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On March 11, 2020, Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, received word that the Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert, who at that moment was in an arena filled with nineteen thousand fans, had tested positive for the coronavirus. Silver cancelled the game just before it was to start, and announced that the rest of the N.B.A. season would be suspended—indefinitely. Earlier that day, the World Health Organization had officially declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic. But, for many Americans, the N.B.A. shutdown signalled the true beginning of what was to come. This thing had to be serious if a league that averages more than ten billion dollars in annual revenue was willing to leave it all on the table. Yet, by May, there were reports that the N.B.A. was trying to salvage the remainder of the 2019-20 season, and the league’s bottom line, by creating a contained zone where players would be subjected to strict quarantine procedures and daily testing. In this “bubble,” it would be as if COVID did not exist. The league selected an ideal setting to cut itself off from reality: Disney World.
A small number of journalists were allowed in to cover the games, and also the gamesmanship that went into pulling off a public-health miracle. As per health regulations, ESPN could only send in a handful of first-tier reporters, who would have direct access to players and who would lead on-air coverage for the network. Only one would remain in the bubble for four months (if the place did not become a petri dish and get shut down). On July 3rd, from ESPN studios in Los Angeles, Rachel Nichols, the host of “The Jump,” introduced the network’s bubble long-hauler as if she were Neil Armstrong touching down on the moon. “Malika Andrews has made it physically onto the N.B.A.’s Orlando campus!” Nichols cheered.
Andrews, a baby-faced twenty-five-year-old, was wearing a pink floral tunic and gold hoop earrings, her curly hair pulled into a neat bun. The ensemble was not quite a spacesuit, but, when President Donald Trump was openly asking whether injecting disinfectants into the human body might stave off the virus, Andrews displayed a level of competence that felt otherworldly. She explained not only the what but the why of each of the N.B.A.’s health protocols. “My quarantine period, it’s seven days total, which is a little longer than what the players are going through. The reason for that is just because the players are going to not be flying commercial, so they have a little bit more of a contained environment,” she said. (Her report on the relative risks presumably did not calm the nerves of the Philadelphia 76ers’ Joel Embiid, who posted a photo on Instagram of himself boarding a private jet in a hazmat suit, with the caption “Get rich or die trying!!!”)
Andrews calibrated her humor expertly, injecting a small dose of levity to blunt the terror of the virus. “When I’m finished with my quarantine,” she told the camera, lifting her arm to show off a neon-green bracelet, “I’ll trade this green band that looks like I’m going clubbing somewhere . . . for the Oura Ring, which is the ring that the players are also going to be wearing that detects any early signs of coronavirus, whether that be your temperature or your oxygen output.” Andrews was meticulous, enunciating each word in a way that telegraphed its urgency. When she explained how her plastic-sealed breakfast sandwich arrived outside her door each morning, she did so with the controlled cadences of Christiane Amanpour. Come the playoffs, she would cover elimination games like they were Bosnia.
Most sportscasters present in a relaxed, conversational manner, as if the TV studio were an extension of the living-room couch. “I could do this job” is a common refrain from sports fans tuning in for halftime shows and the like. No one would ever say that about Andrews. It was as if the network had hired a straight-A student to go report on the jocks. She sounded as though she had been preparing for each TV appearance all night, and, indeed, sometimes she had done just that. One evening after the Milwaukee Bucks had abstained from play in protest of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, athletes inside the bubble convened a meeting to consider further work stoppages. Andrews was awake until the wee hours, waiting outside a players-only restaurant to see if the athletes were doing anything that might indicate their mood. “Some of [the players] were just talking among themselves, late at night, about two o’clock in the morning yesterday. There were some players that were singing,” she told Mike Greenberg, the host of “Get Up,” ESPN’s early-morning show, a few hours later.
When it was announced that police officers would not be charged for the death of Breonna Taylor, Andrews covered reactions from players and coaches who were following the news from inside the bubble. “I want to underscore something that Jaylen [Brown] said,” she told Greenberg on “Get Up,” summarizing the sentiments of the Celtics guard. “There needs to be some change, some reckoning, some dismantlement of how things are currently, of the current system, in order for it to be more, just and more fair for Black and brown people moving forward.” She also spoke personally. On “SportsCenter with Scott Van Pelt” that same day, she teared up, telling the camera, “I have prided myself in being able to be objective and cover these sorts of issues, but when it is so clear that the system of objectivity in journalism is so whitewashed and doesn’t account for the fact that when I was walking up the hill my wonderful producer Malinda reminds me that Breonna Taylor was twenty-six, and I am twenty-five and that could have been me, it is very hard to continue to go to work.”
It was the kind of pointed, emotional response the occasion required, but also one that many journalists at the beginning of their careers would have hesitated to show. Andrews came across as a seasoned journalist, and yet she had seemingly come out of nowhere. She had been at ESPN for a year and a half, first in Chicago, then in New York, covering the Knicks and the Nets, but as a writer, not a TV personality. She had done only a smattering of “hits” and short segments on shows like “SportsCenter” and “The Jump.” Now here she was, ESPN’s woman in the bubble, covering the playoffs and the pandemic, and she didn’t look one bit afraid of the moment.
“I was terrified,” she confessed to me, when we met in Los Angeles this February. She was not alone. Cristina Daglas, the ESPN editor who first hired Andrews, recalled that other journalists had felt anxious about having to cover the bubble and all it entailed. “ ‘I didn’t sign up to be a health and science reporter,’ ” Daglas said they confessed to her. But Andrews wanted, in basketball parlance, all that smoke. In Andrews’s parlance, “I wanted to be in a position to tell a story that would become a piece of history, not just of sports history. When we talk about COVID and the pandemic and the way the world shut down, you can’t really do that without talking about the N.B.A.”
In the four years since her bubble breakout, Andrews has risen rapidly through the ranks at ESPN; she is the face of ESPN’s N.B.A. studio coverage, the host of two basketball shows—“NBA Today” and “NBA Countdown”—and in 2022 became the first woman to host the N.B.A. draft. She has garnered the respect of industry titans. “Malika’s talent is just so evident,” the sports commentator Doris Burke, whom Andrews refers to as “the GOAT,” wrote to me in an e-mail. Stephen A. Smith, the star of the ESPN morning program “First Take,” told me, “She doesn’t cheat the profession. She doesn’t cheat professionals.”
Andrews’s precociousness and evening-news-anchor gravitas has given ESPN and sports media in general a much needed credibility boost at a time when certain parts of the industry have been accused of prioritizing access at the expense of objective journalism. Her willingness to report on matters that might cast players and coaches in an unfavorable light—she has made headlines for her reporting on assault charges and allegations of sexual misconduct in the league—has been both refreshing and risky. That coverage has elicited groans from fans, or from some sports insiders, who would prefer that she shut up and cover the dribbling. During the past eighteen months, their online chatter has ballooned into all-out harassment of Andrews. “She’s been under a microscope that I don’t envy,” the ESPN reporter Adrian Wojnarowski told me. “It’s glaring. It’s a lot.” Andrews, still in the early days of her career, is under the kind of pressure that would make most veterans crumble. Can she play through the pain and continue to cover sports as something that doesn’t exist inside a bubble?
I arrived at ESPN Studios in downtown L.A. first thing in the morning, hours before “NBA Today” was set to start taping its February 28th show. I thought I might beat Andrews, but she was already in the hair-and-makeup chair, because she had booked a last-minute interview with Max Strus, of the Cleveland Cavaliers, and had to tape it ahead of time. Strus had hit a fifty-nine-foot buzzer beater, over the head of opponent Luka Dončić, to beat the Dallas Mavericks, 121–119. Andrews was revising her copy for the segment. “The Strus is loose,” she repeated aloud to herself, testing out how the phrase sounded before she walked onto the set.
When I caught up with her after the Strus interview, she grabbed an empty desk in the production area that had been decorated with an Anthony Edwards bobblehead. She and her team were looking over highlight reels and stats for “NBA Today,” in which Andrews and a panel of sports reporters and commentators discuss the latest news in basketball and dissect the previous night’s wins and losses. She occasionally stepped away to take a call from one of the network’s researchers. They were considering a possible question for the panel to debate: “Who would you rather build a team around, Zion Williamson or Tyrese Haliburton?” Neither of them was fond of this kind of hypothetical thought exercise, which increasingly dominates sports talk in an era of fantasy leagues and never-ending GOAT debates. “I prefer to think in terms of reality, but some people think it’s fun,” she told the researcher. “You and I are just grouches.”
Back with her production team, Andrews was trying to get clearance to sing a few beats of Aaliyah’s 1994 hit “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number.” To mark Dončić’s twenty-fifth birthday, they had decided to do a segment on the best N.B.A. players under twenty-five, and Andrews wanted to use the song in a preview. Remarking on how much pressure is put on young professional athletes, Andrews stopped and acknowledged that the same could be said of her. “Sometimes I have to remind myself that I’m twenty-nine,” she said.
Daglas knew, when the bubble was announced, that her young journalist could handle the responsibility of covering both sports and swabs. She had followed Andrews’s bylines since her first job out of college, as a James Reston Fellow at the Times, and noted that she seemed to go far beyond the basic “the defense is X, the offense is Y” sports coverage. “Malika’s stories had a little more humanity to them,” Daglas told me. In one story for the Times, Andrews travelled to Atlanta to interview the W.N.B.A. player Angel McCoughtry about her decision to open an ice-cream parlor. Alongside small talk over Space Jam, a blueberry-cheesecake flavor named for the Michael Jordan film, Andrews noted that McCoughtry had opened the shop in part because she was burned out from playing in Russia during the off-seasons to supplement her W.N.B.A. salary (like many of her colleagues, including Brittney Griner). After the Times fellowship ended, Andrews took a job with the Chicago Tribune, covering the Bulls. While there, she heard about a local group that was fighting gun violence by organizing a basketball game between rival gangs. “They were in the houses of these various different gang leaders trying to communicate to them, ‘Hey, if you see your folks in this part of town, on this court, don’t shoot them. They’re there to play basketball and be peaceful,’ ” Andrews later recounted on a podcast. “I was, like, this is what I want to cover.”
But though Andrews is adept at capturing the world beyond the court, she’s no casual when it comes to ball qua ball. Just before noon, she made her way to the set of “NBA Today.” Most of the talking on the show is done by her panelists, Zach Lowe, Chiney Ogwumike, Kendrick Perkins, Richard Jefferson, and Brian Windhorst, whose segments she helps write, structure, and select clips for. “I always call her the point guard of the show,” Perkins told me, in a thick Texas accent. “Whether it’s her dropping the behind-the-back pass to Zach Lowe, or throwing me a lob, or forcing me to go catch it and dunk it.” But sometimes she can’t resist taking the shot herself. Half an hour in, the panelists turned to a segment called the “Battle for L.A.,” in which they previewed the game taking place that night between the Lakers and the Clippers. The Clippers were favored, but Andrews mentioned how “flat” the team had looked since the All-Star break, and suggested that it struggled against teams with good rim protection of the sort that the Lakers’ Anthony Davis provided. “The Lakers, they could have a real chance tonight, Perk,” she said. Perkins, a former N.B.A. champion, scoffed. “They got a better chance of me eating a salad today,” he said. “It’s not happening.” The Lakers won that night, 116–112.
Andrews, at center, reviews strengths and weaknesses with her co-workers after filming an episode of “NBA Today” at ESPN studios in downtown Los Angeles.
At around 5 P.M., after Andrews finished taping for the day and got out of a post-production meeting, I followed her upstairs to her cubicle. On her desk was what looked like a baseball card with Andrews’s face on it. She seemed a little embarrassed, explaining, “People send them to me and ask me to sign.” In the image, she’s wearing a gray blazer and her hair is parted down the middle, with a long braid on either side. I hadn’t realized until then that sports journalists also make their way onto collectible cards. But, yes, online you can purchase a card made by the company Topps labelled “#258 Malika Andrews.”
The card was not a total leap. Andrews prepares for her job like the athletes she covers. I had heard that, during the first year of “NBA Today,” a show that premiered with Andrews as host, she would rewatch every episode, looking for mistakes and ways to be sharper, like a player reviewing game tape after a loss. I noted this similarity to Andrews, but she demurred, insisting that all journalists surely operate like this. (No comment.) Back when she was a beat reporter, she would read and reread each of her pieces, never feeling like any had reached its full potential. “I felt like I didn't nail it,” she told me. “I wanted to nail it.” She also watched the greats. When I asked about her references as she developed her on-camera presence, she mentioned the ESPN anchors Elle Duncan and Robin Roberts (now with “Good Morning America”) and also Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric. “But that came later,” she told me; at the beginning, it was just about listening to the producers coaching her to slow down, and reps, lots of reps.
Andrews so embodies the overachiever that I was surprised to read, in a 2020 profile of her in the New York Post, that she had been kicked out of middle school at Head-Royce, in Oakland, California., Her parents decided to enroll her in a wilderness program for teens with behavioral challenges, and then in a therapeutic boarding school in Utah. She told me that she didn’t want to go into detail about those experiences, because her thoughts about that time in her life are still evolving: “I’m still trying to get a thirty-thousand-foot view of it.”
She did note that she had been one of a handful of Black students at Head-Royce. (Her father, Mike, is African American, and her mother, Caren, an art teacher, is white and Jewish. Andrews also has a sister, Kendra, who covers the Golden State Warriors for ESPN.) Andrews told me that her time at Head-Royce had made her sensitive to the racial dynamics at the University of Portland, which, when she attended college there, was majority white. The way that the school treated its student athletes, many of whom were Black, was a story bigger than college sports, Andrews felt, and she wanted to cover it. She joined the Beacon, the school newspaper, and by her senior year she was editor-in-chief. For one story, she spoke to a Black student on the university’s men’s basketball team. He reported feeling that Black student athletes received less praise than white athletes when they performed well. When a Black player scores, he told Andrews, the coaches think, “ ‘He is black. He’s supposed to be good.’ ”
One story in particular from her college-paper days shaped the kind of journalism that she would later undertake, she told me. In 2014, a freshman on the soccer team named Jacob Hanlin crashed into a cement wall during a game, fracturing his skull. Andrews interviewed the school’s director of sports medicine, who told her that he had previously alerted the school that the wall posed a safety risk and the university had not acted. (The university stated that “at that time, our athletic facilities met NCAA and West Coast Conference safety standards.”) After the incident, the school installed five inches of protective padding, which Andrews counts as a personal win. “To feel like you can effect change was a very powerful responsibility,” she told me, “it felt like a real weight to be able to carry and to hold.”
In recent years, Andrews has had to carry that weight with all eyes on her—and some have been hoping to see her buckle under it. Her reporting on allegations of violence against women has put her at odds with a legion of fans who don’t want #MeToo interrupting their sports talk. On September 22, 2022, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported that the Boston Celtics were likely suspending their head coach, Ime Udoka, for the entirety of the upcoming season owing to his “role in a consensual relationship with a female staff member.” The Athletic reported that sources said that “the woman recently accused Udoka of making unwanted comments toward her—leading the team to launch a set of internal interviews.” Amid these conflicting reports, the Celtics’ governor, Wyc Grousbeck, and the team’s president of basketball operations, Brad Stevens, held a press conference in which they confirmed that Udoka had violated team conduct policy, but they did not specify which policy or comment on the nature of the infraction. Andrews was the first reporter to get a statement from Udoka directly, which she posted to Twitter. It was a short apology that vaguely alluded to letting people down. Though the story was still developing, the word “consensual” seemed to trigger a maelstrom of criticism of the Celtics’ decision; across the Web, fans and commentators chimed in, turning Udoka’s suspension into a story about #MeToo overreach and Black men being held to unfair standards by the media, including ESPN.
Andrews had tuned in virtually to the Celtics press conference, and was slated to appear on “First Take” to discuss the events. Ahead of her appearance, Stephen A. Smith excoriated the Celtics for their handling of the situation, saying,
I’m not here to make any excuses or any apologies for [Udoka’s] behavior. It is inexcusable. It’s a fireable offense as far as I am concerned, but it doesn’t negate what the Celtics are doing here. According to your reports, Woj, and what we have been talking about over the last couple of days, this was a consensual relationship. Was Ime Udoka involved with himself? . . . Two consenting adults engaged in this act or these actions that were clearly in violation of the Boston Celtics policy, but all we are hearing about is Ime.
When Andrews joined by phone, she reproached Smith. “The fact that we are sitting here debating whether somebody else should have been suspended or not—we are not here, Stephen A., to further blame women,” she responded, speaking forcefully. A tense moment ensued, in which Smith denied that he was blaming anyone other than Udoka. The clash was over almost before it began, but the exchange went viral and sparked an online campaign to make Andrews into a villain who—so her detractors would claim—singled out Black men for scrutiny. When I talked to Smith in February, he told me that he and Andrews had spoken privately and resolved the dispute amicably, adding, “My level of sensitivity was heightened because I saw how people in the public were reacting to her. It really rubbed me the wrong way. People were using it as an excuse to be misogynistic, to be vile.”
And that was only the beginning. Days later, Andrews was the first to announce that the Celtics were replacing Udoka with Joe Mazzulla, an African American assistant coach. She noted in her report that “we’d be remiss not to also mention that Mazzulla was arrested twice at West Virginia, once in 2008 for underage drinking and aggravated assault—he pled guilty, paid a fine—and then again in 2009 for domestic battery after an incident at [a] Morgantown bar.” Critics pounced. In a widely quoted Twitter post, one user wrote, “Andrews clearly has a problem with black men. We ain’t the enemy hun.”
In the past year and a half, videos that have been edited to show Andrews disagreeing with Black men have appeared on YouTube. If you are looking for clips of her discussing the latest sports news online, which is how many viewers access ESPN, you have to sift through these videos, some of which have more than a million views. A voice-over in one video, titled “Exposing the Dark Truth About Malika Andrews,” states, “Malika Andrews has a rare, obscene public and clinical contempt of African American men.” A similar video name-checks “Ime Udoka,” “Joe Mazzulla,” and “Dave McMenamin” in its description. McMenamin, an ESPN reporter who is Andrews’s fiancé, is white, a fact that Internet trolls hold up as evidence of bias.
Things reached a fever pitch in November, 2023, when a white N.B.A. player named Josh Giddey was rumored to have been conducting a relationship with a minor. (Both the police and the N.B.A. dropped the investigation, citing inconclusive evidence.) Oddly, the former Cowboys wide receiver Dez Bryant took to X to condemn Andrews. “Why haven’t you said nothing about Josh Giddey. I advise you not to make this a black or white thing,” Bryant posted. Andrews had in fact covered the Giddey allegations on the air. Bryant later apologized for his “aggressive” tone toward Andrews, but did not retract the accusation.
I asked Andrews how she had been coping with the fallout from these incidents. Andrews, who had always appeared unflappable, onscreen and off, suddenly looked like she was about to cry. Daglas has been aghast at the online backlash. Referring to the videos comparing Andrews’s reporting on Black players and white players, she added, “There’s no difference. What are you all seeing here?” Wojnarowski told me, “You get judged harshly working at this place. When I came to ESPN, I remember Adam Schefter said to me, ‘You’re coming to play for the Yankees—no one roots for you anymore.’ But, when you’re young and you’re a woman of color, you get judged even harsher.”
One of Andrews’s mentors at ESPN suggested that she just stop looking at social media. But some of the online vitriol has spilled into real life. Last fall, a Los Angeles judge granted ESPN’s request for a restraining order against Ahmed Abubakar, a New Jersey doctor, on behalf of Andrews, McMenamin, Smith, and Molly Qerim, the host of “First Take.” Abubakar had sent Andrews harassing messages on X and claimed to have shown up at ESPN offices in Los Angeles. In one of Abubakar’s messages to Andrews, according to the Washington Post, he told her “to stop bringing up negative old news.” (Abubakar did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) The message was thought to be in response to Andrews’s reporting, during the 2023 N.B.A. Draft, that the prospect Brandon Miller had been mentioned in court testimony related to a capital-murder case in Alabama involving his former college teammate. Andrews noted that the University of Alabama had described Miller as “a coöperating witness,” before asking her panelists how that might play a role in the way teams evaluated him. (Miller has not been charged with any wrongdoing; his friend has pleaded not guilty.)
Andrews wanted to reassure me that the online posts about her being biased against Black men were not true. “I hope you can tell I’m not that kind of person,” she told me, looking emotional. I was taken aback. The videos were obviously skewed; of course they were not credible. But, in a league made up predominantly of Black men, even a provably false narrative can be damaging. Sports media has never had to be friendlier toward athletes and their representatives; after all, players can cover themselves now. The past several years have seen the rise of the athlete podcaster and YouTuber, as the streaming era has blurred the line between amateur and professional broadcasters. Sports documentaries are increasingly made with the coöperation of the subject, such as “The Last Dance,” about Michael Jordan, and Steph Curry’s auto-documentary, “Underrated.”
In August, 2023, Smith was a guest on the podcast of the N.B.A. player Paul George, “Podcast P,” to discuss the controversy surrounding Andrews. “Malika Andrews, my colleague . . . she getting crucified,” he complained. “She had an obligation to ask those questions.” He was defending not only Andrews but sports journalism itself, an industry in crisis, at ESPN and elsewhere. Earlier this year, ESPN discontinued its weekly investigative news show “Outside the Lines,” and it is devoting more money to what can only be described as infotainment. It recently agreed to pay eighty-five million dollars over five years for the former N.F.L. player Pat McAfee’s self-titled YouTube show, which comes with a caveat that “the following progrum [sic] is a collection of stooges talking about happenings in the sports world. It is meant to be comedic informative.” McAfee’s show, a ratings juggernaut, is a safe space, where guests don’t face the kind of hardball questions that a journalist like Andrews would ask.
So far, Andrews’s old-school journalistic style has not hindered her access to players. “She can text Devin Booker like that,” her producer Hilary Guy told me, snapping her fingers. When I was in the studio, Andrews showed me her phone. She had just received a daily prayer text from the father of Karl-Anthony Towns—“Big Karl,” she calls him. (This would make his son, at seven feet tall, Little Karl.) Andrews believes that what athletes want from reporters isn’t fawning coverage or the absence of an adversarial voice—they just want to see some hustle. “What I learned really early is that these guys, they work all the time,” she told me. “They’re always on planes. They’re on the road for forty-one games a year. They are in arenas, they’re at practice, they’re getting treatment. So guys just want to see you mirror the work that they put in if you show up over and over and over again.” Wojnarowski recalled working alongside Andrews in Las Vegas at the In-Season tournament. After a gruelling day, Andrews, to his surprise, asked if he could help her get credentials to watch LeBron James’s son Bronny play his first game at U.S.C. the following morning. “She was going to show face,” he explained. “She said, ‘LeBron’s going to be there. Bronny James is going to be a player we’re going to report and talk a lot about. My presence there is important for me to do this job.’ ” Anyone else, Wojnarowski added, would have slept in.
And surely players get what she’s going through. They understand false narratives. They know how it feels to be blamed for other people’s fouls. And, above all, game recognizes game. Basketball is as much about cheap shots, petty selfishness, and human frailty as it is about teamwork and strength of body and character. Andrews, in covering the shadow alongside the light, has captured the very essence of sports. When we spoke, I told Andrews that if I found out tomorrow she was covering something else entirely—say, a conflict on the other side of the world—I wouldn't be surprised. She left open the possibility that she might switch beats one day, but “not right now.” What did she love about sports, I asked. “There’s a little bit of everything in it,” she said, her face lighting up. “There’s victors. There’s people who are downtrodden. You have to get back up. You have to try again. You can be the best in the world at something. With the draft, your life and the life of your entire family can change in a single moment. You don’t get that anywhere else. The hope, the crush, you don’t get that anywhere else.” ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
