Chris Fowler on His Deeply Personal ‘Finding My Father’ ESPN Documentary

Chris Fowler joined Rich to talk about the most personal project of his career, a SportsCenter feature called Finding My Father, airing on Father's Day, built around audio tapes his dad recorded before dying of cancer when Fowler was just 16.

The tapes sat undiscovered for decades. Fowler's father had been recording them hoping to write a book about his experience as a cancer patient and the lessons he was learning, but no one found them until Fowler's mother passed away and his brother Drew came across a dusty cardboard box of cassettes in the basement. Like many who lose a parent young, Fowler felt he never really got to know his dad, and his dad never got to know him as a fully formed person, dying before Fowler attended the same school his father had. So he poured a glass of Pappy Van Winkle, sat in his mountain house late at night, and worked through about ten hours of content that blew him away and sent him on a path to learn more.

What he found was a different man than he remembered. His father was a college theater professor and director, and Fowler got to hear sides of him he never saw, then spoke with former students now in their 70s about the impact he still had on their lives. One of those connections was Joyce DeWitt, the Three's Company star his father directed in summer stock long before her fame, and a family friend Fowler hadn't spoken to in about 40 years. Now living quietly in Santa Fe, she told a 63-year-old Fowler that his dad was the best and favorite director she'd ever worked with, on stage, TV, or film, which landed like a lightning bolt.

The hardest discovery was the darkness. The tapes weren't addressed to Fowler or Drew but to a hoped-for collaborator on the book, and they captured how lonely and deeply depressed his father was while separated from the family, getting treatment in Colorado while the boys finished the school year in Pennsylvania. In that 1970s era, Fowler said, the strategy was to let kids be kids and keep them in the dark, so he only learned by listening decades later how dark that place truly was. He drew the contrast to how openly people like Stuart Scott, Jim Valvano, and Dick Vitale have since shared their own journeys.

Rich, who lost his own father six years ago and feels him every day, asked whether Fowler now sees how his dad lives through him. Fowler said they're quite different. His father craved fame and was a bit narcissistic, traits Fowler likes to think he's kept at bay, since he never got into this to be the center of attention. The lingering questions, whether they'd have been friends given such distinct personalities, are the cost of never knowing him as an adult. But Fowler took real comfort in learning his father left a piece of himself with so many people and made their lives better. Finding My Father airs in the 8 a.m. hour of SportsCenter on Father's Day.