Max Kellerman might’ve mistaken Woody Paige for someone who gave a sh*t.
At least that’s how Paige remembers it, recounting a moment from more than two decades ago, seated across from Kellerman at Carnegie Deli. The longtime Denver-based columnist had just met with two ESPN executives during Super Bowl week, where he was told the network wanted a new show to complement Pardon the Interruption, which is still going strong.
Now, 23 years later, with Around the Horn approaching its end, Paige reflected on its origins during an interview with Adam Schein on SiriusXM’s Mad Dog Sports Radio. He’s told pieces of the story before, such as how he was ESPN’s original hire, and how the show was pitched to him as Hollywood Squares, but with sports. Paige would be one of the stars; the fast-talking Kellerman was tapped to host.
Paige didn’t buy it.
He didn’t get the concept, didn’t believe it would last, and didn’t particularly care for what Kellerman had to say about boxing, or the New York Yankees. But somewhere between bites of a pastrami sandwich, he stopped Kellerman in his tracks. That, Paige says, is when the show began to make a little more sense, thanks partly to producer Bill Wolff, who told him the idea was simple: It’s like you’re arguing about sports at a bar.
That was the pitch. And it stuck.
But Paige didn’t stick initially.
“Tim Cowlishaw said, ‘We didn’t think you belonged on the show, and then we found out you were the show, so we had to develop personalities,’” Paige told Schein, as transcribed by Barrett Media. “Bob Ryan was a serious, serious journalist on Sunday mornings on Sports Reporters. Bob Ryan showed us an entirely new side where he could be the elder professor and tell us what we’re doing, and we had fun with it, and I think people saw that, and they were confused about scoring, and they were confused about journalists being on TV every day.”
And don’t worry, Paige didn’t understand the scoring system either. In fact, he still doesn’t.
“I think people became very comfortable with the concept of what we were doing and trying to figure out the scoring system, which I still have never figured out, and it was something comfortable in the afternoon,” Paige said via Barrett. “I asked somebody in the beginning, I said, ‘Who’s going to watch this show?’ And they said, ‘Drunks at bars and college kids.’ Well, college and high school kids really adopted it, and people who came home at 5:00 in the East would say, ‘Well, let’s sit down and watch this.’”
Despite his skepticism and self-deprecating humor, Paige became Around the Horn’s anchor of chaos and charm. He turned his chalkboard gimmick into a trademark, his quirks into currency on a points system he never understood.
Now, as ESPN prepares to turn out the lights on a sports media institution, Paige remains one of the show’s most memorable panelists, a terrific columnist who became a television stalwart almost by accident.
Not bad for a guy who wanted to mute Kellerman from the start.