird that was. 

7. When (and how) did you fall in love with golf?

I’m sorry to say I didn’t fall in love when I lived in Orlando, which stinks because of how many cool courses are in Florida. I tried in like 2013. I took a lesson in Atlanta on a free day from my training camp tour, but I was living in Hell’s Kitchen without a car and it’s basically impossible to golf like that.

I fell in love with golf in 2016 when I moved to L.A. for The Ringer. A few guys golfed on staff and I started playing the public courses at Griffith Park. I was immediately hooked on it like nothing ever before.

What I like about it is that you can follow threads on golf forever. You like one course, you can read about the architect or the grass type and learn about 50 other courses. You can take one of those 50 courses and learn about a different region’s golf etc etc. You will never learn everything about golf (and needless to say, the golf swing). It will always be a part of my life. 

8. What is a shot or golf moment that you find yourself thinking about all the time?

I will actually never forget my first round in 2016. I was terrified (I still am sometimes) and booked the absolute last tee time on the Wilson course at Griffith Park. It was probably a perfect 65 degrees and my wife actually came with me just to sorta hang out. I was awful. My first drive went 50 yards and sharp right. Topping everything. Whiffing.

But every time I hit it 100 yards (that was rare) I felt like I won the lottery. I knew I’d never give this sport up. If I loved it this much at the absolute worst, I knew I’d be obsessed once I started actually hitting the ball. I was right. It’s a misery we can’t live without.

The only thing worse than golfing is not golfing. 

Thank you for reading until the end.

You’re a sicko, and I’m grateful for it.

If you want to hear more of Kevin, this podcast is a great place to start.

Starting next Tuesday, this is my full time job.

That is terrifying but also thrilling.

Cannot wait.

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