Most people knew my father as a dolly grip for TV shows and movies. It was cool to tell my friends growing up that my dad had worked on “Law and Order,” had shot movies with Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep and Matt Damon, or that he had an offer to film one of Sam Raimi’s “Spiderman” movies that he ultimately turned down.

What most didn’t know about my dad was, for several years, he helped run a store in Tuscaloosa, Ala., that sold Englander mattresses. He would do this in the “offseason” of television and movies, which was mostly during the summer. Since I was out of school, I would often stay with him at the store during when he was working.

There usually wasn’t much to do at the store, especially when my father was with a customer, so I mostly just watched television. This was when I fell in love with SportsCenter. Who doesn’t like watching sports highlights with sometimes witty commentary? My middle-school aged self certainly did, and ESPN provided plenty of entertainment with sports highlights, even if I wasn’t particularly a fan of a sport they were featuring.

When I found this past week ESPN had fired more than 100 employees in what was the latest round of layoffs for the company in recent times — and when I didn’t recognize half the names of the people who were cut — it finally dawned on me that I couldn’t remember the last time I tuned to EPSN unless it was showing live sports.

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t watched SportsCenter in forever. I would later find out Jemele Hill and Michael Smith were the lead anchors on the 5 p.m. (Central) telecast of SportsCenter. I knew who those two media personalities were, but I had no idea they had been the anchors. 

This may seem unbelievable. I am, after all, the sports editor of a newspaper, so you’d think I would be watching SportsCenter, right? In reality, though, the way I consume sports news has changed since when I was a child, and this likely has a lot to do with why ESPN keeps trying to cut costs.

In my younger days, SportsCenter was the place to go to get highlights from a day’s worth of games. Now, if I’m not seeing a highlight posted directly to my Twitter feed, I just need to go to ESPN’s website to look it up, or Google search the particular game and find the link to the story it gives me that features a highlight. The same goes for a game: I can just go to MLB.com if I want to see box scores from around the league, and I’d immediately know who went 4-for-5 in such-and-such game instead of having to wait for it to move across the ticker on the bottom of ESPN’s broadcast.

Why is ESPN being forced to cut jobs? The most common explanation I’ve seen is that the network, like seemingly every other network, has been victim to cord-cutting, or the amount of people deciding a cable bill simply isn’t worth the cost. Different forms of entertainment are becoming more and more niche — or consumed by a specific demographic — so people who aren’t sports fans are less and less likely to be willing to pay for ESPN on their cable bill just so they can watch HGTV or the History Channel.

It’s also difficult to ignore ESPN’s contractual commitments. National sports personality Clay Travis, in a recent column (http://bit.ly/2q87PZv), said the company was on track for $8 billion in programming costs while facing the total loss of 15 million subscribers since 2011. Some of the network’s bigger personalities likely cost a fortune to keep around, but are sports media personalities really worth that fortune given the decline in viewership?

I’ve seen a lot of remarks about ESPN’s supposed left-leaning political views. I honestly haven’t watched enough to comment just how much the personalities’ politics have been made prominent, but for a company losing viewers, any attempt to inject politics is a confusing strategy. You risk alienating half of the population when you express certain viewpoints. If I were in charge of ESPN, I would tell my programming directors and on-air personalities to avoid discussing politics altogether unless they’re simply reporting a player doing something political and it affecting his/her playing status.

One of the people who lost their job was analyst Danny Kannell, who perhaps is most famous for taking jabs at the SEC. One of his more recent Tweets as of my writing this talks about him reminding Charles Barkley that the ACC has the national titles in football and basketball with the hashtag “ACC > SEC.”

Us Southerners obviously don’t like that. But his profile picture on Twitter has him hugging three young girls who I assume to be his daughters. That’s the most important takeaway here: Whatever you thought about some of these personalities, they are ultimately human beings who are now out of a job. It’s an ugly reality to a shifting media landscape, and one that saddens me.

Drew Kerekes is the sports editor at The Meridian Star. He can be reached at dkerekes@themeridianstar.com.