The end of Shane Battier’s NBA career was humiliating.
When he was told, without being told, that the 2014 Miami Heat’s best chance at winning a championship was without him on the floor, he was bitter. Nothing was worse to Battier than being sat by Erik Spoelstra in crunch time, except maybe his short-lived ESPN tenure.
“That was my identity,” the Duke legend told Pablo Torre. “It hurt me to my core. And that’s when I knew I was done. I was embarrassed, and I was cynical. And so when I retired, I was very cynical. I was sad, but I was also very cynical.”
That cynicism didn’t stay tucked away. It carried right into his post-playing chapter at the Worldwide Leader. ESPN brought Battier on for NBA Draft coverage, where he’d handle interviews with freshly picked prospects. It was an experimental move that looked decent on paper.
But it didn’t work. At all.
“I had all these emotions I’d never associated with basketball,” Battier informed the ex-ESPNer as he laid out that he battled depression, heavily isolated himself, and was emotionally unavailable in the immediate aftermath of his post-playing career. “It was a big mistake to go work for ESPN. I was really bad on TV. You could probably go on Awful Announcing and find some Shane Battier lowlights. I had zero passion for it. Zero.”
Hey, we know those guys! And we did go into AA’s archives and found that there wasn’t exactly a lot of glowing praise being thrown his way. At the time, AA’s Matt Yoder wrote that the best way to describe Battier’s presence on TV was a “painfully awkward Rob Lowe manifesting himself as a college basketball analyst.”
Getting a very “Monty from Major League” vibe from Shane Battier thus far.
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) December 3, 2014
Battier dabbled as a college basketball analyst alongside the great Sean McDonough. His debut was pretty rough, as he compared the same Louisville player to both Kevin Durant and Shawn Bradley. He didn’t excel as an analyst, and he didn’t excel as an interviewer, either.
It just wasn’t his lane. And now, we know why.
He didn’t love it. He didn’t want it. He was still reeling from how his playing days ended with a quiet fade to black in a crowded Heat locker room. The ESPN opportunity was more about filling a void than following a passion.
“I was chasing relevance,” Battier said. “When you retire, you don’t know. This is all I knew for 30 years, right? I had a purpose every day and a scoreboard above me that told me where I was. I loved my teammates. I loved being a part of a team. The money was great. I had status. I had all these things. People are chasing these things in their professional lives; I checked every box. So not to have that when you wake up one day because you don’t have the jersey, you don’t have the locker room, you don’t have the purpose — it’s scary as sh*t. I was terrified.”
Battier spent the entirety of his career mastering the rule of the glue guy. On the court, he was the guy who never cracked, never showed weakness, and always did the little things. But when the minutes disappeared, so did the identity he’d spent decades building. He no longer knew who he was.
And for a brief, uncomfortable stretch, ESPN viewers didn’t know either.
But they also didn’t know that Battier was just a man clearly searching for footing in a world that no longer made sense to him.