Two years before the pandemic, Monica McNutt returned home to live with her parents.
Despite her current success as an ESPN analyst covering NBA, WNBA, and college basketball, McNutt opened up about a challenging period in her life. She’s quickly risen to stardom, and that was even before her spat with Stephen A. Smith on First Take, in which she questioned his coverage of women’s basketball.
But it always wasn’t this way for McNutt. Nothing was handed to her.
On the 7PM in Brooklyn with Carmelo Anthony & Kid Mero podcast, McNutt recently revealed being laid off twice within three years. She admitted facing financial difficulties during this time, struggling to pay bills, and even explaining the situation to bill collectors.
So when she got a phone call from an unknown number, she figured it was about an unpaid bill.
“I get a call from a number I didn’t know,” she said. “I turned out to be (Patricia) Lowry, who at the time was the coordinating producer at ESPN over women’s college basketball. I’m like, ‘Oh, I know who you are. How can I help you?’ She’s like, ‘I need you to go to my tournament this weekend. This is a Wednesday. Need you to watch our games on Friday, do our studio coverage on Saturday. Can you do it?’ And I was supposed to go to LA for Big East coverage, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’ll figure it out. I can do it.’
“So, that weekend, we knock it out of the park. It was great. So, she’s like, ‘The ACC Network, a subsidiary of ESPN, is launching in the Fall; you’ll hear from me.’ So, that was definitely the moment I was like, ‘Alright, this is the traction we need to get this thing back on the track for sure.'”
Kid Mero asked McNutt how that made her feel.
“At that point, I was legit about to go coach basketball and teach English,” she explained. “Like, we’ll figure it out. I can have a beautiful life, even if it doesn’t look the way I hoped and dreamed…It was like one of those moments that once you let it go, it comes back. Like, it was that. I had truly surrendered…I’m gonna do what I can. I can do it as a hobby because I love it, but these bills…I can’t keep being like, ‘Imma get you when I got it.’ So it was one of those moments of sometimes you can’t hold things so tightly.
“You destroy it, crush it, whatever the analogy you want to use. You just gotta let it be. I think that was the larger message: you really can’t control — control is dangerous.”
[7PM in Brooklyn with Carmelo Anthony & Kid Mero]