Of all the major American sports, football is probably the most difficult beat for a sportswriter to tackle. Team rosters are substantially larger than they are in other sports, coaches can be notoriously cagey, coaching staffs guard information as if they’re countries guarding national security secrets, and the salary cap is so complex that one virtually needs a Ph.D. in mathematics to make sense of it. Combined with needing to master the various machinations of roster move strategies (raise your hand if you know what it means when a team places the “transition tag” on a player), practice squad transactions, and the implications of “dead money” cap hits on teams’ free agency plans, covering the NFL may be as difficult of a challenge as there is in any area of journalism.
All of this serves to make good and accurate reporting on the NFL that much more impressive — and top NFL reporters that much more valuable to their news organizations. For the past three decades, no one did it better, and no one was more valuable to his employer, than Chris Mortensen.
Mortensen, the outstanding and award-winning ESPN reporter who was one of the media faces of the NFL for a generation of football fans, died this week in Birmingham, Alabama, at the age of 72. Mortensen was born in 1951 in Torrance, California, a city about 25 miles south of Los Angeles. After graduating from nearby El Camino College, Mortensen served in the U.S. Army for two years, which included tours of duty in Vietnam. Shortly after his military service, he joined the staff of the Southern California paper South Bay Daily Breeze, where he won the National Headliner Award for investigative reporting in 1978.
In 1983, Mortensen was hired by the higher-profile Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he would cover baseball and college sports. For those like myself who associate Mortensen with the NFL to such an extent that “Mort” (as he was affectionately known by his colleagues and fans) became synonymous with NFL reporting, it may surprising to learn that for the majority of his early career, Mort was not an NFL reporter; he was a sports reporter, and a great one at that. Mortensen won the prestigious George Polk Award in long-form investigative journalism in 1987, was made a Sporting News columnist in 1990, and earned two Pulitzer Prize nominations. Having been a sports generalist before becoming a football specialist may have helped Mortensen become such an excellent NFL reporter. He understood the broader American sports ecosystem — college athletics, as well as professional sports — in which the NFL resided and how football interrelated with other American sports, even as it was in the process of surpassing them in fan interest and media attention.
Mortensen began to acquire national renown when he left regional sports reporting in 1991 to become an NFL reporter for the burgeoning sports media powerhouse ESPN. In doing so, Mort became a journalistic pioneer, becoming one of the first print sports journalists to leave a highly regarded newspaper in order to work full-time for a sports television outlet. His thorough and well-sourced reporting lent journalistic credibility to ESPN’s NFL coverage as the nascent New England-based sports network was seeking to prove itself as a legitimate broadcast partner for the most powerful American sports league. (ESPN would eventually acquire the rights to broadcast Monday Night Football during Mortensen’s tenure with the network.)
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At the same time, Mortensen’s affable, easygoing screen presence and mellow delivery, unflappable even when reporting on the trickiest stories, continued to earn him more and more prime screen time on ESPN’s signature show, SportsCenter, as well as on ESPN’s ever-expanding roster of football-only shows, such as NFL Countdown and NFL Live. I’m confident that I speak for many football fans when I admit that I would often only glancingly “watch” these shows in recent years, just having them on in the background while I would do other things, like answer emails or check my calendar. But when I would hear the show’s anchor say, “OK, now let’s go to Mort,” my ears would always perk up, and I would start actually paying attention to the show because I knew that whatever Mort would have to say would be important.
ESPN’s Adam Schefter, the NFL reporter who has inherited Mort’s mantle as the current most-trusted voice in football coverage, called Mortensen “ESPN’s reporting conscience” — and, in an even greater compliment, described Mort as “a great reporter, and an even better man.” Our experiences as football fans, and our lives, were better off for having had Mort in them.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His latest book, Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America, was published this summer by the University of Alabama Press.