Mike Greenberg has done nearly every job at ESPN. But his latest project is as the host of a show you might not expect to see “Greeny” in. Bettor Days with Mike Greenberg, a series co-produced by Greenberg that premiered its second season last week on ESPN+, reenacts the dramatic stories of extraordinary gambling snafus. The eight-episode run is told across many sports and cities and spans the spectrum from heart-warming to zany as it takes sports fans inside the wild world of sports betting.
“The show is really not about gambling as much as it’s about gamblers and all the fascinating things that people do when they are in the midst of gambling,” Greenberg told Uproxx.
For someone who is usually seen at the desk of ESPN’s top radio and TV shows, focusing in on a shorter, narrative series is a unique turn for Greenberg, become one of ESPN’s highest-profile hosts since leaving Mike & Mike. The series gave him an opportunity to find stories in a part of sports that most fans are still getting attuned to.
“It’s a person who’s in the middle of a drama, bordering on a crisis, so those are fascinating stories to tell,” Greenberg said.
The host of Get Up! and his own radio show, Greeny, in addition to Bettor Days, took some time last week to discuss the show and his career with Uproxx.
What was it like doing this second season of Bettor Days and if there’s story you would highlight for sports fans who want to get a taste of what the show is like, which one was most striking to you?
The first question is easy. The second season was much easier to do because I had a much better understanding from a hosting perspective of what we were going for. When we created it originally, any time something is just an idea, you never really know exactly how it’s going to work. You can make a series of educated guesses, but one of my favorite expressions is you can never really get anything right until you’ve first gotten it at least a little bit wrong.
So I think when we shot the first four episodes having never put one together, because we shot them all in two days, I was just trying to figure out how to best serve the role of the host and the narrator of that show. Having been able to now see the four and how they came together and be part of that, it was much easier to host it. I realized I really am just the narrator of a story. That’s what I am. Not literally, but figuratively. We are telling a story and I am just facilitating the telling of that story.
As far as the memorable ones from season two, we shot eight episodes in two days. Each story has its own really wonderful charm. What I can tell you is one of them resulted in a law being changed, and another of them was about a guy who, unbeknownst to him, has a winning ticket on a bet in Vegas. He throws it away because he doesn’t realize it’s a winning ticket due to a variety of circumstances, and a total stranger chases him down to return it to him so that he has a winning ticket. In the gambling milieu, who knows what (viewers’) visions of the people are, but there are quite a few heartwarming, really wonderful stories that come from these bets being placed as well.
Have you personally ever been the betting type? Do you have any unfortunate bad beat stories?
Don’t we all. I grew up and my father loved horse racing. I grew up going to the horse track. My father loved harness racing, so we would go to Yonkers and we would go to Roosevelt and every now and then the Meadowlands, and we would watch harness racing, the trotters and the pacers. And I loved it. And that’s how I learned about gambling. That sport basically is gambling for most people.
Like anyone, I would place a bet and get some action on football when I was in college, that sort of thing. I dabbled in it, but I was not heavily into it. I love a casino and I would play blackjack and craps and all that stuff anytime. But when I got into our business, I thought that at that time, it just would not be appropriate for me to be gambling on sports. Nobody ever told me that, it just felt wrong.
So I didn’t do it forever, but now that so much of that is changing and not only that it’s legal now in a number of places, but people’s perception of it has changed so greatly. I think there was always a feeling because of the illegality of it that there was something very shady about gambling. As people continue to move away from that mindset, it becomes an incredibly important part not only of sports but also our industry.
You mentioned how long you’ve been in this business, and that encapsulates quite a bit of change in how betting is involved in the consumption and coverage of sports. I wonder what you make of that change over time and if you thought we would get to this place and if it feels like you thought it would feel when we got here, and what it’s like to be finally talking about some of these things out in the open?
You’re 100 percent correct. That was an enormous change and it happened in the blink of an eye. I can’t give you an exact date but I can tell you that as recently as probably three or four years ago, on an average show that I hosted on the network, and for 18 years that show (Mike & Mike) was four hours long, we would not make a single reference to gambling. I would not reference a point spread, I would not reference an over-under. It doesn’t mean I never would, but the overwhelming majority of shows, they would not be referenced at all.
Now, and it feels like a blink of an eye that this change took place, that’s one of the first areas of subject matter that we touch on, on shows like Get Up! and SportsCenter. Everything we do, one of the considerations is we know that’s what our audience wants to know, and our job ultimately is the audience has a menu and we’re trying to serve the dish that they want on their TV screens. They want that information, so one of the very first considerations we make in almost any story we are going to cover is what are the gambling implications, and those are front and center in the presentation of every show. There is not a single day that goes by now where there is not at least some reference to or consideration of gambling that is given in the subject matter of a show that I do.
I’m curious now that you have been away from Mike & Mike for a few years, I would imagine that change takes years to get used to. You must come across things that are different (about leaving) than you might have thought. Did you ever have a sense coming off that show that you may not have made the right choice? Was there ever doubt about that?
Actually there was not. Everything in life has its place and its time. You’re never guaranteed that anything will succeed. I’ll give you the best example that I can offer you. In 2007, something like that, I got the opportunity to host a game show called Duel on ABC. And I am a game show junkie, I grew up loving game shows. I hosted the show and I loved it. I loved the experience and I loved all the people I met. I loved having had the opportunity to do it.
And the show wasn’t anywhere near the success we hoped it would be, or really at all. It didn’t do especially well and it didn’t last. But as I was saying the other day, I never think about that as having been a failure, and I never for one second regret having done it. In life, you’re not guaranteed of things.
When we launched Get Up!, whether it was immediately the greatest show of all time or the worst show of all time, or like most things, somewhere in between, I never for one second thought, ‘this was a mistake.’ Even if we had only lasted six months and gotten canceled, I guess you could say it didn’t succeed, but I would never have taken that as a failure. You try things sometimes, and if they don’t work, you try something else.
We had an extraordinary run on Mike & Mike. It was exceptional. And then we moved onto something new, and I’m delighted things have worked out as well as they have, including Get Up!, which I worked really, really hard on. But if they hadn’t, then that’s life, and you keep trying until you find something that does.
ESPN is a network full of debate shows, why have we never seen Mike Greenberg cast on a head-to-head sports talk show?
I guess Mike & Mike was somewhat of a debate show, when we disagreed, we would go at it. We never faked that. But you have to know your strengths. My role at ESPN is to be a host. I am a host, and being a host is a little bit of a different skill set, and I think my best role is to facilitate interesting discussion, and the interesting nature of that discussion can take a lot of different forms. Sometimes that’s analysis, sometimes it’s humor, sometimes it’s in debate, but that is really what I do best, and how I can best be in service to the people who pay me, is to bring the best out of other people.
The reality is if I tried to be Stephen A. Smith — Stephen A is a friend of mine for 15 years, and I have nothing but the utmost respect for him — and if I tried to be him, I would not be able to do it. I know well that that’s not what I do well.
Something I think our readers would be interested in from your perspective is who is someone else around the sports media landscape, whether it is a teammate of yours at ESPN or someone doing your job elsewhere that you think is doing a great job right now?
Oh my goodness, there’s so many people. I have long said that my idol in the industry is Bob Costas. Someone once called me a poor man’s Bob Costas and I told them that was the greatest compliment anyone had ever paid me in my entire life. I think he’s as good as anyone who’s ever done it.
I could start rattling off names of people who I think are exceptional, but just at our place, in different areas, Stephen A. is singular and is exceptionally good at what he does, I think Rece Davis is exceptional at what he does, I think Doris Burke is exceptional at what she does, and then any number of other people looking at other networks. Mike Tirico is a longstanding friend of mine and I think he is as talented as anybody we have in the industry.
It goes on and on. Much more than just being a person who is in the industry, I am a viewer and a listener, and there are any number of people who I think are terrific. That’s just a very small list of them.
