ESPN Prepared for Wooden Story

With the death of college basketball legend John Wooden, every sports media outlet produced mounds of tributes to the 99-year-old coach and former All-American.

ESPN was the best prepared to cover the news of the beloved coach's death because of previous research and work.

Wooden was a focus on ESPN's "Sports Century" series in the past, and the hours of interviews with an appropriate variety of sources was mined for things such as this segment, which was utilized on TV and online almost immediately after Wooden's death.


Also, ESPN rallied all its resources to provide timely interviews and responses from its deep roster of college basketball efforts. Taken together, the breadth of coverage produced an appropriate picture of a man that almost all of ESPN's core viewers were too young to remember.

It was good work all around. Of course, a good man who did so much made it easy.