Kenny Mayne is seeking new career opportunities after he left ESPN earlier this year. To hear him tell it, he is unshackled from the corporate edict to stick to sports – and stay away from politics – and went as far as to say his Twitter page was monitored on an internal “watch list” lest he veer too far to the left.
In an interview with The Ringer, Mayne spoke about how his ESPN exit ultimately came down to a substantial pay cut request. Speaking matter-of-factly as opposed to bitterly, he explained details about his interactions with ESPN studio production EVP Norby Williamson, who’s in charge of “SportsCenter” and all of the network’s TV and radio talk programming, about both his contract and social media.
Mayne mentioned that he did not have the courage to go as far with his tweets as Jemele Hill, as he did not want to get fired. Nonetheless, he says he was “definitely on the watch list. They told me so: ‘There’s a group of people that watch your Twitter.’”
He recalled an instance when President Trump was given a cleaner bill of health than one would have thought by his doctor, and Mayne sent the following tweet poking fun at it:
“I got a Norby call on that one,” Mayne said, noting that there was another occasion when Williamson asked him, “Why do you have to do the politics?” Mayne responded to his boss, “Because I have four daughters and a wife and I want to look at myself in the mirror.”
If you’ve been paying attention to the trajectory of ESPN over the last five or six years, none of this will be surprising. Williamson has been internally and externally vocal about his belief that ESPN viewers do not wish to hear political opinions from ESPN personalities. Williamson has worked at the network since 1985 and he believes the audience wants meat-and-potatoes sports talk: Who won the game? Who is going to win the game? Trades, free agency rumors, draft evaluations, and now gambling lines.
Williamson and ESPN have achieved these preferences to varying levels of success — last summer, when there were few to no sports, ESPN talked extensively on-air about George Floyd’s death and the subsequent fallout throughout America — and have persistently grappled with social media, where many talents believe they should be afforded more individuality and the freedom to speak out about what they believe to be unacceptable injustices. The prevailing attitude of Williamson with ESPN personalities has been that talents who wish to opine on politics should work somewhere else.
In response to questions about the alleged “watch list” and other inquiries about Mayne, an ESPN spokesperson sent The Ringer the following statement attributed to Norby Williamson: “Kenny was a key figure in building ESPN. We’ll always be grateful for his creativity, passion and work ethic. We wish him continued success.”
Mayne also spoke, as he has been doing since he announced that he was an ESPN cap casualty on Twitter, about the pay cut. He said that Williamson told him he wouldn’t like the company’s offer and would think he’d be worth more. Mayne phrased it as ESPN “essentially set an over/under” on him.
The Post’s Andrew Marchand reported in May that Mayne had been making $1.5 million annually on his last deal; Mayne had previously told The Athletic that ESPN had offered him “a 14 percent reduction in time worked and a 61 percent reduction in money earned” and that he “thought the variance was too much.”