Rich's 'This Was SportsCenter' - Chris Fowler - Season 1, Episode 5

When ESPN came calling in 1986, Chris Fowler assumed the job was SportsCenter. It was not. "Scholastic Sports America was what they had in mind," Fowler told Rich, "which was a high school sports show they were starting up." The offices, he recalled, were "in a trailer in the parking lot" of Bristol, then in roughly its seventh year of existence and, by Fowler's own description, "definitely wasn't the worldwide anything back then."

The unglamorous gig produced a remarkable first credit. "Emmitt Smith was the first athlete I ever profiled," Fowler said. "Pensacola Escambia High School was episode one, interview one." The same magazine show introduced him to future stars in their teenage years: Alonzo Mourning, Billy Owens, Janet Evans, and a young triathlete named Lance Armstrong.

The decision that shaped everything came two years later, when management offered Fowler a plum-sounding role as ESPN's first West Coast SportsCenter reporter. He turned it down. "Something it just didn't feel right to me," he said. The conventional move was to say yes. Instead, a month later, the network offered him sidelines for college football, college basketball studio work, and a Saturday morning pregame show. "Boom. Yes. Instantly on that," Fowler said. "But if I had said yes to the other thing, I never would have got GameDay."

His SportsCenter education was thrown together on the fly. Fowler's first turn came alongside the late Tom Mees, and he confessed he had "really never read a teleprompter" before going on air. As a utility anchor with no permanent partner, he worked a punishing rotation, once doing an 11:30 show, a 2:30 a.m. overnight, and a weekend morning SportsCenter inside a single week. He learned his monthly schedule the way everyone did, scanning a posted list "like your grades are posted on the wall."

That same schedule, Fowler noted, is how Rich and Stuart Scott discovered they were a team. Nobody, Fowler said, sat them down or made the pairing official. They simply kept appearing in the same 2 a.m. line until they turned to each other and asked if they were a team.

The shows Fowler remembers most were the hard ones. He was on the desk with Chris Berman the day Hank Gathers collapsed and died, having profiled the Loyola Marymount star weeks earlier. That episode, Fowler said, was submitted on the Emmy reel and won. He also had to deliver the news of Ayrton Senna's death live on a Sunday morning. "I still get chills about it," he said.

GameDay, Fowler explained, was a slow burn until November 1993, when the show went on the road for top-ranked Florida State against No. 2 Notre Dame, a trip the network feared would cost a then-staggering $50,000. The tipping point crystallized in Lincoln, where Nebraska fans tore down a goalpost and laid it across the desk "like a tusk of a willy mammoth."

Forty years and one employer later, Fowler is, by his own joke, "in my second administration." Rich kept lobbying for one more SportsCenter together. Fowler stayed coy, but the door stayed open.