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The next day, they had me do some reporting from L.A. and I eventually got the first interview with Artest some time later. But Artest got me on the phone that night and I reported it on SportsCenter. He said he was just acting in self-defense, it was just a reaction. Then the next day he told me Ben Wallace had called to apologize to him. Wallace denies that to this day.

JOHN SAUNDERS:

I was hosting College GameDay one time and Todd Boseman, the coach at Cal at the time, reached around and took a punch or a swing at a fan during a game, and the producer in my ear said, “This just came over the wire, we gotta do this story, Todd Boseman threw a punch.” And I said, “Does it say in the wire story why he threw a punch?” And he said, “No.” Then I asked, “Does it say in the wire story what the fan behind the bench said to Boseman?” and the producer said, “No, it doesn’t,” and I said, “Then I’m not going to do the story. Because I guarantee you that the fan used the N word. That’s the only thing I can think of that would cause a black coach to turn around and take a swing at a fan.” The producer was trying to be adamant: “You gotta do this.” I said, “Unless you’re going to come down here, pull me out of the chair, sit in the chair yourself, and do the story, those words are not coming out of my mouth.” About an hour later, the wire came over again, and it turned out that was exactly the case. The fan had called him a nigger, and that’s what had turned him, and so then I went with the story.

JASON WHITLOCK, Writer:

Race at ESPN is a complicated issue. I give ESPN credit for hiring a lot of minorities, but I do think that under Mark Shapiro there was a certain type of minority that they loved to promote—the more animated, stereotypical, hip-hop, or whatever. I went to a meeting on the campus at Bristol with Mark Shapiro and Vince Doria, and afterward,

Vince Doria told me in private—and these aren’t his exact words—that it was a great time to be like Stuart Scott and Stephen A. Smith, and the message seemed to be “You need to hip-hop-up your delivery on ESPN. It needs to be more rapperish”—or whatever. Those aren’t his exact words, but I almost think he said “stereotypically black.”

I do think they had an image that they thought worked for black people on their air, and they wanted everybody to be more like Stuart Scott and Stephen A. Smith, and that’s just not the shtick I wanted to do on television. Again, I give them credit for giving blacks a lot of opportunities, but I think they bought into a certain style of being black as what they thought would work. At one time at ESPN.com you had Ralph Wiley as one of your top columnists, and Bill Simmons. Ralph Wiley is one of the best journalists among black journalists and a mentor-friend of mine. He had a lot of leverage and was very well-respected and he was difficult to deal with because you couldn’t tell him anything. But when Ralph Wiley passed away, they said, “We’re not going to have any more guys like this,” and it’s why they started promoting a guy like Scoop Jackson, who had been writing for Slam magazine and had been kind of a hip-hop sportswriter, and they installed him as the replacement for Ralph Wiley. Some of us didn’t think he took it all that seriously. His positions were easy to dismiss because you didn’t have to take him all that seriously.

This is why I think ESPN struggles: it’s almost like—I’ve got to be careful—but it’s almost like you’ve got to be cartoonish to be black and have success at ESPN. Wilbon flies in the face of that because he’s very professional and very talented and has to be respected, but for the most part, I felt like with everybody else, they were looking for a cartoon character. I think that’s changed a little bit of late. Still, ESPN’s not a place that’s going to have a very serious discussion of the race issue led by any minorities for the most part. Maybe they think the issue of race is too dangerous; I don’t know why. I felt that in order for me to reach my full potential as a columnist