How long can one man orient his life around the unbelievably demanding but ultimately vacuous race to tweet out transactional NBA news a few seconds faster than the competition? ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski has found his personal answer. The 55-year-old reporter announced Wednesday morning that he is leaving the industry to become general manager of the men's basketball program at St. Bonaventure, his alma mater. Fittingly, Woj broke the news himself with a tweeted graphic.
"I understand the commitment required in my role and it’s an investment that I’m no longer driven to make. Time isn’t in endless supply and I want to spend mine in ways that are more personally meaningful," he wrote, in the most heartening segment of his announcement. His role at St. Bonaventure will involve recruiting players, managing the transfer portal, fundraising, and handling NIL opportunities.
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— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) September 18, 2024
Wojnarowski's plotting had no leaks; he reportedly surprised his bosses at ESPN when he told them the news this morning. The company soon published its own story, which was triple-bylined by other sports' scoopsters, presumably in his honor. According to The Athletic, Wojnarowski walked away from around $20 million, as he makes roughly $7 million per year and had three years left on his deal:
Wojnarowski conveyed to his ESPN bosses that he was completely burned out from the incessant news breaking that required him to be on his phone nearly 24/7.
Wojnarowski told his bosses that with the NBA season around the corner, the thought of only having three hours of sleep per night to keep up with the latest transactions and information was unappealing. He thought he could have gone on for one more season, but the St. Bonaventure job excited him in a way that news breaking no longer did.
The Athletic
The work hours weren't always this perverse. A former newspaper reporter and columnist, Wojnarowski spent the last and most famous phase of his career tweeting out bits of news known to NBA fans as "Woj bombs," later rolling those reports into longer articles on ESPN, occasionally appearing on TV, and hosting his own podcast. His career is a useful index of the constantly shifting incentives over the last 15-odd years in sports media: Even a name-brand, newspaper-weaned reporter employed by an establishment outlet was not insulated from the expansion of the "news cycle" into a samsara of screen time. The final Woj bomb, on Sept. 14, detailed Isaac Okoro's three-year, $38 million deal with the Cleveland Cavaliers. The wing acknowledged the honor.
Wojnarowski spent a decade at Yahoo Sports, fighting ESPN for scoops with a ferocity that some described as "jihad." His arrival at ESPN in 2017 shook up the NBA desk, ejecting rivals and those with competing visions of league coverage. But the most fascinating consequence of Woj's move was how directly it pitted him against his former Yahoo protégé, Shams Charania, 25 years his junior, already making a name in the art of writing spectacularly weird sentences while carrying water for an expansive network of sports agents. Wojnarowski and Charania spent the next seven years warring for the same scraps of information, refusing to directly acknowledge one another, and abiding by a certain scoopster bushido.
Both men abandoned the possibility of well-rested lives in order to pursue extremely well-compensated phone addiction. The elder hit his physical limit first. In the absence of his chief competitor, Charania's quality of life and job prospects might improve, but will his vigilance decline? Will his writing get worse? Can it? Perhaps NBA fans will have to settle for learning the same information six minutes later than they would have otherwise.
Wojnarowski helped pioneer a diseased syntactical style now synonymous with the sports scoop industry, and while Defector awarded him the 2022 Shamsy for the below passage, he merits a lifetime achievement honor in the category:
For everything owner Joe Tsai and general manager Sean Marks did to assemble one of the modern NBA's most talented Big 3s, Irving's impenetrable connection to Durant looms as a domino to the dismantling of the roster. Brooklyn is straddling the narrowest of walkways: Keeping conviction on Irving's contract talks and keeping Durant's desire to stay a Net.
Wojnarowski spent every draft night consulting his thesaurus. He wrote some strange columns about LeBron James, one gross one about J.R. Smith, one good email, and over 26,000 tweets. He was a fixture—perhaps the central fixture—of the soap opera-style coverage that rejects the concept of an offseason and defines modern NBA fandom. That's a pretty fun fandom, even if it evidently has a human cost. Goodbye, Woj. You taught us that it was immensely lucrative to befriend agents, eschew sleep, and compose tweets, but more importantly, you taught us that it was OK to ramp up toward weirdness.
