Profile of Tony Kornheiser on Famous Like Me

Tony Kornheiser (born Anthony Irwin Kornheiser on July 13, 1948) is a popular Jewish-American sportswriter, radio talk show host, and columnist for The Washington Post. He was raised in Hewlett, a town on Long Island, New York.

Well known for his savage wit, Kornheiser began his career in New York City after his graduation from Harpur College, now Binghamton University, in 1970. Before joining the Washington Post in 1979, Kornheiser wrote for Newsday and The New York Times and also worked as a teacher. Kornheiser and fellow sportswriter Michael Wilbon co-host the program Pardon the Interruption on ESPN television. He hosted The Tony Kornheiser Show on ESPN radio for six years and now has a radio show on WTEM Sportstalk 980 out of Washington, D.C., and carried by XM Satellite Radio.

Mr. Kornheiser, a self-admitted agitator stemming from his time as a young adult in the late 1960s, would do many things to provoke wrath from his bosses, fellow ESPN employees, (especially the on-air TV "heads") and with ESPN's usual core audience who wanted only sports talk and not stories about his mischievous dog, Maggie, or him kvetching about his age and lack of hair. Eventually, ESPN Radio let him go, but his lively banter with colleague Michael Wilbon on the show, which mirrored actual discussions had at the Washington Post, sparked the idea for Pardon the Interruption well before the end of his run at ESPN Radio. Several months later, "Mr. Tony" returned back to where he got his sports-radio start, at WTEM Sportstalk 980 with Washington, D.C., talk-show host Andy Pollin, Gary Braun, and Mark Stern. The show can be heard online on SportsTalk 980 from 9 AM EST to 11 AM EST, after which the show is repeated until 1 PM EST.

The 2004-2005 sitcom Listen Up, which aired on CBS, was based on Kornheiser's life. It featured Jason Alexander (Seinfeld) as Tony, and the sitcom's material mostly came from Kornheiser's columns (collected in I'm Back for More Cash) that he contributed to the "Style" section of the Washington Post; they columns took a humorous view of his family life.

When Wilbon isn't in the studio (such as on location at a sporting event), Kornheiser often has to read all of the viewer emails in the "Mail Time" segment. Accepting this responsibility, he says he will "do it for the kids."

Kornheiser believes that Man vs. Beast is the greatest program in sports history, and that the "trampoline bear" is the funniest clip in human history.

Describes himself as a "Blue State Guy." Appropriately, he and Wilbon are close friends with Democratic political advisor James Carville, who has appeared several times on the show.

Bibliography

• 1983 - "The Baby Chase". Macmillan. 212 Pages. ISBN 0689113544
• 1995 - Pumping irony: working out the angst of a lifetime. DIANE Publishing Company. ISBN 0788167731.
• 1997 - Bald as I wanna be. Villard. 304 pages. ISBN 0375500375.
• 2003 - I’m back for more cash: a Tony Kornheiser collection (because you can’t take two hundred newspapers into the bathroom). Villard. 400 pages. ISBN 0812968530.

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