The $ports Guy: The Making Of Darren Rovell

The Making Of The $ports Guy
SPORTS BIZ WITH DARREN ROVELL -- Pictured: Darren Rovell at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, WI as part of NBCUniversal's NFL Kick Off (Photo by Paul Drinkwater/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)
SPORTS BIZ WITH DARREN ROVELL -- Pictured: Darren Rovell at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, WI as part of NBCUniversal's NFL Kick Off (Photo by Paul Drinkwater/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)

Darren Rovell, just shy of 400,000 followers strong, does not exist on Twitter alone — his return to ESPN after six years at CNBC includes filing reported stories regularly and shooting non-sports segments for ABC News — but it’s what he thinks about, and what people think about when they think about Darren Rovell. (Even his detractors would grant that he’s been instrumental in changing the nature of sports reporting.) He will regularly spend hours researching and crafting a single tweet; there are whole Tumblrs devoted to criticizing his online output. He compares what he does to VH1’s Pop-up Video, dropping salient, bite-sized business-related footnotes to events we’re watching as fans. The often angry reaction thereto speaks to the uneasy relationship between sports’ string-pullers and the fans they ostensibly serve, as well as to his own murky relationship to both. (His Twitter background, in case any of this is too subtle: stacks of cash.) He does not profess to be sticking up for the little guy, and yet he firmly considers what he does to be, above all, a public service.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot