Craig Kilborn Reveals His Top "This Was SportsCenter" Commercials That He Starred In

Before there was a late-night desk, there was a hockey promo Craig Kilborn did not want to do.

Asked to name his favorite entry in the "This Is SportsCenter" catalog, Kilborn went straight to the spot built around a starstruck production assistant named Glenn Jacobs.

"I like the Glenn Jacobs one," Kilborn said, then quoted the character who worshipped him: a PA a few months into the job, thrilled when one of the anchors reads something he wrote on air, forever getting brushed off with "Nice try, Sparky" and "Two words for you, pizza delivery."

The origin of Kilborn's run in the campaign traces back to one man, Hank Perlman, a creative he met when Perlman was at Wieden and Kennedy.

"Hank was a fan of mine," Kilborn said. "He calls me at ESPN and says, 'I want you to do these promos.'"

There was a catch. The assignments were hockey spots, and Kilborn did not see himself as the hockey guy.

"I said, 'These are hockey promos and I'm the basketball guy. I'm not the hockey guy,'" he recalled. "And he goes, 'I want you to do it. You're funny.' I said, 'Okay.'"

Not every commercial went down that easily. Kilborn admitted he balked at the one that sent his on-air persona down to the minor leagues, a stretch of spots that stuck him in a high school, collecting JV wrestling uniforms and getting asked to buy beer.

"I didn't want to do it, because I thought, why are they sending me down in the minors?" Kilborn said. "I had been on SportsCenter for a few years. Why am I still like a freshman around? I thought I'd matriculated at a certain point."

The person who talked him into it was Dan Patrick, and the advice was blunt.

"Dan basically was just like, just suck it up. It's funny," Kilborn said. "Do you find it funny? Yeah. And then go with it. Just be funny."

That instinct, leaning into the joke at his own expense, is one Kilborn claimed as a personal creed.

"Self-deprecating," he said. "Which is my way of life."

There is a version of this story where a young anchor protects his image, turns down the promos, and never becomes part of a campaign that outlived the shows it was advertising. Kilborn tells a different one, where a friend from an ad agency insisted he was funny, a co-anchor told him to get over himself, and those résumé lines about maturity and experience turned out to be worth more played for laughs.

"This was SportsCenter," as the tag goes. Out now.