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" Dan Pugh has made a career of knowing sports for three decades. Since before he became Dan Patrick, the co-anchor of ESPN&amp;#039;s 11 p.m. edition of SportsCenter in the mid-&amp;#039;90s \u2014 a broadcast he and partner Keith Olbermann mockingly referred to as &amp;quot;The Big Show.&amp;quot; Today, you can&amp;#039;t stop him; you can only hope to contain him. Six years into helming The Dan Patrick Show, he&amp;#039;s become a staple in NBC Sports&amp;#039;s lineup, holding down Football Night in America on NFL Sundays, and hosting his first Olympics in London last summer. Earlier this month, Patrick was awarded his second Sportscaster of the Year Award. He recently sat down with us to talk about the art of interviewing, handing out the Lombardi Trophy, and his all-time NBA starting five. \u2014Interviewed by Jeff DiNunzio I have done speeches in the mirror before. I&amp;#039;ve never interviewed me. There are voices in my head that are interviewing me or talking to me.  I overanalyze people&amp;#039;s interviewing skills. Always ask a question that is going to get someone to talk. That&amp;#039;s tough. You want to be smart. You want to ask the question that has a little bit of perspective in it. It&amp;#039;s how you ask the tough questions.  I took a seminar at the Mothership, for 8 hours for 5 days, on the art of interviewing. I got to understand the process. If I go from A to Z, how am I getting there? It&amp;#039;s like an accordion: if it&amp;#039;s this big, then you&amp;#039;re in trouble. THIS big, you&amp;#039;re great. I knew at age 12. We&amp;#039;d get a copy of Sports Illustrated on Wednesday, and I&amp;#039;d read the articles and cut out all the pictures before my dad got home. I was fascinated with stats. It wasn&amp;#039;t really deeper than that. I didn&amp;#039;t have a fallback. I thought I&amp;#039;d tend bar or I&amp;#039;d be a sportscaster. I was too na\u00EFve to know what I didn&amp;#039;t know. I didn&amp;#039;t know that hair parted down the middle, and it&amp;#039;s around your shoulders, and you got acne, and you&amp;#039;re 6&amp;#039;3&amp;quot;, 148, the camera doesn&amp;#039;t exactly fall in love with me. I knew sports. I&amp;#039;d go to parties, and you&amp;#039;d have to stump me before you could leave. I had some girlfriends that were pissed off at me. They&amp;#039;d be, &amp;quot;Oh God, will you just miss the question?&amp;quot; No, if you left my party, you had to stump me. I grew up in a competitive family, and I want to be great. Every day, every hour, every half hour, every question, every interview. The last couple of years at ESPN I forgot to enjoy what I was doing. And I made sure doing this I was going to have fun, and that&amp;#039;s been the difference.  I would watch every SportsCenter. I&amp;#039;d grab the tape, go upstairs, and watch what I did wrong. Keith [Olbermann] is seeing me put myself through this for six months. And in a Keith-like moment says, &amp;quot;You got the fucking job.&amp;quot; And it hit me, he&amp;#039;s right. Stop looking at the negative. Look at what you&amp;#039;re doing and how to make it even better.  The only thing I&amp;#039;ve done on radio that I didn&amp;#039;t do on TV was be myself. We called it the Big Show because we didn&amp;#039;t know who the fuck was watching! We mocked ourselves. The first person I ran into who let me know how big it had gotten was Bill Murray. We were doing a pub crawl in Lower Manhattan, and went by Antique Boutique and Billy went in and came out with an orange tie. He goes, &amp;quot;Didn&amp;#039;t you say how if you&amp;#039;re the head coach of Tennessee the toughest part would be to find ties that color?&amp;quot; And I&amp;#039;d said it on the air. I&amp;#039;m going, &amp;quot;Holy shit!&amp;quot; I was going to sign another five-year deal with ESPN, and my wife said, &amp;quot;You know the kids are going to be gone by the time this is done.&amp;quot; If she hadn&amp;#039;t said it, I might still be there.  I was so insecure at ESPN \u2014 because they never embraced us \u2014 that I did radio because I thought it was harder to fire me. People thought I got demoted. Are you kidding me? It&amp;#039;s the purest medium we still have in this industry! I&amp;#039;m not here to manipulate you. I don&amp;#039;t have to be somebody when I go on the air.  We&amp;#039;re not SportsCenter. There are some things I don&amp;#039;t give a shit about. &amp;quot;Why?&amp;quot; is a great question. Patrick Ewing was on the other day, and I was curious why he didn&amp;#039;t go to North Carolina. All of a sudden he starts talking about the KKK rally. If you think you know what the answer is going to be, you&amp;#039;ll never get that spontaneity. I just try to be curious with people, and I listen to their answers. That&amp;#039;s the key. Tonya Harding was a difficult interview because she came on with a false pretense. You want to talk about how you&amp;#039;re going to make an appearance for a minor league hockey team? Okay, we&amp;#039;ll get to that. But I got to talk about all this other shit. She gets offended, and her manager gets on the phone, and I say I&amp;#039;m doing a radio interview here. We&amp;#039;re live on the air. That was awkwardly entertaining.  I have to live up to your expectations. Sometimes I&amp;#039;m asking you live up to mine. It&amp;#039;s easier if you&amp;#039;re honest. I didn&amp;#039;t tell anybody in my family I was handing out the Super Bowl trophy. I thought, let them have the excitement of being in the moment, let them experience it through me. The next time I handed out the trophy, the Giants won. We&amp;#039;re on the podium, and I have the keys to a special-edition Corvette. Eli doesn&amp;#039;t have a deal with Chevrolet. I&amp;#039;m in front of 110 million people and I&amp;#039;m reading off a card, &amp;quot;As the MVP...&amp;quot; and I turn around, and he&amp;#039;s walking back and I&amp;#039;m yelling &amp;quot;ELI!&amp;quot; He wouldn&amp;#039;t turn around. So, I said, &amp;quot;Here&amp;#039;s your keys. Get home safely.&amp;quot; I asked him, where&amp;#039;s that car? He goes, &amp;quot;I got it at my house in Mississippi.&amp;quot; I think Brent [Musburger] is one of the most underrated sportscasters in history. Al Michaels, he&amp;#039;s one of the great play-by-play guys of all time. Doc Emrick? I hope I&amp;#039;m the gentleman he is. I saw Tiger walk up 18 when he won Augusta for the first time. I was there in &amp;#039;86 for the Buckner error. To see all those Super Bowls. It&amp;#039;s too long a list of those moments where you go, &amp;quot;I just witnessed that. You&amp;#039;re lucky.&amp;quot;  Nobody cares if you&amp;#039;re cheating in football, but we care about baseball. It&amp;#039;s selective outrage. Magic and Michael and Larry and LeBron and Hakeem. I&amp;#039;ll take my chances. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/sports/news/a23236/dan-patrick-interview/>