As Kornheiser’s popularity increased, through PTI and Monday Night Football, his writing slowed and then finally, in 1999, stopped altogether.

‘I’ve watched too many guys get old, and think they had a fastball, and didn’t have a fastball,’ he says, ‘and I’ve just watched too many people get to the point where they have nothing new to say and so they try to recreate their old moves. And I just don’t want to do it. I’ve told [Bill] Simmons, you can put my name on this Grantland thing, and I’ll be happy to write you e-mails. But I’m not going out there again with my pants off. I’m not doing that. I’m too old for that. There’s a new style of writing now. It’s just different than anything I ever wrote. They write with such enormous confidence. They have no doubts. I could never have done that. I lived with doubts all the time. It was the doubts, I guess, that drove me.’