click to enlarge Woody Paige and Harry Lyles Jr. during their March 6 showdown on Around the Horn. ESPN/Photo by Michael Roberts
On March 7, Woody Paige would have had every reason to be depressed. After all, just three days earlier, ESPN revealed the cancellation of Around the Horn , a daily sports dish-fest that has featured Paige for 23 years, since its debut in 2002.The final episode is set to air on May 23.But Paige, 78, is anything but downbeat, in part because of a positive resolution to a medical crisis he’s kept quiet until now. Just over a month ago, he underwent facial surgery for melanoma — a procedure that resulted in a six-inch scar that he’s currently doing his best to cover by growing a beard. Fortunately, his prognosis is positive and has provided some much-needed perspective about the fate of his national television home for almost a quarter-century.”If anyone is trying to make me feel bad aboutgoing off the air,” he says, “I heard a week before the announcement that I was cancer-free.”As such, he maintains, “I’m the luckiest person in Colorado,” only to amend that assertion seconds later before firing off an-esque take about politics.”Actually, I’m the second-luckiest person in Colorado. The luckiest person in Colorado is Lauren Boebert. I think if you’re caught giving someone a hand-job at[a debatable claim] and you get kicked out of the DCPA [not debatable], and you didn’t graduate from high school but you’re still in Congress, that’s lucky.”He adds, “I saw her asking questions of the Denver mayor the other day” — on Wednesday, Mayor Mike Johnston testified at the U.S. Capitol about the city’s immigration policies — “and I thought they were the stupidest questions I’ve ever heard.”Another recent feel-good moment for Paige was provided by’s March 6 edition, when he was the subject of a tribute reminiscent of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn eavesdropping on their own funeral.The concept ofcalls for a quartet of panelists to offer takes about hot sports topics of the day, with host Tony Reali awarding points to the participants whose responses he most enjoys — but, as Paige readily admits, “the scoring system is goofy and basically nonexistent.” The pair with the highest scores at the end of two rounds then take part in a lightning-round showdown, and the winner, determined by Reali, is rewarded with a half-minute or so of face time to talk about anything they wish.On March 6, Paige made the finals and tried hard to top the other finalist, ESPN college football analyst Harry Lyles Jr. Through that day’s program, he’d notched 684 wins in 2,956 appearances — both records — and while he acknowledges that getting to his goal of 700 victories is ultra-unlikely given’s fast-approaching end date, he wants to put up the biggest total he can before the studio lights dim for the last time.Lyles earned the face time that day, only to use the spotlight shone on him to salute Paige.”As one of the younger panelists on this show, a lot of us grew up coming home from school and watching this particular program,” Lyles said. “One of the people we always saw was Woody Paige. And whether you loved him or hated him, you always tuned into the show to see what that man was going to say. That also goes for those of you watching at home. I have to say, you still see Woody’s influence all over sports media today in terms of the shows that you watch, the styles that people have. And it gave me a path to know where I wanted to be in my career. This show is one of those things and, Woody Paige, I would not be here without your influence.”To that, Reali replied, “I still think Woody would rather have a win, but there we go. Woody, we love you.”Reali was right, Paige confirms. “I would much rather have won than had Harry talk about me,” he says. “But when he did, I started crying.”The impact ofcreated by Erik Rydholm, who’s also the man behind, the iconic staple that immediately follows it — was impossible for Paige to envision in 2002, when ESPN reached out to the then-columnist and asked him to be a part of the venture along with fellow scribes from Dallas, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston.”I have a theory about why they picked newspaper columnists to begin with,” he says of fellow longtimers such as Tim Cowlishaw, Bill Plaschke, Bob Ryan and Jay Mariotti, who Paige frankly confesses to hating. (He used to refer to Mariotti, who last appeared onin 2010, as “Richard,” because it was the closest he could come to calling him “Dick.”)”One reason was to give the show a kind of regional flair. But the biggest reason, I think, although nobody told us this, is so they could dismiss us more easily. If something we said made people mad, they could say, ‘They’re not employees. They’re independent contractors. Their opinions aren’t the opinions of ESPN.'”Paige concedes that, originally hosted by Max Kellerman (Reali came aboard in 2004), took a while to find its footing. Initially, in his view, no one could decide if the show should present serious debates along the lines of, which bowed on ESPN in 1999, or be more lighthearted — and by opting for the latter tone, Paige made himself a target of criticism.”I was being condemned by media columnists who were my friends,” he recalls. “A guy in Nashville that I got a job for condemned me and said the show was like,” a 1960s sitcom widely viewed as the worst network show ever. “I couldn’t sleep at night. I drank too much.”Indeed, Paige concedes that before the end of’s first thirteen weeks (the span to which ESPN had committed), he went to network honchos and said he wanted to resign because he was embarrassed by his performance and didn’t think anyone was watching. But before he could pull the plug, he learned that there actually were fans of the— just not any that he’d noticed.”I went to a CU game, and I usually don’t leave the press box, but there was construction at the stadium, and I walked over at halftime to see what it looked like,” he says. “And all of a sudden, I was surrounded by college students screaming and hollering like a rock star had showed up — and there was this one girl who came up to me and said, ‘You’re Bobby Paige! You’re Bobby Paige!’ I said, ‘No, I’m Woody Paige.’ She said, ‘My boyfriend watches you every day. The other day, he even watched you while we were making love’ — and I thought, wow, too much information. She asked me to sign an autograph to him — his name was David — and I wrote, ‘Thanks for watching, and don’t have sex during the show,’ and signed it, ‘Bobby Paige.'”This was a light-bulb moment for Paige, who realized, “The audience wasn’t a 48-year-old at a company, and it wasn’t any of the media columnists saying how awful it was, and it wasn’t any of my friends; none of them watched. It was high school students, college students and guys at sports bars. That was the changing moment for me. I called ESPN and told them, ‘I’m still doing the show.'”made Paige a national star and earned him a slot on another ESPN program,, which ran from 2003 to 2007; he confirms that the gig, for which he moved to New York, paid him $1 million per annum. Afterwas sent to the dumpster, he moved back to Denver and continued his work as a sports columnist for thebefore being lured to the. But through it all, he remained a regular guest on, if a less frequent one.”I went from five days a week for five or ten years to three or two days a week — and that was basically my decision,” he says. “The show started out as four middle-aged white guys talking about sports, but I think one of the most important changes in the landscape of ESPN was adding more women and diverse voices. It started with Jackie McMullan in Boston, and then they added more Black columnists, like Kevin Blackistone and J.A. Adande. I guess it flies in the face of where we are as a country now, but we went from five of us to about 22 now — and we’ve had Cuban Americans, gay Americans, lesbian Americans, Filipino Americans, Asian Americans. I don’t think there’s been a more diverse program in the history of sports television.”He believeswas key to producing a new generation of sports personalities that didn’t fit the typical mold, Mina Kimes, Monica McNutt and Sarah Spain among them. Likewise, Paige creditswith pioneering a number of other innovations that are now familiar, including an on-screen scroll teasing the topics to come.As for whywas axed, Paige isn’t sure, but he’s got some suspicions. In 2024, ESPN went through a series of management shakeups , including the dismissal of five powerful executives in August. He doesn’t believe the program’s ratings had cratered; Reali told him the numbers related to the coveted 18-34 demographics were the net’s best.Paige thinks the new brain trust wanted to put their stamp on the platform. Hence, a call from Rydholm last November informing him thatwould be going away sometime in 2025. He thought it might hang on until early summer and wondered if the final broadcast might happen on June 27, his 79th birthday.But it wasn’t to be. Paige learned about the May 23 shutdown schedule through the press.The latest contract Paige signed extends well beyond that date, and he has no idea if ESPN has plans for him afterward. But if his relationship with the cable giant ends in May, he’s at peace with the development, since the rewards he’s received fromhave already exceeded any reasonable expectations he might have had.”When Harry talked about watching this show and wanting to be on it when he grew up, I definitely understand it,” he notes. “When I was growing up, I watched the Mouseketeers on, and my dream was to be a Mouseketeer. And I grew up to be a Mouseketeer. I work for Disney [the parent company of ESPN]. The envelope my paycheck comes in has mouse ears on it. I’ve performed at Disney World about six times and I’m doing a show where I’m kind of different and unique. So to me, I’m a Mouseketeer, and my dream came true.”The fantasy isn’t over. When he got the melanoma diagnosis, Paige feared the worst. “I lost my sister and my mother to cancer, and in both those cases, I felt like I deserved it more than they did, because they were good people,” he says. “Family is the most important thing, and my daughter is more important to me thanor the Denveror even my cancer. That’s why I’m the luckiest person in Colorado — except for someone who’s in Congress.”