Chris Berman charms Charlotte crowd with Panthers praise and ESPN tales
Popular ESPN sports anchor Chris Berman was a little surprised at how the Carolina Panthers’ season turned out.
“I didn’t know in July or August when you guys asked me to come speak here, I was coming to the home of the NFC South champs,” Berman said Thursday morning at Carmel Country Club. “You guys beat the Rams the first time, and they still may be the favorite to win the whole thing. But you played toe to toe with them twice. You split with them, in two of the most fun games I’ve seen all year. And let’s see what you guys do. You’ve arrived ahead of schedule, and I can’t wait to see what happens next year with the Panthers.”
Berman, 70, was in Charlotte to speak to the Hood Hargett Breakfast Club, a membership-based collection of businesspeople who come together for networking opportunities as well as the signature breakfast speaker series. In recent years, NFL Hall of Famer Ray Lewis and pro golfer Bryson DeChambeau were among the speakers.
After a buffet breakfast, Berman — a six-time National Sportscaster of the Year — spoke for about an hour. He talked about starting at ESPN when he was 24, taking a $16,000 salary; how he came up with his famous nicknames for athletes (think Jake “Daylight come and you gotta” Delhomme); and weaved in an interesting story about a skunk (stick around for that).
We’ll share some of what he said:
On the early days of ESPN
Berman explained how ESPN originally set out to be a 24-hour sports channel for Connecticut sports, mainly for UConn teams. To create a cable channel back in 1979, at the start of cable TV, Berman said distribution costs, via a satellite feed, were $35,000 per month, but the network brass quickly discovered that it would cost the same amount of money to broadcast only to Connecticut or nationally.
Berman said ESPN founder Bill Rasmussen — who had recently been fired from his communication manager position with the old Hartford Whalers NHL team — bought land in Connecticut and the national broadcasts began.
“So that’s how we started,” Berman said. “So that’s why we’re in Connecticut. We could be anywhere. It could be Iowa. We could be here. It was one of those things. You find gold in the backyard. And that’s how we started, kind of an accident. Sometimes you have a good idea and you don’t know where it’s going to lead.”
Berman said he worked very early in the mornings at the start of his career, and even called darts once.
“You ever do a replay on the wrist action?” Berman said to laughs. “Oh, ‘Good follow-through.’”
On his famous nicknames
Berman has become well-known for giving athletes nicknames and for his catchphrases, like saying a baseball player is going “back, back, back, back” to try to catch a long fly ball. The sound effect he does for football players making a shifty move — “whoot!” — he got from watching “The Three Stooges.”
He said he started doing nicknames as a history major at Brown University and really dove in, early in his ESPN career, when he was doing a show that started at 2:30 a.m.
“These things came organically,” he said. “A lot of them came out, like I wasn’t planning on it. If you try to do something, it doesn’t work. Just be yourself.”
Berman said the first two he used on air were for baseball players Frank Tanana (”Frank Tanana daiquiri”) and John Mayberry (”Mayberry RFD”).
But he wasn’t sure they landed well.
“I hear it in my earpiece,” Berman said. “My producer says, ‘What was that?’ I thought I said a four-letter word on TV and my career would be over, but the camera people were laughing. I got in the next day and nobody said, ‘You’re not doing the show,’ so we tried a couple more.”
The infamous skunk story
Berman told a story about a skunk around the middle of his remarks Thursday and it drew some of the biggest responses of the entire speech.
“I don’t know how it happened,” he said. “It went in the studio. Never saw (it), but you ever have a skunk in your garage? You get him out of there, right? But the smell doesn’t leave. It’s there for two weeks. They get scared. They do their thing, and apparently the skunk didn’t think much of our shows.
“We were crying, hacking. I don’t care if you take leaf blowers and you have big fans. It stays there. We did shows for a good week, like choking and tearing and nobody ever said why.”
Reflecting on a long career
Berman said he’s been lucky to be at one place for his entire career, and though he’s semi-retired, he said he’s still having a lot of fun.
“I didn’t get in to make great money in it,” he said. “But if you’re 24 years old and you can pursue something that you love, you go, ‘Let me see what happens.’”
In May, Berman signed a new deal with ESPN that will keep him with the network through its 50th anniversary in 2029.
“You know, they underpaid me for 20 years,” he said. “They overpaid me for 20 years, and now it’s kind of a wash. I’m one of the most fortunate ever.”
This story was originally published January 15, 2026 at 2:19 PM.
