Rich's 'This Was SportsCenter' - Linda Cohn - Season 1, Episode 4

For episode four of This Was SportsCenter, Rich welcomed Linda Cohn, the person who has anchored more SportsCenters than any human on earth, and the first guest of the series to visit the Rich Eisen Show studios in Los Angeles. He even broke out the only SportsCenter Emmy he ever won, from 1996, the year he and Cohn took home the trophy together.

The reunion doubled as a pair of origin stories. Rich arrived from tiny Redding, California, at 26, having mailed a tape to a headhunter on a whim, and showed up at ESPN in early 1996 to find a newsroom bigger than his entire small-market operation, full of faces he'd watched on TV, Cohn among them. He still has a bone to pick that columnist Rudy Martzke named Chris McKendry the 1996 rookie of the year over him.

Cohn's path was longer. A New Yorker grinding seven days a week in radio and volunteering on Long Island cable to cut a VHS tape, she broke through in Seattle at KIRO, covering the Seahawks, Sonics, and Mariners and a young Gary Payton. She turned down an early ESPN offer from talent scout Al Jaffe to keep honing her skills, a decision she credits for making her better, and had her daughter there, making her, as the show joked, sleepless in Seattle before the movie. Her best Seattle tale was Ken Griffey Jr. rubbing her pregnant belly and talking to the baby, the Kid welcoming a kid. Years later, a retired Griffey turned cold during an ESPN junket interview, only to track down Cohn's number afterward and apologize, a lesson, she said, in not putting people on pedestals.

The two also charted how SportsCenter changed. Cohn recalled lobbying Norby Williamson to keep the new bottom-line ticker from spoiling the very scores she was setting up, a technological non-starter given the rundown's timing. The ticker, born on cable news around 9/11, changed how anchors could tell stories, and Cohn remembered she and Stuart Scott anchoring the first 11 p.m. show after the attacks. When Rich left for NFL Network, he found nothing matched ESPN's platform, but what he missed most, and what Cohn pulled out of him, was the campus and the camaraderie. The grass, he admitted, isn't always greener.

The centerpiece was a story only This Was SportsCenter could surface. Assigned the boxing beat he didn't want, Rich covered the Holyfield-Moorer rematch in Las Vegas but pitched a piece on the Vegas scene instead of the fight. Knowing David Cassidy, Cohn's first love as a 12-year-old, was performing in town, Rich got Cassidy to autograph a headshot of Cohn herself and prop it on his dressing-room mirror, as if Cassidy pined for her every night. He drove a rented red convertible around town with the Blue Man Group and aired it live at the crack of dawn, only for host Jack Edwards to throw back with a flat "looking forward to the fight."

They closed on the familiar touchstones, including the day of the O.J. Simpson chase, when Cohn sat wordlessly at the desk with Gary Miller during the Knicks-Rockets Finals while a freshly graduated Rich watched in a Chicago bar and blurted out a flagrant-foul call. Both, it turned out, did their very first SportsCenter with Chris Myers. The episode, presented by Gusto, ended with Rich teasing the final two of the season, Chris Fowler and Craig Kilborn, and calling the whole thing his Emmy all over again.