CLEVELAND – When Sage Steele prepared the week before her commencement speech at Indiana, she was nervous and still a little surprised. College wasn’t an easy road for her, and despite eventually becoming a national TV personality, she was the type of painfully shy kid who was scared to speak in public, so much so that her parents thought about taking her to specialists to try and address the situation when she was younger.
Long past that stage by 2015, now the host of ESPN’s NBA Countdown, Steele was still anxious about speaking in front of all those graduates with the world ahead of them.
Why me?, she thought. They could have picked anyone.
But they picked her. And she decided to use her unique perspective –including the academic struggles she had while she was at Bloomington, and the time she was called into the Dean’s Office for poor grades – to relate to the students. Steele considers herself an open book, and she’s never afraid to speak her mind, and that’s something that has carried her from stop to stop, and eventually to the Worldwide Leader, a job she dreamt of having from the moment she started in broadcasting.
“People see you on TV and see this smile and the clothes and this amazing job,” Steele says from a room at the Vault Nightclub in the basement of the Metropolitan at the 9 a few hours before Game 3 of the 2016 NBA Finals, “which is all true, but it’s okay to let people in on the other side. People look at everybody from afar, whether it’s Hollywood or professional athletes, but everybody has something else. I’m more than happy to share my imperfections – the list is very long – but it was amazing to be able to do it on that sort of platform and let these kids know that this is what happened, and this is what it took. I was here, at the lowest point possible, but I still had this dream and went after it, and didn’t realize until afterwards how important some of those decisions were.”
Being asked to give that speech is one of the biggest honors of Steele’s life, and it took her back to some advice her father Gary – the first black player to make the varsity Army football team in 1966 – has repeated throughout her life, a line from the West Point “Cadet Prayer” that reads, “Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.”
That harder right has popped up numerous times for Steele over the years, none more important than a difficult conversation she had with the news director at her first big job in Indianapolis at a local CBS affiliate in 1997.
Steele was in credit card debt, still paying off some silly purchases and decisions she made in college, and was living month to month despite being a visible sports anchor and reporter around town with producing chops. She was making $23,000 a year at the time and was up for a $2,000 raise in a few months, but she went to the news director and asked if she could essentially get an advance on that raise due to her hard work and the tough spot she was in.
His response?
She wasn’t worth it.
It’s hard to imagine anyone ever thinking that now, seeing Steele on camera or meeting her in person. She commands the room, speaking with expertise and a well-balanced mixture of snark and empathy. She’s not afraid to put someone in their place if need be, but she’s always quick with a joke or an aside to lighten the mood.
The news director didn’t see all those things. He saw a young woman in the sports journalism field he could push around. And Sage was presented with the chance to take the harder right or the easier wrong. She could have sat there and taken those words quietly, letting a misguided superior define her value for her.
Instead, she chose the harder right.
“I’m working crazy hours,” Steele says. “I did everything possible, and I was the first female sportscaster in that market. I was young, and female, and African-American, and people weren’t accepting of any of it. I thought about what my dad said. It’s harder to address it, and to say, ‘what do you mean I’m not worth it?’ and swallow that lump in my throat that was trying to make me start bawling. I did the harder thing, and stood and asked, and listened, and disagreed. I called my parents, and my dad told me, ‘okay, what are you going to do now?’”
What she did was hire an agent, and she found another job in Florida. But to get out of her contract, the Indianapolis station required her to pay back her initial moving expenses from South Bend, which were right around $980. She borrowed money from her parents, and eventually paid them back, but she says she wanted to pay the station in nickels.
“I decided to be the bigger person and just said here you go,” Steele says. “Here’s your $980, for the person you said wasn’t worth it anyway. You’re tempted to do things the wrong way because it feels good. He was probably right about where I was talent-wise, but is that the way to make me better?”
So when you see Steele get into a verbal debate with Brian Billick and not back down, or side-eye Bill Simmons on a broadcast, or push back on Arcade Fire lead singer Win Butler’s political posturing during a All-Star Celebrity Game MVP ceremony, the rationale behind those moments starts to make sense.
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Much of Steele’s past, present, and future can be traced back to that day in the news director’s office, when she simply wouldn’t back down.
Had she walked out of that room with her head bowed, we may never have had Sage Steele, SportsCenter anchor, or even the Sage Steele that did such great work at Comcast SportsNet. There are plenty of people who are faced with similar situations when they’re chasing their dream who do choose the easier wrong, and give up entirely. Steele wasn’t going to be one of those people, and she doesn’t want others to do that either.
“It was such a progression and a slow climb,” Steele says. “It’s just the next step. You’re able to gain perspective and wisdom. Not that I expected to be here, but my dream truly was SportsCenter, and I did it. How many people actually get to achieve their dream? And Countdown is a whole new thing. You never know what opening up your experiences to others can do. It has helped me so much, too, to own my crap.”
The constant motion and moving – from Bloomington to South Bend to Indianapolis to Tampa to Baltimore and D.C. to Bristol and on – could be dizzying to some, but it’s just part of life for Sage. She was raised with that military background, and would stay in some places for as little as six months at a time. But each time, her mother did something that made a big difference.
Her mom would make sure to paint and wallpaper the house they lived in so that it felt like home. Every single move, she did that. That gesture, despite all the work that went into it, gave the space a safe feeling the family needed. Her mom told her, “I wanted each place to feel like a home, not a house.”
So it’s not a surprise that when Steele was asked to do NBA Countdown, she embraced it even though it was a different role entirely for her than SportsCenter. And when she and her husband and kids moved from Bristol to Arizona to be closer to Los Angeles, she did so without hesitation.
“Once I move, I kind of move on,” Steele says.
Change is something Steele embraces, and that flexibility and adaptability (she’s been a host, a broadcaster, an anchor, a sideline reporter, an interviewer, a producer, and more over the years) is one of the qualities that allowed her to make that progressive climb over the years and got her to where she is today.
“People might forget that she’s worked really hard to get where she’s at,” ESPN senior vice president of production and remote events Mark Gross says. “And she worked her way up in the walls of Bristol. She always stayed patient, and good things happened. But one of the biggest things she’s worked on this year is just relaxing. She has a much better feel of when to insert herself in the conversation, and when to sit back and let everybody else do their thing. She’s so much more comfortable.”
The Countdown transition has been exactly that, a transition, but Steele has gotten more comfortable as she’s gotten more reps. Sure, she still admittedly talks too fast (something she jokes about frequently – and something that news director brought up as a point of criticism way back when), but she’s seeing openings to interject her own thoughts and stats in the broadcast, keeping Jalen Rose and Doug Collins on topic or knowing when to let them go off, and she’s tackling tough interviews (including NBA Commissioner Adam Silver prior to Game 3).
Countdown will never be Inside the NBA, and that’s okay. Those two programs are doing different things on different networks serving different needs, and all Steele can do is continue to improve and make Countdown the best show it possibly can be. There’s been a lot of change over the years for Countdown which hasn’t helped consistency, but Steele seems more entrenched in her role than ever there, and she’s improved because of it.
“I love Sage,” 13-year NBA veteran and NBA Countdown analyst Jalen Rose says. “I’ve known her since she was working in Indianapolis while I played there. She does a terrific job of keeping us in line, especially me, calling me out because I tend to go on the third rail every now and then. You have to have the flexibility and versatility to entertain not only diehard fans, but everyone from infants to the elderly. When you have such a wide reach, you have to walk a fine line and stay entertaining, and she helps us do a great job of that.”
The fact that Steele has made her moves from stop to stop gives her the confidence to make her own calls, and the Celebrity Game incident back in February was no exception.
The Friday night broadcast was coming to a close, and Butler had just been named MVP, a truly tremendous honor in such a hard-fought and difficult contest where Kevin Hart started the game as a coach and at halftime suited up to make the decision to play. The game was so serious that at one point in time Tracy McGrady picked up Muggsy Bogues and then gently sat him down in a chair along the baseline.
Butler, a Canadian playing the game in Toronto, was interviewed after the game at center court. He took that opportunity to mention universal health care, and Steele made the call on her own to move on. She didn’t have a producer in her ear telling her to do so, she just felt that this wasn’t the right situation to bring that up.
“Dude, I don’t care what you think,” Steele says. “Time and place. We just played a Celebrity All-Star Game of all things. But I got nailed for that, and others were very supportive. Usually there isn’t a follow-up, but I asked him one question and I gave him the whole opportunity to be happy. He said what he said, and I got killed for it. All those comments like Sage Steele does not believe that Americans should have health care. I mean, okay. It was just a gut reaction, and I try to make myself a viewer in everything we do. This was no different.”
Steele has conscientiously tried to take the past year to ignore the noise more often than normal, although she admits it’s tough from time to time not to respond to criticism. She still wants to make people happy as much as possible, and that’ll never change, but that’s simply not realistic.
If anything, it’s that old adage that the air is thinner at the top, and after the climb Steele has had, it’d be nice to take a deep breath once in awhile.
“It’s my choice whether or not to let all of that affect me, but that’s a change I’ve made lately that I think is going to help everything in my life. People see this picture and this face and you can love me or hate me, but you can’t argue with the fact that I worked my way up.”
