When Around the Horn signs off for the final time at the end of May, sports media will lose more than just a daily debate show. It’ll lose one of its most consistent rhythms — a familiar voice, a familiar format, and a host who’s been at the center of it all for over two decades.
Tony Reali will be saying goodbye to more than a hosting gig; he’ll be letting go of a piece of himself.
The longtime Around the Horn host joined the Awful Announcing Podcast with host Brandon Contes to reflect on the upcoming finale and what he’ll miss most after 21 years in the moderator’s chair.
Unsurprisingly, the list is long.
“I love my job. I don’t think it’s any mystery to anybody,” Reali said. “I’m doing it now for 21 years. I love waking up in the morning and writing my script, as silly as that sounds. It gives me a place to kind of project something outward. As small as the scripts are for our show, it allows me to start things. So, I’m gonna miss that.”
And yes, he’s going to miss the mutes.
“Everybody asks me, ‘What’s your favorite mute?’ The next one,” Reali quipped. “My next mute is always my favorite mute. So, I’ll miss turning off the microphones. Although that’s not who I am as a person. I don’t want to shut down anybody at any moment, but I’ve enjoyed living in that space a little bit.”
Reali admitted that muting some of the most respected voices in sports media, whether it was Bob Ryan, Woody Paige, Tony Kornheiser, and Michael Wilbon on Pardon the Interruption, took some getting used to.
“I have a strong self-confidence in all of these things,” he says. “But even me, that took me a lot. Everything else, I think I do on the Horn, is me exactly, but me shutting somebody down? Not exactly. I won’t miss that as much.”
What the rest of us will miss — what Contes described so well during their conversation — is the familiarity. The comfort. Even if you weren’t watching closely, Around the Horn was always there, humming in the background. That distinctive music, the rotating panel of voices, the quick hits and quips, it was the sound of sports media’s daily heartbeat.
“Familiar is everything. I mean, that’s family,” Reali said. “That’s the base of that word. And that’s what I liked about it… I think that’s what hit me most of all when the news came out last month, and I was, of course, aware of this and prepared for this for quite some time. It’s all about the interconnectedness. That’s, I think, how I kind of evolved as a human.
“I knew what I wanted to do since I was five years old. I wanted to be a sportscaster. I wanted to call the Yankees. My friends are doing that at the moment. Ryan Ruocco is literally doing that at the moment. Spero Dedes just got off the March Madness. These are guys I worked with my whole life. That wasn’t necessarily the path I took. But what I really recognized after trying to be this smart aleck, know-it-all stat boy, which is who I was in my core, really, how to grow was to be somebody who connected people. And the interconnectedness of the show is, if you really got down to it, what I’m going to miss the most.”
So, just know when Reali mutes someone for the final time, it’ll land a little heavier, even if it was the one part of Around the Horn that never quite felt like him.