ESPN Did Ryan Clark Dirty. But It Got Me Thinking About the Most Disrespectful Ways to Get Fired
Getting fired while you’re on-air is the kind of corporate behavior that makes everybody else side-eye their employer.
ESPN recently announced several layoffs of prominent analysts and commentators in what is being sold as some sort of restructuring. Among the layoffs are folks of note like Cam Newton, Bart Scott and Ryan Clark. While I’m not sure where Scott will go, Newton will be fine; he’s got his own show, and while his stint at BET was cut short, Cam is enough of a personality that I imagine this move won’t be a thing that puts him into the background.
Ryan Clark, though, is interesting for a few reasons. He’s built up enough cachet and credibility where not being on ESPN and part of its football and sports culture isn’t great for his brand, but he can do the same thing on his own podcast, The Pivot, which he co-hosts with Channing Crowder and Fred Taylor. While it’s not ESPN, ESPN also isn’t The Pivot, which allows its hosts to have convos in ways ESPN would never touch. Clark, at this point, has also become something of a social media phenom. His takes, especially when something of notable cultural interest happens, travel far and wide all over social media. There’s a reason he managed to secure a more than $2 million annual deal at ESPN, even if it’s come to an end.
Which makes his termination all the more disrespectful. Getting let go from ESPN amidst several layoffs isn’t the part that’s disrespectful; he’ll be fine, and frankly, he might be able to do better. But Clark was fired while he was ON-AIR. ESPN’s company line was that it intended to announce his layoff with the rest of the announcements that happened on Tuesday, but for fear of him learning via social media instead of being told “face-to-face,” he was told of his termination on Monday while he was taping NFL Live.
For a person as ballyhoo’d as Clark, getting fired mid-show is up there with Craig famously getting fired on his day off on Friday. Except, Friday is fiction, a movie whose central premise is the pure stupidity of circumstances that led to the firing and the day that followed. Clark lives in the real world where real people came to the conclusion that this was the best way to relieve one of their highest-paid and most famous talents on the network of their work duties.
ESPN ought to be ashamed of itself. I’m pissed for him. If I were Clark, I’d go on The Pivot and tell them about themselves one good time and then follow the Bill Simmons blueprint of talking shit about them every so often in coy, IYKYK ways.
All that aside, Clark’s termination and the way he was let go got me thinking about just how disrespectful it was. It can’t be the most disrespectful way to be fired, but it’s surely not on the lower end of that scale. In fact, the only thing that I can think of that is more disrespectful is being fired live, on-air, during an actual segment where another co-host shares the knowledge. To wit, it seems he got the news mid-show, presumably from his agent or somebody at ESPN, and just never returned. It felt disrespectful enough to result in some furniture moving, though Clark has moved no furniture in the wake of his termination, thus far. He has instead opted for the canned social media response when you’re kind of already rich by showing how he’s back to it in the gym...which kind of doubles as an ad for Planet Fitness?
Either way, here are some other ways to be terminated that would absolutely piss me off.
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