Bristol, CT – May 18, 2015 – Studio X: Scott Van Pelt on the set of SportsCenter
(Photo by Allen Kee / ESPN Images)

In case you missed it, here is Scott Van Pelt’s interview with Dan Patrick Monday on the debut of Van Pelt’s solo version of “SportsCenter” at midnight ET.

Patrick kept on his visitor’s pass to make it clear he wouldn’t be returning to ESPN.

Also, check out end of interview when Patrick discusses how he recruited Van Pelt to join ESPN.

In case you missed it, here is Gene Wojciechowski’s story on Alabama kicker Adam Griffith that aired on ESPN College GameDay Saturday.

It is an incredible story. Well worth your time.

Richard Deitsch of SI.com talked to Wojciechowski about his reporting for the piece.

Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports media:

Richard Sandomir of the New York Times gave high marks to Jessica Mendoza for her work in ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball booth. She was terrific. You definitely will see her on more MLB games.

Jessica Mendoza showed Sunday night that she belongs in ESPN’s regular rotation of baseball game analysts, with a smart, understated stint in place of Curt Schilling.

She did not sound nervous. She did not push herself into conversations whenever a thought occurred to her. She had an easy camaraderie with the play-by-play announcer Dan Shulman and the analyst John Kruk, with whom she worked at the women’s College World Series in 2008. Sometimes she offered the first analysis of a play, sometimes Kruk did, alternating easily as veteran partners might.

More important, she spoke knowledgeably about batting mechanics, pitch sequences and the way Cubs pitcher Jake Arrieta manipulated the speed of his slider en route to a no-hitter.

“Male, female, it doesn’t matter,” Kruk said Monday in a telephone interview. “She’s as knowledgeable as anyone I’ve ever talked to about baseball. That’s why she was arguably the best hitter in the world when she was in her prime.”

More details on why David Feherty parted ways with CBS from Ron Sirak of Golf Digest.

Multiple sources say the CBS situation was soured by the two factors: Feherty wanted a booth job rather than roaming the fairways, but Nick Faldo already shares that duty with Jim Nantz; and CAA was demanding a salary figure CBS was unwilling to meet.

Feherty would be a huge boost for Fox, whose debut at the U.S. Open at Chambers Bay was roundly panned. It would also appear to be a good fit since Fox has an appetite for the kind of outspoken comments to which Feherty is prone.

Here we go: Top college football analysts weigh in on what expect in 2015. Richard Deitsch, SI.com

Matt Yoder of Awful Announcing sets the broadcast teams for the new college football season.

Why Donald Trump is not a big fan of Rick Reilly via the Washington Post.

NBC Sports has revamped its website. Matt Yoder of Awful Announcing.

Mark Selig of Backstory talks to Tom Haudricourt of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel about how he broke the story about a gay player in the Brewers’ minor league system.

Long-time St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bernie Miklacz explains why he left newspapers to do sports talk radio.

Fox Sports’ Katie Nolan does a SI Media podcast with Richard Deitsch.

An excerpt from my latest Chicago Tribune column:

*******

Notre Dame’s game against Boston College on Nov. 21 will be an interesting day for Doug Flutie.

Flutie will be on the call as an analyst for NBC Sports Network’s telecast of the Shamrock Series from Fenway Park. He likely will come under extra scrutiny from Notre Dame fans who will be monitoring if Boston College’s favorite son is tilting toward his old school.

“Actually, it will be more of an issue for the Boston College people,” Flutie said. “They’ll be upset that I am doing all these Notre Dame games.”

Indeed, Notre Dame will be getting a full dose of Flutie this year. He will kick off his first full season as analyst for NBC’s coverage Saturday night when the Fighting Irish host Texas.

Flutie hardly is a stranger to South Bend. He has served as part of NBC’s pre- and postgame coverage for Notre Dame since 2011.

NBC, though, set the lineup change in motion when it elevated Flutie to the booth and sent regular analyst Mike Mayock to the sidelines for the Notre Dame-Northwestern game last November. In August, the network officially tabbed Flutie to join Dan Hicks on calling games.

It seemed like an easy decision. Flutie is one of the most iconic players in college football history after winning the 1984 Heisman Trophy. He also figures to be less technical than Mayock, who received criticism for using complex football lingo in the telecasts.

I want to flag this story by Gene Wojciechowski on ESPN College GameDay Saturday. Wojciechowski spent nearly two weeks in Poland with Adam Griffith and his family in reporting this piece.

It hardly is something you’ll see everyday on a college pregame show.

From the release:

Alabama’s starting kicker Adam Griffith is no stranger to adversity. At the 2013 Iron Bowl, with one second left in a tied game, Griffith’s 57-yard field goal attempt against rival Auburn was short and returned for a touchdown – an improbable, history-making play. Just as unlikely is Griffith’s road to Alabama – born in Poland to unfit parents and shuffling through orphanages, with little hope for a bright future. That changed in 2006, when a then 13-year-old Griffith was adopted by a couple in Georgia, where he found a successful high school football career that led to a scholarship at Alabama. Earlier this year, ESPN accompanied the Griffith family as they returned to Poland for the first time since the adoption. Gene Wojciechowski reports as Griffith retraces his roots, discovering a new relationship with those of his distant past along the way.

“In Poland, growing up in the orphanage, there was no dreams. Sometimes you go to bed hungry. You don’t have anything… I was never looking forward to having family, you know?  I just wanted to be on my own… and do my own thing. I guess that was my dream.” – Adam Griffith

“I think we’ve gained as much from him as I hope he’s gained from us. When I sit back and I think he’s the kicker at University of Alabama I’m always amazed.” – Michelle Griffith, Adam’s adoptive mother

I saw old friend Mike Buteau of Bloomberg at the recent PGA Championship. It turned out to be his last tournament for Bloomberg.

Monday, he got the bad news.

Julia Greenberg of Wired explains Bloomberg’s decision to eliminate sports coverage.

In reorganizing, Bloomberg will eschew general interest reporting on topics like sports and education in favor of a stricter focus on business and markets. To stay competitive, Bloomberg seems to feel it must resist the broad industry trend of homogenization in favor of becoming more like itself—the essential source, especially for paying Bloomberg terminal users, for business, markets, and financial news.

Unfortunately, Buteau and others got caught on the wrong side of this decision. Here’s hoping doors open for them.

Keith Bank is living out a different type of dream about golf.

Bank, an avid golfer who runs a venture capital business in Highland Park, currently is in Scotland for the filming of  “Tommy’s Honour.” He is the executive producer of the film about golf’s founding fathers, Old Tom Morris and his son, Young Tom Morris.

“It really is almost like living a dream,” Bank said. “You look at the footage every day, and it’s just radiant. These shots of golf are beautiful against the landscape. You walk around the set and everything feels like the 1860s.”

Bank said he initially had no interest in being part of the project that is based on the bestselling book by Kevin Cook. However, after reading the book and then the screenplay, Bank was hooked.

The story, set in St. Andrews, shows how Old Tom Morris reshaped the famed Old Course and started many of the game’s traditions, including a round being 18 holes and founding the first British Open, which he won four times. However, Young Tom Morris soon eclipsed his father, becoming golf’s first superstar. The film focuses on their complicated relationship that ended with the tragic death of Young Tom at the age of 24.

“People know about James Naismith and basketball, but golfers don’t know where the game and the traditions really came from,” Bank said. “We’re going to delve into a lot of those things. But the film is a lot more than golf. There are a lot of universal themes; a class struggle, a love story, the father-son relationship.”

The film is directed by Jason Connery, the son of Sean Connery. Connery grew up on a golf course in Scotland.

“Jason understands the game and he is passionate about this project,” Bank said. “He has studied up on the history and I think this is going to be an authentic story for people to see.”

Bank said he expects the film will debut in North America in the late summer, early fall of 2016.

John Ourand of Sports Business Daily dropped the exclusive late Tuesday afternoon: David Feherty is leaving CBS.

This is a rather shocking development considering Feherty had been a fixture on CBS’ golf coverage for 19 years. Yet maybe it isn’t that surprising.

Every time I see and talk to Feherty, he always says he is doing a ridiculous amount of work. He often is on overload with CBS’ large golf slate and doing his “Feherty” show for the Golf Channel, not to mention a myriad of personal appearances, commercials, etc. He always punctuates this by saying, “It’s all good.”

However, maybe it got to be too much for Feherty, now 57. Perhaps he wants to do less.

Whatever the reason, NBC, which owns the Golf Channel, would seem to be a natural fit for him. NBC doesn’t have as many tournaments (a good thing for him), but it does have some good ones in the British Open (coming in 2017), the Players Championship, the last three tournaments of the FedEx Cup playoffs, and the Florida swing. Plus, it would allow him to do the Ryder Cup, surely a bucket list item for the member of the 1991 European team.

And don’t forget, NBC will be airing golf’s return to the Olympics in 2016. Surely, Feherty always wanted to see Rio.

Also, Feherty would continue to do his “Feherty” show for the Golf Channel and likely even work the network’s massive studio coverage for the majors. So he even could return to Augusta, where he would see all of his old friends from CBS.

As he would say, “Now that would be awkward.”

Last week, I realized I hadn’t received any editions of Sports Illustrated for a while. It turns out the credit card had expired on my automatic subscription renewal.

I found it interesting that nobody reached out to me to fix the situation. I didn’t receive any emails or letters from SI.

I quickly renewed my subscription. I’ve been getting the magazine since I was 12 in 1971. You never forget your first cover, right? Mine was Cornell’s Ed Marinaro on the Nov. 1, 1971 edition.

Naturally, I wasn’t going to break a habit that dates back more than 43 years. Yet others have.

Frank Fitzpatrick of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote a column about what he thinks is the demise of SI.

Recently, casually lifting a Sports Illustrated out of a magazine rack in a physician’s waiting room, I nearly had a heart attack. Fortunately, it was my cardiologist’s office.

I don’t know how long it had been since I last held a copy of the magazine I’d grown up adoring, but this one was frighteningly emaciated, a slight and insubstantial version of its once-robust self. Even the frail old men surrounding me seemed healthier.

Time – both the passing years and the magazine’s parent company – clearly had not been kind to SI. The issues I eagerly consumed as a boy used to have a tangible heft. They were as physically imposing as their content was mentally stimulating.

Later he writes:

Those who didn’t subscribe bought it at newsstands, borrowed it from friends, or read it in libraries and doctors’ offices. It set the agenda. It identified sports’ heroes and villains. It added depth to what until then had simply been fun and games.

It was the bible for our boyhood. Youngsters everywhere plastered SI covers all over their bedroom walls, saved every issue, had them autographed. In an age when televised sports were still relatively rare, it was our surest connection to that world.

He concludes:

It’s inevitable. The world moves on, and sentiment can’t stop it. But when the print SI is gone something will have been lost: the way some words and photos seemed created for a page; that delicious anxiety you felt opening a mailbox to see whether the week’s issue had arrived; the tactile sensations of thumbing through a fresh, beautifully produced magazine.

And so, before this incredibly shrinking magazine evaporates like a puddle in the sun of new technology, its readers past and present ought to take a moment to appreciate all the great journalism, writing, and photography it brought us.

Today’s SI might be thin and flimsy, but when it’s gone, the hearts of those who loved it will be heavy.

Fitzpatrick is right in respect. It is sad to see Sports Illustrated feel so thin during many weeks. Soon it will rival the “Great Jewish Athletes” pamphlet the flight attendant hands to the woman in “Airplane.”

Yet there still are many reasons to read SI. The quality of writing remains excellent.

I expect my subscription will expire one day. I think the physical magazine’s days are numbered. Ten years on the outside.

Until then, I will keep SI on automatic renewal.