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TONY KORNHEISER:

There’s an old story about the guy who goes to Wimbledon for the first time and he looks at the grass courts and he says, “Oh, my God, these are beautiful. How did they get so green?” And his friend answers, “Well, you start with five thousand years of rain.” You can’t just put people in a booth together and say, “Have chemistry.” It doesn’t work that way. What Wilbon and I have is five thousand years of rain. It started in 1980. We didn’t go on the air until 2001. We never thought about going on the air. We were friends, we had adjoining offices, we yelled at each other. When PTI went on the air, and it was on the TV sets in the sports department at the Washington Post, people didn’t even look up. They’d heard us argue so many times, they simply assumed we were in the building. After a while they looked up because we weren’t cursing—that would be the only difference on television. If PTI had been on HBO, nobody would’ve ever looked up because the show’s open would always be the same: “Pardon the interruption, I’m Mike Wilbon… blah blah blah, I’m Tony Kornheiser, how the fuck are you?”

CHRISTINE BRENNAN, Reporter:

I’d be on my phone at my desk at the Post, and Kornheiser and Wilbon would be screaming and arguing, and I’d say, “Excuse me,” and I’d put my hand over the phone and say to them, “Hey, guys, can you take it somewhere else?” Well, they took it somewhere else, all right.

MICHAEL WILBON:

Tony and I both said we wouldn’t do the show if we had to do it in Bristol. I had interacted with enough people at ESPN to know there’s a certain reverence that Tony and I do not buy into. We didn’t grow up at ESPN, we grew up as cynics, and cynical is not the mood “on campus.”

Erik Rydholm had grown up in Chicago, and got his television experience bouncing from one midwestern TV newsroom to another in the early 1990s. Then the Internet began to bubble and, with friends Tom and David Gardner, Rydholm founded the Motley Fool, a stock-tip service that was originally affiliated with AOL and, when it became a success, migrated to a website of its own.

Having been enormously impressed with how smart Rydholm was during six months he spent working in the Chicago bureau, Jim Cohen mounted an aggressive campaign to land him as producer of PTI. But Rydholm didn’t want to work for a big company. All righty, then: Cohen took care of that by telling him to start his own, which wound up helping ESPN, because at the time, Disney had imposed an employee head-count freeze. Cohen and Rydholm worked out an agreement whereby Rydholm would hire and pay employees and all ESPN had to do was provide offices and technical facilities. Cohen even took care of Rydholm’s disinterest in technical production, promising him that he would be responsible only for editorial matters.

So it was that Erik Rydholm rode into Washington, D.C., and in the process changed the direction of his life and that of quite a few others—principally Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon. The unusual arrangement proved to be one of ESPN’s most important hires of the decade, bringing a big brain and relatively small ego—rare in a single individual—into the ESPN fold.

ERIK RYDHOLM, Executive Producer:

Cohen asked me if I read Kornheiser and Wilbon, and I said yes, then he told me, “The idea is to have a daily show with daily takes on the news. Do you think that’s a good idea?” I said yes again, and then wrote him eighteen pages as to why. I thought if they actually talked about today’s issues, ratings would go up, because there was no other place for people to watch sports television in that time slot. Then Jim asked me if I wanted to produce the show, and I said no.

I didn’t want to be a television producer again—but I really wanted to be involved with those two guys. One older, one younger; one black, one white; one Jewish, one gentile. And they were so well educated, and had such an interest in, and perspective on, a world beyond sports. They also had the only relationship I’d ever seen