Cari Champion (born June 1, 1978) is an American broadcast journalist and television personality. She was the host of The Cari Champion Show on Amazon Prime Video Sports Talk. She has worked as an

anchor An anchor is a device, normally made of metal, used to secure a vessel to the bed of a body of water to prevent the craft from drifting due to wind or current. The word derives from Latin ', which itself comes from the Greek (). Anch ...

and reporter for the Tennis Channel and as the host of

ESPN2 ESPN2 is an American multinational pay television network owned by ESPN Inc., a joint venture between the Walt Disney Company (which owns a controlling 80% stake) and Hearst Communications (which owns the remaining 20%). ESPN2 was initially ...

's '' First Take''. In July 2014, Champion became an anchor for

ESPN ESPN (an initialism of their original name, which was the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by the Walt Disney Company (80% and operational control) and Hearst Commu ...

's flagship program '' SportsCenter''. After almost eight years at the network, she left ESPN in February 2020. From August 2020 to February 2021, she co-hosted '' Cari & Jemele (Won't) Stick to Sports'' with Jemele Hill on the Vice on TV network.

Early life

Champion was born in June 1978 and raised in

Pasadena, California Pasadena ( ) is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States, northeast of downtown Los Angeles. It is the most populous city and the primary cultural center of the San Gabriel Valley. Old Pasadena is the city's original commerci ...

. Champion attended the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school the ...

(UCLA), where she majored in English and minored in mass communications. She wrote for the ''

Daily Bruin The ''Daily Bruin'' is the student newspaper at the University of California, Los Angeles. It began publishing in 1919, the year UCLA was founded. The ''Daily Bruin'' distributes about 6,000 copies across campus three times a week. It also publ ...

'' and was inspired to pursue a career in

journalism Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that informs society to at least some degree of accuracy. The word, a noun, applies to the journ ...

by UCLA alumni, including Matea Gold of the ''

Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...

'', who was the editor in chief of the student newspaper. Champion was drawn to journalism with goals of transforming negative stereotypes of

African American African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from an ...

s: "I wanted to give people a voice that didn't have a voice. I'm always fighting for the underdog. I don't know where I got it from, but I've been like that all my life. That's why I love journalism." In her junior year, she studied in Washington, D.C., and earned an internship at VOA. Champion graduated from UCLA in 2000, with an English degree.

Career

Early broadcasting work

Champion began her broadcasting career at several television stations. She moved to West Virginia for her first reporting job. She later said of working there: "I was a one-man-band carrying a camera and a tripod and that was God-awful. But I loved it because I wanted to do it. I always wanted to be a reporter." She was a reporter at the Orange County Newschannel in

Santa Ana, California Santa Ana (Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a city in and the county seat of Orange County, California, United States. Located in the Greater Los Angeles region of Southern California, the city's population was 310,227 at the 2020 census. As ...

, before joining WPTV-TV in West Palm Beach, Florida, in the same capacity in 2002. In November 2007, while working as an anchor for WGCL-TV in Atlanta, Champion was fired for allegedly uttering a profanity over the air. She appealed the firing and said in an interview for the Maynard Institute that the floor director had not cued her and her co-anchor following a commercial break, and that the microphone picked up a conversation they were having about an unhandy mechanical screenwriter: "I called the screenwriter a 'mothersucka' not the f-bomb." She was rehired in January 2008, but left shortly after in March for a broadcasting job outside of Atlanta. After moving to Florida, Champion covered news such as human interest stories and devastating hurricanes in the state. While working as a reporter there, she developed an affinity for tennis after covering players such as

Venus Venus is the second planet from the Sun. It is often called Earth's "twin" or "sister" planet for having almost the same size and mass, and the closest orbit to Earth's. While both are rocky planets, Venus has an atmosphere much thicker ...

and

Serena Williams Serena Jameka Williams (born September 26, 1981) is an American former professional tennis player. She was ranked as the List of WTA number 1 ranked singles tennis players, world No. 1 in women's singles by the Women's Tennis Association (WT ...

: "They made me love the sport even more. They opened the door to tennis for so many different people." She subsequently auditioned for the Tennis Channel's burgeoning news department and was one of three women selected from a pool of more than fifty candidates. She joined the network in 2009. Champion worked as a courtside reporter, and anchored the channel's ''Court Report'' news segment. She also worked as an entertainment reporter for the Starz network and shows such as '' The Insider'' and ''

Hollywood 411 ''Hollywood 411'' is an entertainment news and gossip television show that originally premiered on August 12, 2005, but later started on January 14, 2008, on the TV Guide Network and is hosted by Chris Harrison. The show was previously hosted by ...

''.

Career at ESPN

On October 1, 2012, Champion joined

as the new host of

's live debate show '' First Take''. She was hired over Heidi Watney and Jemele Hill for the job. As the show's host, she moderated debates between sports pundits Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith, who she said had "the biggest, strongest personalities in the building". After proposing ideas for stories to ESPN, Champion made her journalistic debut for the network on November 4, 2014, when she profiled and interviewed American football quarterback Cam Newton in a segment for '' E:60''. That same day, she was the target of racist and sexist tweets from comedian Artie Lange, who jokingly portrayed himself and Champion in a sexual fantasy set during

slavery Slavery is the ownership of a person as property, especially in regards to their labour. Slavery typically involves compulsory work, with the slave's location of work and residence dictated by the party that holds them in bondage. Enslavemen ...

. Lange tweeted an apology to Champion the following day and ESPN issued a statement to ''

Sports Illustrated ''Sports Illustrated'' (''SI'') is an American sports magazine first published in August 1954. Founded by Stuart Scheftel, it was the first magazine with a circulation of over one million to win the National Magazine Award for General Excellen ...

'' that rebuked Lange's tweets, while Champion did not respond publicly. After petitioning ESPN for six months to become an anchor on '' SportsCenter'', Champion was promoted to the position in June 2015. She hosted her last episode of ''First Take'' on June 19 and began anchoring morning editions of ''SportsCenter'' in July.

Career at Amazon Prime Video

In 2022,

Embassy Row Embassy Row is the informal name for a section of Northwest Washington, D.C., with a high concentration of embassies, diplomatic missions, and diplomatic residences. It spans Massachusetts Avenue N.W. between 18th and 35th street, bounded ...

announced that Champion will host ''The Cari Champion Show'' on

Amazon Prime Video Amazon Prime Video, known simply as Prime Video, is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming television service owned by Amazon. The service primarily distributes films and television series produced or co-produced by ...

. On November 14, 2022, Champion made her debut on The Cari Champion Show.

Reese-Clark rivalry

In June 2024, invited to CNN along with Bob Costas to comment on the WNBA game between Indiana Fever and Chicago Sky, and on the Reese-Clark rivalry, Champion stated that while "no one cared about the WNBA when women of a certain color .e. black womenwere beating up and bruising each other," now "we have this star, this woman larkthat people love, ndthey want to protect her." Costas pointed out that a flagrant foul committed against Reese less than a week before that game had received very little media attention because both Reese and the player who fouled her were black, and, therefore, the incident did not "spark as much conversation."

References

External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Champion, Cari 1978 births African-American television hosts American television journalists American women television journalists African-American television personalities American television sports anchors Liberalism in the United States Living people Mass media people from Pasadena, California University of California, Los Angeles alumni CNN people ESPN people African-American women journalists African-American journalists African-American sports journalists American sports journalists 21st-century American women journalists 21st-century American journalists