As Mike Tirico gets set to call his 28th Open Championship as a broadcaster, Dan Patrick doesn’t seem totally over the fact that it could have been him.
Tirico joined The Dan Patrick Show Thursday morning to discuss the 154th Open Championship which is taking place this week and weekend at Royal Birkdale. And during the interview, Patrick reminded Tirico he was almost put in that same announcer’s chair.
When ABC held the rights to the prestigious golf major, they were tasked with replacing Brent Musburger as the Open Championship announcer in 1997. The network ultimately picked Tirico, but at the time, Patrick was in consideration for the role. And Patrick remembers making the four-minute walk to the studio for his 11pm SportsCenter, when he was abruptly stopped at 10:53pm by a boss who informed him the position was going to Tirico.
“I said, couldn’t this wait?” Patrick recalled. “I’m gonna go do a SportsCenter! So I’m doing the entire SportsCenter thinking about, ‘Well, I didn’t want the golf, but I would have loved to have the golf.’ And now I’m mad that I’m not getting it.”
The executive claimed USA Today was about to break the news about Tirico getting golf, so they wanted to make sure Patrick heard the decision from ESPN before he read about it.
“Couldn’t you have told me before the story was going to break? Maybe 4 o’clock in the afternoon? Unbelievable,” Patrick lamented. “It will be in the book that I don’t write.”
“I’m glad that you’ve let it go,” Tirico joked.
Tirico held the position throughout the Open Championship’s tenure on ABC and ESPN. And when Tirico moved to NBC in 2016, the Open Championship conveniently and coincidentally moved with him.
But the bigger news here might be that Patrick isn’t thinking about writing a tell-all book on his time at ESPN. Because Patrick has amazing stories to tell, and he seems to love telling them. Now it’s on a publisher to convince Patrick he should start writing them.
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