Dan Patrick reflects on time at ESPN, relationship with Keith Olbermann

Still get along with Olbermann. I don't have much communication with him. I don't know. We're just, I'm just trying to figure out sometimes what's best for us, if there's common ground of things that we, you know, talk about or like. I still have great respect for him. He's the best team that I ever had on Sports Center. He he really mastered it. He was great at it. And people always asked, oh, did you talk politics? We never talk politics, not one time. He got me a book on Winston Churchill because he knew I was a fan of Winston Churchill. That was it. When we were in ESPN, when we were in the building, we were doing what we were supposed to do and having fun with Sports Center. We didn't socialize too much outside of that. But look, I was married with kids and Keith wasn't. But yeah, that, I mean, there's always going to be this respect for what we did, when we did it, how we did it, because understand at the time, management did not want us to succeed the way we succeeded. You know, in the infamous words of one of my bosses, we don't, we don't want another Berman because Chris had gotten so big that, you know, he had kind of escaped. And, and so they wanted the four letters to be important, not us. And I remember, you know, Keith had this mindset of FM. You know, we're, we're, we're going to have fun with this. And we got yelled at a couple of times. Pulled into meetings a couple times that they didn't embrace it. And which is surprising to a lot of people. They're like, why would they not embrace it? Because the four letters were more important than any other talent. And they wanted to let you know that. And that was that was very humbling because we we were doing some different things and we had changed Sports Center a little bit. And they didn't embrace it as as you would, you would expect. Even now, my former boss still gives credit to Bob Lee and Chris Berman. Changing Sports Center or whatever, not Keith and myself, which, OK, I mean, that's fine. I know it, that's not true. But it was kind of sad that they still can't, you know, acknowledge maybe what we did when we did it.