Nearly a quarter-century ago, in the middle of ESPN’s golden age, network president Mark Shapiro debuted a novel banter talk show with only the most modest ambitions: Pardon the Interruption featured a pair of balding, grizzled, middle-aged Washington Post columnists, who had either been kicked upstairs or downstairs after years of regular appearances on The Sports Reporters, the old Sunday morning Dick Schaap roundtable. In those early days, Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon were almost comically transparent about their unusual, and perhaps precarious, leap from the smoky newsroom into the celluloid boob tube during the invisible lead-in hour to SportsCenter. Indeed, neither were matinee-idol-attractive or even entirely media trained. Their chief talent, in fact, was arguing about sports—and they were preternaturally great at arguing with each other about sports.