Skip Bayless explains why his career is ‘my whole life’ & ‘my calling’

Skip Bayless is, well, a lot of things. It’s hard to imagine you are a U.S. sports fan and don’t have some kind of opinion about Fox Sports’ one-man hot take machine and the career he’s made for himself, even if that opinion involves avoiding everything and anything he says.

The 70-year-old, who has never been shy about the drive and single-minded focus that took him from print journalist to radio show host to ESPN personality and where he is today. On the third episode of his new podcast, The Skip Bayless Show, Bayless ended up digressing from Tom Brady’s potential retirement to discuss the sacrifices he chose to make in order to do what he does for a living.

“I chose in my 20s, as I was coming up in this business, to not have children. I married not my high school sweetheart but my junior high sweetheart and one reason we didn’t make it was, I knew she wanted kids and I knew the deeper I got into my career, I just couldn’t have kids. I am obsessed to this moment with what I’m doing right here, right now with you. I live for this. It’s my whole life. It’s my calling. It’s not a job, it’s my passion. It’s what I was born to do and what I want to continue to do as long as my personal situation will allow it.

“Then, after that relationship ended, my first marriage, I had a longer-term relationship with another woman and in the end, she just had to have children. I said, ‘I can’t.’ I tried to get there and I couldn’t get there. I just knew I was going to have to move to move up — that’s how this business works — and I just knew that if I continue to work nights and weekends the way I do obsessively, that I’d be a horrible father. I’d be as horrible a father as my father was for other reasons and I wasn’t going to inflict that on kids. Not fair, not worth it, no. I’m married to this.

“Then I met my wife, Ernestine, 17 years ago in New York City. On our first date, as she will attest, I said ‘hey, if this happens to go anywhere, I’m sorry but I’m declaring myself upfront, you’ll always be No. 2 to my job, which is my life.'”

Gonna be honest, not really sure what to do with all of this. Certainly, everyone is free to make the kind of major life decisions that Skip describes here. And good for him for being honest with others about his intentions, life goals, and realities. Plenty of people never do that.

Everyone is allowed to decide that their career is the most important thing in their life if that’s what drives them, for better or worse. But, like…this is what you did it for, Skip? In order to say things like this? And do things like this? This is what you’re going to look back and say you sacrificed everything else in order to do and be remembered for? To have your peers and colleagues think of you like this?

To each their own.

[Skip Bayless. via The Big Lead]