The Renaissance of Pablo Torre: How the ESPN Personality Survived High Noon and Became the Happiest Guy with a Podcast

On a normal day, scrolling through his phone takes up a considerable amount of Pablo Torre’s time and strength: “For better, and for worse, I’m one of those people who has weird cramps in his arms because I’m holding my phone all day, and neck pain because I tilt my head at non-ergonomic angles,” Torre told Mediaite in an interview.

The evening of Feb. 24, 2020, though, was anything but normal for him, and he was experiencing it in, as he described it, “acute” fashion. Torre was doomscrolling on his phone from a New York City hospital. That same day, news broke that High Noon, the daily sports debate show Torre co-hosted with Bomani Jones on ESPN, was being canceled. When that became public – mere hours after an episode had finished airing – Torre was by his wife’s bedside as she gave birth to their first child, Violet. (He notably chronicled the dramatic series of events in an Instagram post the next day.)

“I remember vividly, like, Violet is born, I’m in the hospital, and then I’m in the room with Liz [Torre’s wife], and she’s holding Violet,” Torre told Mediaite, “and… I’m reading a headline on my phone about coronavirus, like, ‘what the hell is this’, [and] dealing with the press release about High Noon being canceled – it was everything happening. I mean, it was everything, everywhere, all at once… landing on my lap.”

Pablo Torre had made a name for himself as one of the most revered sports journalists of his era long before his on-air personality careers began, although he’s often written off by critics as just another member of a supposedly “woke, angry, and unpleasant new wave” of sports personalities, largely without any evidence cited whatsoever. So when ESPN first ordered a new talk show with Torre co-hosting alongside Jones, it seemed to have a high ceiling: it would add to ESPN’s dominance in the realm of debate – akin to Pardon the Interruption and First Take – but fulfill desire to offer more nuance and less dramatics than the network’s other content heavily relied upon. High Noon was the result, created by Pardon the Interruption’s executive producer Erik Rydholm (who also created the Viceland edition of Desus & Mero), first airing in 2018.

High Noon was referred to numerous times as, on and off-air, the network’s “smart show.” Savvy back-and-forths interceded Jones’ constant jokes lamenting how lame Torre was, Torre betting money that Jones couldn’t say the alphabet backwards (and losing), gimmicks such as Torre eating entire bags of cheese or raw beef at the end of shows, or running gags like Torre and ESPN analyst Mina Kimes building and maintaining a “shrine” to Asian or Asian-related athletes. In essence, ridiculousness was the defining factor for the show – and, like a Saturday Night Live cast member of sorts, Torre’s distinctive characteristic was inducing cringe and second-hand embarrassment.

But High Noon also came at a time when departure from the network’s “normal,” as much of the creations under then-network president John Skipper’s tenure were, became more and more tenuous. After initially starting as an hour-long show airing at – you guessed it – noon Eastern Time, it was cut to a half-hour and moved into a jam-packed afternoon line-up. Ratings – which were just a few thousand viewers below two-hour morning show Get Up! within months of the switch – weren’t abysmal, but the network still cited that “not enough people” enjoyed High Noon as reasoning for its cancellation.

While Torre has become known, by name or face, to millions as someone on one of the most-watched cable channels on TV, he wasn’t immune to the changes that every other person on the planet would begin to experience at that time. Like others, Torre would have to withstand unique unprecedented life alterations: in addition to becoming a father right as coronavirus began to spread throughout the city he lived in, the news came just a number of weeks ahead of both Jones’ and Torre’s contracts expiring. With cuts looming at the network (and parent corporation Disney writ-large) even prior to the pandemic, there was plenty of speculation about their future.

Torre recounted the entire sequence of events as an “out of body experience, that whole week” in February 2020. “So I lost the show, I gained a human life that I was tasked with taking care of. I was never… and I was not going to go to the office to do that show ever again.”

But, as Torre reflected, “everyone else also stopped during all of that. Like, no one was going back to the office.”

He admitted “there’s probably some… very unresolved [emotion], because it was never [really] an end of the show. I don’t think we ever really got resolution, the way it happened.”

Both hosts have since said that despite the steady fanbase it managed to garner, High Noon didn’t meet its high expectations. “There’s only shame in admitting something didn’t work if you’ve never made anything work. [High Noon] didn’t work. It happens sometimes. And we’ve all moved on to other things and we’re all doing just fine,” Jones said in a tweet earlier this year. Torre “more or less” agreed with that assessment.

“Am I glad that it happened? Am I proud of what I did? Undeniably yes,” he told Mediaite. “Of course, we wish more people watched, we wish we had even more fun than we did, I wish it all – by no means were we like a perfect show, at all – but in terms of what we had to deal with, I would redo every opportunity that I was presented with.”

Torre pointed out, though, “What I think about when I think about the show [is] like, ‘man, we got to really resonate with people for a while, and that meant something to them.’ That’s a best case scenario, even though the way it ended was not the best case scenario.”

Torre’s chapter at ESPN could have ended there: he had proven himself as a writer and personality that reported out the provocative, industry-changing stories, but as The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis wrote in 2018, that left him with “the classic problem of a smart young guy at ESPN, which is that no one can stop thinking of you as the smart young guy.” He had also gotten accustomed to a “relief pitcher” role on various shows, but the role, by necessity, flattened him. Torre had the opportunity to host a cable talk show, but where else could he use his bare foot to drink coffee and show off his “prehensile” toes? What would allow him to reconcile all of those dimensions of himself?

***

What happened from there is pretty simple, at least on paper: in August, Torre completed his second year as the host of the flagship podcast show for the network, ESPN Daily, described by the Boston Globe as “a success” that “deserves to be an even bigger one because it is exceptional.”

The Globe wrote, “It’s even more remarkable that this is where the path has brought him.”

To explain how it happened, though, let’s borrow a cliché often heard on podcasts: we need to go back…

An important bit of context to know regarding Torre’s career path: sports – or journalism, for that matter – was never in his path. He planned to go to law school right up until the time he was graduating from Harvard University. Even then, Torre had proven himself as a penman, rising to be the executive editor of The Crimson.

When he took his LSATs, Torre – in his words – “shit the bed,” so he planned to take it again. But in the meantime, he decided to accept an offer to become a fact-checker at Sports Illustrated, where he had been interning. In short time, he became one of SI’s staff reporters, getting his first bylines on topics such as Therma Blades and Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. By the time to sit for the LSAT came around again, Torre recalled, “I realized – thank God – that I had just wanted to do journalism. I wanted to write and report and work for SI and work in sports media. And so, failure is how I wound up with this quality of life and this career.”

That realization is “something that I am grateful for every single day,” he said. “I truly, literally did not choose this life – this life, did sort of choose me, against my will – and then I realized, ‘actually, this is kind of the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’ It was all totally accidental.”

Does he think about the parallel universe where he made it down that fork in the road (and what his hourly rate would be)? Well, someone does: “My mom – like, only half jokingly – has told me there’s still time for me to go to grad school.”

He jokes, “By the way, [my] hourly rate would be way lower if I was a lawyer.”

His 2009 report in Sports Illustrated on the financial struggles professional athletes often face would inspire a ESPN 30 for 30 documentary short, Broke, and a SEC investigation. He profiled basketball sensation (and fellow Harvard graduate) Jeremy Lin and appeared in the documentary Linsanity.

In May 2012, the same month Broke premiered, he co-wrote a feature on transgender athletes trying to compete around the world, long before it became a hot-button issue. At the time, the NCAA had determined that “genitalia…[did] not impact athletic performance,” a determination they’ve since had to assess with much more detail (to a similar result). “Not much has gotten better honestly, based on how people talk about it, because it’s a story that requires homework,” Torre surmised.

(Mentioning an episode of ESPN Daily from this year regarding Lia Thomas, he reasoned, “This is not theater for people who are directly affected by the laws and the policy that these discussions can help shape. There are people whose lives are consequentially impacted by the way we talk about this stuff. It’s not abstract.”)

Within a few months, Torre would go to ESPN full-time as a senior writer for ESPN.com. He eventually made his way on ESPN’s airwaves more and more, eventually becoming the go-to fill-in host for Around the Horn and the second “Stat Boy” for Pardon the Interruption, two of the network’s longest-running and most respected shows. (His first cable news spot was actually on Fox News, where he learned the “performance of nodding” when sitting across from Bill O’Reilly and discussing swimming.)

In 2016, he became a recurring guest on Highly Questionable, a much looser – and more irreverent – part of the network’s afternoon programming (which ended last year). Under the lead of the show’s co-creator and host, Dan Le Batard – who also hosted The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz radio program which was syndicated on ESPN’s cable and radio channels – it essentially became a cult-classic, and Torre along with it.

He still wrote and reported outside of his television duties – In 2015, for ESPN the Magazine, he wrote “The 76ers’ plan to win (yes, really),” the definitive article that publicly popularized the strategy by Philadelphia’s basketball team that became known as “Trust the Process.”

The more he appeared across the network, the more glimpses of who Pablo Torre was began to show. As time went on, Torre wasn’t just another talking head with a five-minute slot to discuss a singular topic or a deep thinker overanalyzing some issue with nuance – he was someone willing to hear out 9/11 conspiracy theories from Jesse Ventura while wearing an orca whale costume, or video-bombing colleagues live on-air while eating cereal.

“With TV, obviously the main distinction is visual, and I think there’s a very clear skill for knowing how to communicate through the television screen where everyone can see you,” Torre said.

But television doesn’t always capture anyone’s identity in full accuracy, and while there was more control and space for nuance in his self-presentation on High Noon, he still found himself limited by the structure of sports television.

In hindsight, Torre described High Noon as “one of those alt-kind of shows that… if you watched, and you got to catch it, the odds are – it kind of resonated with you in a way that other shows maybe didn’t. For a legacy, like, I’m so grateful for that.”

Since then, ESPN re-signed both Jones and Torre, although Jones is separately hosting a weekly sports-focused late night show on HBO, Game Theory, which is entering its second season. ESPN would find just the right place for Torre, naming him the successor to ESPN colleague (and close friend) Mina Kimes as host of their flagship podcast, ESPN Daily in June. Funnily enough, one running bit on High Noon was that both Jones and Tony Kornheiser, a Pardon the Interruption co-host, both had podcasts, while Torre did not.

Now, not only does he host one, but he leads the podcast at the network.

Suffice it to say, the result hasn’t been disappointing. By the end of 2020, ESPN Daily had doubled its audience from the time of its debut and garnered all the praises of the network’s executives. The transition from co-hosting a show on TV to hosting a podcast alone might have been irregular, but it’s given Torre the ability to bring his in-depth storytelling talents to a forum where it’s not only welcome, but encouraged – and bring the creativity and personality necessary to make ESPN Daily intriguing and tolerable to even the least willing podcast consumer. “It’s even more remarkable that this is where the path has brought him,” the Globe wrote in 2020.

“I still absolutely love, and traffic in, the business of takes,” Torre said, “but I have found that this is a return to my roots of actual journalism. I started as a magazine writer. Now I’m sort of helping run this mini-newsroom where we do a daily sports podcast driven by reporting and interviewing, and it has a very magazine sensibility [to it].” Leading an audio-first program made him realize “I underestimated how much I personally want to be listening to stories,” recognizing that “takes are different from stories.”

Along the way Torre also realized, “‘This is kind of a more natural fit for where my career has been leading me…’ even though I never would have said at this point in my life, I would be ‘a guy with a podcast.’ It’s not where I would have thought at all.”

In addition to regular appearances by ESPN colleagues, the podcast has notched appearances from the likes of Dr. Anthony Fauci, Gabrielle Union, and former President Barack Obama. In the same vein, the podcast has dedicated entire episodes to Wikipedia vandalism, why NFL scouts love big butts – with as many accompanying puns possible – and the “Crying Jordan” meme. The podcast’s episode “Is Jalen Rose the first Jalen? We Solve a Sports Name Mystery” won an Edward R. Murrow Award for Sports Reporting last month.

“The joy that I get from it is from the storytelling,” he stated, “which is kind of lost in that online take era for reasons that are I guess, understandable – but I’m also complicit in, so…”

Not only has Torre sustained a role at ESPN, but he still gets time to have fun, too. In October 2021, a new digital-first show entitled (debatable), also created by Rydholm to “carry the spirit of the network’s former show Highly Questionable” (according to ESPN), debuted. Torre is a regular of the three panelists, usually alongside ESPN commentator Domonique Foxworth and radio host David Jacoby. The show is broadcast daily on ESPN’s Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and podcast channels.

“There are three distinguishing characteristics about (debatable) to me,” Torre explained to Mediaite. “One: it’s on social, two: it’s completely live, and three, I say this with love: it’s the most chaotic show I’ve ever been a part of.”

It offers Torre and others the opportunity to continue extolling the eccentricities that fans probably enjoy, without the pressures that usually encompasses “hosting” a TV show or anxieties that come with making the show palatable for a potential audience of hundreds of millions. “(debatable) is definitely that other side of me, which I love,” he expounded, “because that is where like, you know, it’s freeform. All of the highly produced and edited structure of ESPN daily, even a television show… This is not that.”

With ESPN Digital already setting record viewership levels last year, and Torre and others already possessing significant social followings, maintaining the audience doesn’t need to be obsessed over as much as it would be if it was taking up a network programming block. Like a podcast, people simply consume if, when, and how they choose.

As Torre views it: “What we invite the consumer to do: you’re on Twitter, you’re on YouTube, you’re on social (already)… you walk in, and there’s a cafeteria. Our cafeteria table is me and Domonique and who the f*ck knows what else – and who knows what we’re doing. But our hope is that you want to kind of sit down with us and hang out.

“We’re going to talk about sports, and with the name, we’re supposed to debate things – but we usually debate nothing, and we’ll talk about a lot more than sports.”

As it relates to matters bigger than sports, while he can playfully acknowledge the many stereotypes he fits in as Filipino-American Ivy League graduating overachiever who’s often noted for his nerdiness and professionalism, Torre also takes pride in being unconventional whenever he can. Since he had the opportunity to be an Asian-American with a consistent presence on airwaves amidst the pandemic – when anti-Asian discrimination skyrocketed – he knows the importance of that.

“To be just sort of cheesy here for a second, but very genuine about how I feel about this: to me,” Torre shared, “making it in America means doing something that proves to everyone else that you’re not what they said you were. I want [us] to transcend this at some point, but for anybody who’s a non-white person in America, we want to prove: ‘You don’t have me figured out,’ you know? Like, you actually don’t know as much as you think you know… about people that you’ve never taken the time to really think about, ever.”

That sentiment heavily influenced the making of ‘the shrine’ gimmick. “For me, the idea of pointing out all the secret Asians, part-Asians, the Asians you didn’t know about is just like: ‘no man, like, we’re here. Like, we’re in sports. Like, there’s more of us than you realize.’” Torre still gets constant messages about it and jokes that, with his Twitter account, he has essentially turned into Professor X with the machine Cerebro from the X-Men universe because “people are now doing the work for me. As soon as someone is on their radar, someone gets into my mentions, and it’s beautiful! I’m like, ‘thank you. Yes, I would love to add this to the shrine.’”

Torre hasn’t even seen the “shrine” since High Noon was canceled, and actually doesn’t know where it is.

“It’s hidden somewhere… I’d like to think that it’s now in a corner of the [ESPN’s South Street] Seaport Studio, and someone is tending to it without my knowledge. I’d like to think that the candles are still being lit, that all of this is happening and it’s still somewhere intact,” he bemused.

***

Torre spoke with Mediaite while walking through New York City, amidst a break during a work day (which are now largely spent from his living room and his wife’s closet turned makeshift-studio in their apartment). His schedule allows him to be at home pretty much anytime he’s working, which he finds invaluable as a “#girldad” – as the late Kobe Bryant infamously embodied – with a now-toddler to take care of.

The flip-side of that is that he spends remarkably little time reflecting to himself about much of all of it. Talking about High Noon – or maybe it all – he admitted, “I really… honestly, like, I have not had a chance since all that happened, to really sit down and be like, ‘so how did that feel?’” He finds some symmetry in knowing, though, that “for everybody, it was the most surreal point in their lives, arguably.”

Torre’s acutely self-aware, which you might not expect for someone shaped by years of working in television, but he’s far from self-absorbed: he remains focused on our conversation even as drivers of cars passing by literally stop to honk and yell “Pablo!” He even willingly went over time to dish on his favorite episodes of ESPN Daily (“the butts one has to be on there,” he laughed, in addition to one with Milwaukee locals talking about their love for Giannis Antekumpto) and his favorite person at the network (it’s Tony Kornheiser.) He’ll officially enter his tenth year with the company in October.

Every now and again, knowingly or not, he does something that gives himself some needed perspective. “The idea of a walk – I cannot tell you how essential that is to my mental health,” he stressed. He’s also done some improv (“I loved that,” he laughed, “I have now realized that like, everything I’ve done in sports media has really kind of prepared me to do it. Shouting a topic at me and asking me to talk about it is kind of what I’ve been doing for years”); he recently provided an answer for an episode of a special edition of Jeopardy!; he hangs out with Jason Sudeikis and Wyatt Cenac (and a cropped-out Pete Davidson) at basketball games; he’s even started going ‘whale watching’ alone “like a total weirdo.”

Otherwise, “I’m trying to be a decent human being who has a daughter,” he surmised. “That’s the bulk of my brain, as you might imagine.”

High Noon’s untimely ending pushed Torre – arguably for the first time in his career – not just to ‘grow up,’ but redefine himself, on his terms. It seems now – given the opportunity to have a consistent, marquee-like role of his own – Torre has experienced a renaissance of sorts.

Torre’s old friends at The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz, now broadcast online via DraftKings, recently had a laugh at his expense whilst producer Michael Ryan Ruiz performed impressions of him. “Pablo leads all of podcasting in reading while smiling,” producer Chris Wittyngham quipped on Twitter, “if you listen to ESPN Daily, it sounds like he’s having the time of his life.” (Torre responded back on Twitter, “I hate/love all of you.”)

It seems, indeed, to be the time of Pablo Torre’s life.