Rich's 'This Was SportsCenter' - Mike Greenberg - Season 1, Episode 3

Chris Berman gave Mike Greenberg a two-word welcome to ESPN that the Get Up host says changed how he saw the place forever. "There was something about Chris Berman saying, 'Welcome home,'" Greenberg told Rich on the latest edition of "This Was SportsCenter." "That began that evolution in my mind of, 'Yeah, this is home now. This is where I'm going to be.'"

The moment came in a bathroom, of all places. Greenberg, six to eight months into anchoring an ESPN News show "that literally nine people are watching," was shaving shirtless after a brutal commute back from Chicago, where he was visiting the girlfriend who would become his wife of 28 years. Berman walked in, asked how he was doing, heard about the travel grind, and said, "Well, welcome home." Greenberg had spent 11 years building a life in Chicago. Two words started turning Bristol into something other than a place he came to work five days a week.

What struck both men is that Rich has nearly the same story. His version involved a makeup chair, a rack of ESPN charity banners he was too afraid to sign, and a question about how many SportsCenters he had to do before he had earned the right. Berman's answer was a question of his own about how many SportsCenters Rich had done. At least one. Then sign them all, Berman told him. Rich unsheathed the pen and went down the row.

"The through line of your story and mine is he made both of us comfortable," Greenberg said. "And he didn't have to do that." He credits Berman and the late Bob Ley as the figures whose approval mattered most, the originals who "put the bricks in place for everyone who came subsequently."

The episode doubles as an honest accounting of why SportsCenter cannot go back to what fans remember. Greenberg, who left the nightly highlight grind in 2003 when management pushed anchors toward on-air arguing, made the case plainly. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, SportsCenter was simply how you found out whether your team won. He once nearly cried in an Ann Arbor basement, hungover, the morning he realized he still cared if the Knicks had won, proof he was not going to die. That world is gone. "Your kids wouldn't watch that and my kids wouldn't watch that because it's just not the world they live in."

Greenberg, now 29 years in and 58 years old, framed his own place with characteristic deference. He did not build ESPN, he said. He walked into something already built and found his spot. The first four letters of his obituary will be E-S-P-N, and he knows it.

The same welcome closed the conversation. "Welcome home," Rich said. "I love it."