The telephone name Adam Schefter all the time feared got here on his first Sunday at residence in 5 months. It was early March, and ESPN’s senior NFL reporter had just lately flown again from Indianapolis after per week on the scouting mix. He was about to take a seat down for breakfast together with his household when his cell buzzed.
It was his boss, Seth Markman.
“We misplaced him,” was all Markman may muster.
For years, Schefter had identified the decision would possibly come — when your shut good friend and colleague is identified with Stage 4 throat most cancers at age 64, you put together for the worst. There have been a couple of instances in 2020, and some extra in 2022, when Schefter thought to himself, This is perhaps it. However Chris Mortensen all the time pulled although.
“A troublesome son of a bitch,” Markman stated.
“He fought for each single day he bought,” provides Daniel Jeremiah of NFL Community.
When Mort first revealed his analysis to Schefter, over electronic mail in 2016, he begged his pal to maintain it quiet for a couple of days — Mort’s son, Alex, was about to educate in school soccer’s nationwide championship recreation, and he didn’t wish to spoil his second. Mort was all the time extra frightened about what this might do to his spouse, Micki, than the grueling therapy forward. “Micki is absolutely struggling,” he closed the e-mail. “I’m nonetheless going to be a jackass.”
He by no means let on how draining it was: the chemo, the radiation that left burns throughout his neck, the IV routine that sapped his power however not his spirit. He dropped weight. He misplaced hair. His voice light. When pals would ask how he was doing, he’d shrug them off. “I’m positive, I’m good,” Mort would inform them. “I’m coping with it.”
He labored about so long as he may. On the 2023 draft, Mort’s final at ESPN, he had to make use of a twig bottle to moist his mouth between segments. His saliva glands had stopped working.
He retired. He spent final fall watching Alex name performs as UAB’s offensive coordinator. His pals thought he was doing positive, all issues thought of. Schefter known as him from the mix this yr after discovering out one in all Schefter’s 5 canines, Benny, had been identified with lung most cancers. Mort consoled him, by no means mentioning how he was feeling. It was the final time the 2 spoke.
“He sounded higher, like issues had been going the best manner,” Schefter says.
Provides ESPN colleague Mel Kiper, Jr., “No one was ready for it to occur now.”
Mort spent the night time earlier than he died at residence on his horse farm in Arkansas watching soccer drills and TV protection of the mix, cracking jokes on textual content threads.
Jeremiah bought the information throughout a business break the following day, then broke down when Wealthy Eisen requested him about it on the air. The person who’d jumpstarted his profession — “None of it occurs with out him,” he says — was gone. With tears in his eyes, Jeremiah tried to settle himself.
“Mort would’ve punched me within the face if I didn’t end that broadcast proper,” he says.
A number of hours later, Schefter’s telephone buzzed once more. It was John Walsh, a longtime ESPN govt. “I need you to know the way a lot Mort pushed you for this job,” Walsh advised him.
“I do know, John, I do know,” Schefter stated.
“No, I don’t assume you actually do,” Walsh adopted. “You wouldn’t be at ESPN if not for Mort.”
Two months later, Schefter is in his workplace, looking at an image of him and Mort from a Tremendous Bowl a couple of years again.
“I miss him making me giggle,” Schefter says. “I don’t giggle as a lot with out him.
“I simply …”
He pauses. He sighs.
“I simply can’t consider he’s not right here.”
Adam Schefter (left) was employed at ESPN largely due to Chris Mortensen, and the 2 grew shut over time. (Courtesy of ESPN)
They didn’t come for the reporter. They got here for the person.
Former head coaches. Present normal managers. A whole bunch of ESPN colleagues who overlapped with Mortensen throughout his 32-year run on the community — Adrian Wojnarowski even flew in through the NBA playoffs — descended on a small Arkansas city final week to recollect one of the vital influential reporters in NFL historical past.
However they didn’t inform tales about what he did. They advised tales about who he was.
Mort was a prankster, the coworker who all the time made the room really feel lighter. In all his years at ESPN, no person gave Chris Berman extra grief. As soon as, when the community’s new fantasy soccer professional, Matthew Berry, walked into the room to observe his first Sunday slate of video games with the group, Mort piped up. “Why don’t you sit right here, Matthew?” he stated, guiding Berry to a spot within the entrance row. What Berry didn’t know: The seat belonged to Berman, each Sunday, no questions requested. And Berman hated fantasy soccer. “Nonetheless does,” Schefter says.
A minute later, Berman entered, seemed across the room and noticed the fantasy soccer man parked in his seat.
“You’re within the fallacious chair,” he bellowed.
Mort and the remainder of the room burst into laughter.
(For years, Berry named his fantasy workforce “The Fallacious Chair.”)
After Berman’s daughter, Meredith, was identified with tongue most cancers a couple of years again, Mort turned her sounding board. A rapport developed, two sufferers slogging by therapy, venting for hours on the telephone. One would make it. One wouldn’t. “He was a rock for her,” Berman says, “and possibly on some days when he was struggling terribly.”
He was selfless. When Markman was recruiting Schefter to ESPN in 2009, his bosses had been on board — so long as Mort was on board. On the time, Mort was ESPN’s chief NFL reporter, the face of the community’s protection for twenty years working.
One Sunday morning, Markman nervously made his option to the inexperienced room, frightened that Mort would possibly squash the thought completely. “He had that form of energy,” Markman remembers.
“I’m gonna be trustworthy,” he advised Mort, “it’s gonna minimize into your display time fairly a bit.”
Mort didn’t hesitate.
“Seth, if we will get Adam Schefter, you get him,” he stated. “Much less of me on TV is an effective factor.”
Markman laughs, reliving the story 15 years later.
“Are you kidding me?” he says. “Much less of me is an effective factor? No one on this trade says that.”
Mort and Schefter grew extremely tight. And as Mort’s well being deteriorated following his analysis, and as Schefter climbed into the highest chair, Mort coached him behind the scenes.
“That type of factor by no means occurs,” says Bryan Curtis, who writes about sports activities media for The Ringer. “Individuals who get to that degree are very, very aggressive, and in nearly each occasion, it doesn’t work. This did. And it allowed ESPN to personal NFL scoops for 10 years.”
Mort was the very best form of mentor. When Jeremiah was nonetheless in school, he walked into his mother and father’ front room one afternoon and questioned why the man from ESPN was sitting on the sofa. It was January 1998, per week earlier than the Broncos performed the Packers within the Tremendous Bowl in San Diego, and Mort was on the town to cowl the sport. He’d attended a church service hosted by Jeremiah’s father, David, and stopped by for lunch afterward.
Daniel was a 21-year-old quarterback at Appalachian State with goals of entering into broadcasting.
“Properly, I’ve bought an interview with Reggie White tomorrow, would you wanna include me?” Mort requested him.
“This was actually the primary time I met him,” Jeremiah remembers. “I used to be like, ‘Reggie White! Are you kidding me?’”
After that interview wrapped, Mort urged him to tag alongside at media day later within the week. A yr later, he was sitting subsequent to Mort on the NFL Draft in New York Metropolis, answering his telephones and jotting down notes from GMs. A yr later, Mort launched him to Jay Rothman, who produced “Sunday Night time Soccer.” Jeremiah had his first full-time job.
“All due to Mort,” he says.
A number of years later, after Jeremiah frolicked scouting for the Ravens and Browns, it was Mort who pushed him to leap on this new social media platform known as Twitter and dissect draft prospects. Mort would normally urge his followers to take a look at @MoveTheSticks, and every time he did Jeremiah would choose up hundreds of recent followers.
Jeremiah simply wrapped his sixth draft as NFL Community’s lead analyst, and his first and not using a custom he’d come to cherish: a gathering with Mort the morning earlier than the primary spherical. They’d accomplished it yearly relationship to 2000, when he was only a grunt answering telephones and scribbling down notes.
“It was so bizarre not having him there,” Jeremiah says. “That man is actually the explanation I’m within the seat I’m in.”
Mortensen was a prankster, a coworker who all the time lightened the temper of a room. (Courtesy of ESPN)
Chris Mortensen wasn’t the primary soccer scribe to make the soar to TV full-time — that distinction belongs to Will McDonough — however, after becoming a member of ESPN in 1991, he turned probably the most outstanding, a pioneer of what’s change into ubiquitous at present: the insider.
“If Will McDonough created the function of NFL insider,” Curtis says, “then Mort refined it, sped it up and introduced it into the period of cable TV.”
Nonetheless, again then some noticed it as a dangerous transfer. ESPN wasn’t but a sports activities media juggernaut, and newspaper beat writers nonetheless carried appreciable weight. So did Sports activities Illustrated.
“The opposite writers used to make enjoyable of their brethren once they moved to TV,” says Chip Namias, a former PR director for the Dolphins, Oilers and Bucs. “They’d say, ‘Oh, you’re a reasonably boy now? Being a newspaper man isn’t adequate for you?’ When Mort made that soar, it was a bet.”
It paid off — for him and ESPN. Mort introduced with him the reporting chops he’d honed at The Atlanta Journal-Structure, The Sporting Information and The Nationwide. All of the sudden, he was in every single place: on “NFL Sport Day,” which turned “NFL Countdown,” which turned “Sunday NFL Countdown.” Because the league’s recognition boomed, Mort turned one of many faces of the community.
Greater than that, he turned the heartbeat of the NFL.
Peyton Manning used to carve out a couple of minutes on Sunday mornings earlier than kickoff, hoping to catch “The Mort Report” within the locker room, Mortensen’s weekly phase during which he’d dish all of the morsels of information he’d gathered through the week. “QBs watched, GMs watched, coaches watched,” Manning says. “You had to observe. Mort knew who was getting fired earlier than the individuals who had been truly getting fired knew.”
Again when he was a Broncos beat author for The Rocky Mountain Information and later The Denver Publish, Schefter would ensure he was in his lodge room, or subsequent to a TV on the stadium, each time Mort was on the air.
Curtis says throughout his AJ-C days, Mort started each dialog with a supply the identical manner: “Inform me one thing I don’t know.” However greater than merely breaking information, he beloved to uncover the why behind a firing or the discharge of a participant or a commerce. That took time. And belief.
“He by no means blindsided you with something,” says a longtime NFL PR director, Dan Edwards, who labored for the Steelers and Jaguars. “Mort was like a boy scout.”
He was additionally forward of his time. Mort was working even when he wasn’t. An instance: within the early 2000s, he grew shut with Archie Manning, patriarch of probably the most well-known household in soccer. That led to journeys right down to Louisiana for the Manning Passing Academy every summer season, the place Mort befriended Peyton and Eli and in addition dozens of the highest quarterback prospects within the nation. “Mort was all the time 5 steps forward of everybody else,” longtime NFL author Peter King says. “By the point these children bought to the NFL, Mort had identified them for 10 years.”
One yr at camp, after a couple of coaches flew residence early, Mort volunteered to run some drills. It was the final follow of the week, the one all of the mother and father watch earlier than choosing up their sons. “My dad pulls up within the golf cart and sees Mort instructing these children the three-step drop,” Peyton says, attempting to not giggle. “Then he sees all of the mother and father watching. Dad goes, ‘Properly, that is it. That is formally the tip of the Manning Passing Academy.’”
Peyton Manning (proper), like many QBs, coaches and executives across the NFL, frequently watched “The Mort Report.” (Courtesy of the Manning Passing Academy).
Of all of the star gamers Mort coated, he grew closest with Peyton Manning. Within the winter of 2012, it was Mort who first warned the quarterback, coming off a fourth neck surgical procedure: “Be prepared, the Colts is perhaps shifting on.” They had been phrases that may’ve appeared apparent to everybody else on the time however stung Manning nonetheless.
“Oh, wow,” the QB responded.
The 2 traded emails throughout Manning’s free company tour a couple of months later. “He’d give me the lay of the land with every workforce, an unbiased opinion I wanted,” Manning says. “I may speak in confidence to Mort. Mort may speak in confidence to me.”
4 years later, after Manning helped the Broncos win Tremendous Bowl 50, Mort broke the information of the QB’s retirement from a hospital in Atlanta. Manning had advised him the day earlier than, asking for one final night time as an NFL quarterback. Mort vowed to carry the story till morning. Markman was up all night time, fearing they’d get scooped.
“We received’t get beat,” Mort saved telling him.
“He wouldn’t break his phrase,” Markman says now. “And naturally, he was proper.”
Right this moment, Manning retains a folder in his electronic mail of all of the notes Mort despatched him over time.
One got here after his first preseason recreation as a Bronco. Manning had despatched a choose few — household, pals, Mort, that’s it — a clip of him hitting a receiver on an out route, then taking a nasty hit within the pocket. It was the sequence that advised him he may nonetheless play within the NFL.
“Tremendous proud to see this,” Mort wrote again. “Take pleasure in this. You deserve it.”
On the job, Mort was a disciplined reporter — “the final of the old-fashioned guys,” Schefter calls him. He’d bicker with Markman, agitated over among the segments they’d run on ESPN. Mort loathed sizzling takes. He’d grumble every time one of many NFL reveals ran its “Protected or Out” phase, a debate about which NFL coaches had been about to get fired. “These are human beings,” Mort argued. “We’re speaking about individuals’s lives right here.”
Kiper says each time he’d get some shaky intel from a supply, Mort would attain out. “We should always speak,” he’d warn. “That was code for, ‘I’m listening to totally different,’” Kiper says.
Andrea Kremer remembers the best way Mort welcomed her when she turned ESPN’s first feminine reporter within the early Nineteen Nineties. “It was all the time assist, courtesy and respect,” she says. “This was a unique time for girls within the enterprise, and when a coach or a GM sees Chris Mortensen deal with you that manner — as an equal — that offers you prompt credibility.”
Mort’s affect was so immense, his Rolodex so envied, that at one level an NFL workforce truly employed him.
In 1994, the growth Jacksonville Jaguars lured Mortensen away from ESPN for a job as vp on the personnel aspect. They wished him to assist construct their soccer workforce. Mort accepted the gig, solely to emotionally again out a couple of days later, primarily as a result of Micki didn’t wish to transfer to Jacksonville.
“When you consider it on the floor, the job made no sense,” says Pete Prisco, a longtime NFL author who was then protecting the Jags for The Florida Instances-Union. “They thought as a result of Mort had entry to all this info across the league, they may use that. However the actuality was no person was going to inform him something now that he labored for a workforce.”
Plus, Kremer factors out, “Mort was all the time a reporter at coronary heart.”
The lone stain on Mort’s Corridor of Fame résumé — he acquired the Dick McCann award in Canton in 2016 — arrived a couple of years later, after his preliminary report of the Patriots’ use of underinflated footballs through the early days of the Deflategate scandal later proved inaccurate. The ire of New England’s fan base trailed him for years, and Mort, by then present process therapy for most cancers, stated he acquired demise threats. He later acknowledged errors in his reporting.
“Nothing actually bought to him, however whenever you hear vicious issues about your loved ones, issues that bought overtly private, anyone can be bothered by that,” Markman says. “It bought fairly unhealthy.”
The tributes poured in after Mort handed away on March 3 at 72.
On his present, Dan Patrick advised a narrative from his “SportsCenter” days. Mort had a scoop, and earlier than working the story, the bosses wished affirmation from one other supply. “We don’t want one other supply,” Patrick advised them. “It’s Mort.”
“A GOAT,” Eisen known as him on his present. “A trailblazer.”
Like Jeremiah, it hit Schefter hardest on draft weekend. For 15 years, they’d coated the occasion side-by-side. Now Mort wasn’t there.
“It was my honor,” Schefter says, “to take a seat subsequent to one of many legendary figures in sports activities journalism for so long as I did.”
ESPN paid tribute. Booger McFarland remembered the nerves that accompanied one in all his early appearances on TV and the encouraging phrases that got here from Mort after he completed. “You don’t know the way a lot that meant to a man simply beginning on this enterprise,” McFarland stated. Louis Riddick remembered all of the conferences they sat in collectively. “When you had been speaking soccer, and Mort was nodding his head, that was affirmation you knew what you had been speaking about,” he stated.
On his manner into Detroit for this yr’s draft, Schefter was speaking together with his driver, Sean Malone, about how bizarre it might be protecting the occasion with out Mort.
“God, I beloved that man,” Malone advised him.
“All of us did,” Schefter replied.
Then Malone shared his personal Mort story. He’d pushed him to and from the airport dozens of instances, principally for the draft. And annually, after it was completed, Mort would hand him a $100 invoice and inform him and the opposite drivers to exit and revel in a couple of beers on him.
“No, no, no, I can’t take this,” Malone advised him at first.
Mort wouldn’t hear it.
“Take it,” he stated. “And ship me an image in a couple of hours so I do know you guys are having a very good time.”
So that they did, yr after yr. It turned a practice.
Schefter heard that story and took the lesson to coronary heart, yet another help from his mentor and good friend. When Malone dropped Schefter off on the airport after the draft completed, Schefter handed Malone a $100 invoice.
“That is from Mort,” Schefter advised him.
(Picture illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; high photograph courtesy of ESPN)