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For 18 years, Mike Golic and Mike Greenberg were sports radio’s most durable double act. Then ESPN extracted Greenberg from radio to construct a TV show around him, and the fallout left the partnership fractured for years, the two men reduced to virtual strangers on the air they’d once shared.
Now that Golic’s back with the Worldwide Leader, he’s not ready to declare the estrangement permanent, and he made that clear when asked directly about the possibility of reuniting with Greenberg.
“It would be silly for me to ignore the past if it can become the present. To say that we wouldn’t cross paths, you never know,” Golic said during a recent interview with Barrett Media. “I know Greeny stopped doing radio because of Get Up and everything else he’s doing. I would never say never. Obviously, not an everyday show. That would never happen because he’s busy with his own show. But I would never say never.”
Golic and Greenberg’s history runs deeper than almost any other pairing in sports radio history. The two launched Mike & Mike on ESPN Radio in 2000, and the show grew into one of the format’s most dominant morning programs for nearly two decades, simulcast on ESPN2 and ESPNews and eventually enshrined in the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2016. The end came in 2017, when ESPN pulled Greenberg off radio to build what would eventually become Get Up.
“The last thing in the world I expected was ‘we’re breaking up the show,'” Golic told Awful Announcing at the time, adding that ESPN management had pitched him on a new show with his son instead.
Whatever cracks existed didn’t stay hidden for long. By 2020, Golic was describing the relationship in far starker terms, saying there “really isn’t much of a relationship anymore” and that Greenberg never gave him a real heads-up before the split became official. He walked that back somewhat in a later appearance on Sarah Spain’s podcast, saying only that he wished Greenberg “would have come to me and kind of was a little more upfront about it,” while adding, “someday, I will tell the full stories of everything.”
Golic stayed on the air afterward, teaming with Trey Wingo and his own son, Mike Golic Jr., on Golic and Wingo until that show ended in July 2020, closing out a 22-year run as an ESPN morning host. What followed was a strange, winding stretch away from the network that had employed Golic for two decades. He and his son launched Golic & Golic on DraftKings in 2023, moved to FanDuel Sports Network when that deal wasn’t renewed, and lasted there only 10 months before FanDuel TV announced a 20-month wind-down that eliminated roughly 100 jobs. It marked the third stop in three years for a partnership ESPN had once discarded without much ceremony.
Now, ESPN, the same network that had told Golic’s agent it had no interest in bringing him back even at reduced pay, is the fourth. Golic and his son returned to ESPN Radio earlier this month with a new show, The Golics, taking over the 10 a.m. slot.
Greenberg, for his part, has stayed put at ESPN the entire time, hosting Get Up daily since 2018 in addition to his own radio show. Whatever happened between the two Mikes clearly hasn’t fully healed given how Golic described things in 2020, but with both of them back under the same roof for the first time in years, even Golic himself doesn’t sound ready to close the door on it completely.
The post Mike Golic not closing door on reunion with Mike Greenberg: ‘Never say never’ appeared first on Awful Announcing.
