Suzy Kolber opened up about her 2023 ESPN exit (Getty Images)
Suzy Kolber gave ESPN 27 years. When the layoffs came in 2023, she saw it coming. She was there for the launch of ESPN2. She was the first name attached to the X Games. She helped carry Monday Night Football when it moved to the network. What she did not see coming was the part that broke her: ESPN was not going to say a single word about her leaving. Why did Suzy Kolber’s ESPN exit hurt more than just losing her job?
Not thanks for 27 years. It is a line that says a lot about how Kolber carried herself through 27 years. ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro had already warned Kolber about a week before the cuts were announced.
He told her directly, “Suzy, there’s a whiteboard and your name’s on it. She sat at her kitchen table with her daughter and said, “I think this is really happening. I was part of some pretty big franchises,” Kolber said during an appearance on Richard Deitsch’s Sports Media podcast. “As soon as I saw [the post] go live, I had a good three to five minutes of full-on sobbing,” she said. All the [expletive] I’ve seen, I have never said one negative thing about this company.
She processed it. She braced herself. None of that was easy. But it was manageable, in the way that people find a way to manage things they can see coming. What caught her off guard was what came next. She found out that ESPN planned to make no public statement about her departure. No acknowledgment, no thank-you, not even a brief mention of someone who had been one of the most visible people at the network for nearly three decades. That is when it really hit her. “Probably the most emotional thing was Norby saying to me [ESPN was] not going to say anything. I was the first person hired for the launch of ESPN2. I was the first person assigned to the X Games. I was part of Monday Night Football’s move to ESPN. “I was like, ‘You’re not gonna say a word? Just acknowledge it?'” So she took it into her own hands. She wrote her own announcement, reached out to Adam Schefter and longtime ESPN PR executive Chris LaPlaca to help amplify it, and posted it herself. The moment it went live, something inside her gave way. “It was real. What did Suzy Kolber say during her final call with ESPN’s Norby Williamson? The call that officially ended her ESPN career came from former executive Norby Williamson. At some point in the conversation, Williamson reminded Kolber that speaking negatively about the network could have consequences. She did not take that quietly. “I have been the ultimate good soldier. Like, do you think I’m going to start now?” she pushed back. She had seen plenty. She stayed quiet through all of it. And even in the room where they were letting her go, her first instinct was not anger toward ESPN. Join conversation Share your thoughts in the comments Be respectful · TOI community guidelines It was defense of her own record. That kind of loyalty, met with institutional silence on the way out, is what made this story land the way it did for people. It was not really about a firing. It was about what happens when an organization forgets that the people who built it were actually people. Get the latest Sports News and Live updates. Download the TOI app.