Scott Van Pelt has been hosting his nightly SportsCenter with Stanford Steve for each of the last eight years on ESPN. Even though he has done it for a long time, he still feels like it is not hard work for him because of the joy that sports can bring.
Van Pelt was a guest on the Get A Grip With Shane Bacon podcast this week and he said that watching sports daily is still interesting to him because you never know what can happen on any given night.
“It’s still interesting to me on a daily basis. Basically every night, the show I have done by myself with Stanford Steve, this is our 8th year and it’s a lot of being sort of a one-man band out there blowing on the kazoo and banging on the drum, but it doesn’t feel like a chore to do it. It doesn’t feel like hard work to do it because there’s some event, some result, some individual accomplishment on a daily basis that feels worthy of elevation, of celebration. That’s the only thing I think that keeps me not going, but at some point, you start thinking ‘Where are we on the back 9 here?’…I just want the sun to stay up and I just want to keep playing. I still enjoy that.”
While it is still interesting to Van Pelt, he does need days where he can unwind, which usually happens after the NBA Finals ends when he signs off from doing the nightly SportsCenter until around when college football starts.
“We get to the point on the back end of the NBA Finals where it’s sort of like being a teacher, you kind of have that summer schedule where after the NBA Finals, we sort of give everybody a wave and say ‘We’ll see you for football’ and I’m gone. It’s necessary just because I’m not a laborer, I don’t work hard like others work hard so I’m not asking anyone to pity me. But, there’s only so much mental energy you have and at some point, you just need to unplug from producing an hour or more of a show every day…By the time the drums and fight songs and college football gears up in August, you’re like ‘Giddy up, let’s go’.”
Outside of The Masters coverage, Van Pelt and ESPN only get to broadcast one other event during the year (The PGA Championship). During that broadcast, Van Pelt and the ESPN team try to have as much fun as they can because they enjoy the company they get to keep during that week:
“We do one event a year. That’s the thing that blows my mind about all of it. You look up and Bob Wischusen’s been doing hockey after doing college basketball. Sean McDonough has been all over being a great broadcaster in anything that he does. Dave Flemming is doing basketball, then doing the Giants. David Duval, I see once a year, then Andy North, and Curtis Strange. You go on down the line. There’s no ego. Everyone just kind of gets along. We get a kick out of what we do.
“We get a lot of praise for not showing a lot of ads. We are on ESPN+, we can just kind of let it rip, man, and we do. We do our level best to show as much as we can.
“It’s a TV show. You are trying to make it fun, but it’s not like we have some bullet points ‘Make sure you do this’. We just get along, everyone knows the assignment, and we are genuinely enjoying the company of people we are with.”
