PTI turns 25 with Kornheiser and Wilbon mourning the newspaper sports section

Pardon the Interruption marked 25 years on ESPN with an anniversary special, and part of it was about the newspaper business where both hosts started. "The most important thing in my life, and in yours, too, was to be a newspaper sports writer," Tony Kornheiser told Michael Wilbon. "And it's over."

He said he fears his grandsons will never understand what he did for a living. Wilbon's answer was short: "I know. I don't know how to deal with it."

ESPN posted a 22-minute cut of the special on Oct. 22. Asked who has been most worth talking about over 25 years, Wilbon went to his notes and put Tiger Woods first, then Steph Curry, "because he changed basketball." Kornheiser took Tom Brady. Tennis and golf, he said, are "great ornamental sports, not meat and potatoes sports."

They also read from notebooks listing who the other has been too hard on, a file that ran from I-95 and Philadelphia to Jay Cutler, Joel Embiid and Adam Silver. The show replayed old April Fools' bits and the retired games, from Role Play to Good Cop, Bad Cop, and brought back Tony Reali as Stat Boy for one more correction. In the Big Finish, Wilbon said Victor Wembanyama will win five titles in the next 25 years and Patrick Mahomes will end up with four Super Bowls.

Wilbon's longer version

A day earlier, on Oct. 21, Wilbon sat down with Dan Le Batard, who has guest-hosted PTI for years, for 36 minutes on the same question. "When we say it's over," Le Batard asked, "what happened to us?"

Wilbon started with the culture. "We're not a literate people," he said, and "we're not ashamed of not being literate." When Le Batard put a lot of the blame on sports radio, Wilbon agreed it is "largely to blame, not entirely, largely," and added, "There is nothing lazier than sports talk radio that isn't well done."

He spent the most time on what it used to take to earn an opinion. George Solomon, his editor at The Washington Post, only let him write a column on Saturdays, "the paper that mattered less than any other day," so his mistakes would land there. Around 1990, Ralph Wiley would leave voicemails picking his columns apart, because, Wilbon said, Wiley knew "if I failed at this, very likely somebody else wasn't going to get the chance to do it."

He doesn't accept that PTI deals in hot takes. He called the term "a marketing name" and said, "I have an opinion and I will give that opinion and it will be as informed as I can make it." When Le Batard said takes win audiences and are cheap to make, Wilbon asked why those shows "don't get the ratings we get." On Stephen A. Smith, he called him great at what he does, then said "there's a difference between criticism and ridicule."

He saved his harshest word for The New York Times, which he said "bailed on our profession" when it dropped its sports section. "Gutless," he said. Then he asked Le Batard, "Did I stammer?"