Michael Wilbon, the longtime ESPN commentator and acclaimed former Washington Post sports columnist, is taking an indefinite break from television.
The 67-year-old announced that he will step away from Pardon The Interruption while dealing with unspecified health concerns. He will also take a leave from his NBA assignments.
“This isn’t retirement, but it is a trip to the injured list,” Wilbon said in a statement.
“I have no idea how this part of my journey will wind up. The goal of it is to come out of it feeling much better than I do now and ready to return to sparring with Tony.”
The “Tony” Wilbon mentioned is his PTI co-host, fellow former Washington Post writer Tony Kornheiser. The pair have argued, debated and traded opinions on weekday evenings for nearly 25 years.
Wilbon said he had noticed warning signs but should have paid closer attention to his health.
Wilbon said he is dealing with health concerns and will now step away indefinitely
Michael Wilbon (right, with Tony Kornheiser), the former Washington Post sports columnist, is taking a break from the ESPN program they have co-hosted since 2001
“And as one close friend has said as my issues have become bigger, ‘the bill has come due,’” Wilbon wrote. “The struggles are all health related, not to alcohol (I’m not swearing off the now-and-then Kier Royale) and not to gambling (those winds of change I find loathsome).”
Several temporary guest hosts are expected to fill in on the program, including former ESPN personality Pablo Torre and Frank Isola, a frequent contributor to the network who is best known for his years covering the Knicks for the New York Daily News. ESPN has not announced its longer-term replacement plans.
Wilbon, who has type 2 diabetes, suffered a heart attack in Arizona in 2008. Doctors treated the Chicago native with an angioplasty.
After graduating from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Wilbon established himself as a leading voice covering Major League Baseball, the NFL and the NBA for the Post during the 1980s and 1990s. He also began appearing on ESPN’s The Sports Reporters and other programs on the network.
Wilbon (left) and Kornheiser (right) first became colleagues at the Washington Post
His biggest national breakthrough came in 2001, when he joined Kornheiser as one half of Pardon The Interruption’s signature on-air partnership.
The married father has covered 10 Olympic Games, every Super Bowl since 1987, nearly every Final Four since 1982 and an almost four-decade run of NBA Finals.
Wilbon also holds a unique place in college basketball history as the only mainland journalist present for little-known Chaminade’s stunning upset of future NBA star Ralph Sampson and top-ranked Virginia in 1982. He had traveled to Hawaii to cover the No. 16 Maryland football team against No. 9 Washington in the Aloha Bowl, but was assigned to cover Virginia’s men’s basketball team a few nights earlier at the Honolulu International Center.
The result was such an improbable upset that many basketball fans on the East Coast initially doubted the box scores appearing in newspapers, in some cases days later. Chaminade, an NAIA program largely unknown outside Hawaii, landed the matchup with the nation’s No. 1 team under an NCAA rule that allowed schools to schedule additional games at distant sites such as Hawaii and Alaska.
Michael Wilbon announced his indefinite leave in a statement
Virginia’s Ralph Sampson (50) battles Chaminade’s Richard Haenisch during one of basketball’s greatest upsets. Wilbon was covering the game but missed his deadline after it ended late at the 4,000-seat Honolulu International Center
Virginia coach Terry Holland had arranged the game with Chaminade at a small, 4,000-seat gym, expecting an easy victory for the Cavaliers.
Instead, the 7-foot-4 Sampson scored only 12 points, while the Silverswords shot nearly 50 percent from the field in a historic 77-72 triumph.
“People were in disbelief,” Wilbon told The Associated Press years later. “It wasn’t like today. I don’t remember people rushing the floor. It might have been chaotic then, but not by today’s standards. You had the biggest upset in the history of college basketball and no one quite knew what to do.”
Because the game ended so late, Wilbon had no realistic chance of getting his story into the next day’s edition of the Post.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’” Wilbon recalled. “I called the paper and asked, ‘Are you guys listening?’ They were like, ‘Yeah, but we put the paper to bed.’ I’ve never been angrier in my life, professionally, because they put it to bed and the next morning there was nothing in my paper.”
