ESPN’s Ogwumike Launches ‘Second Acts Live’ Talks With Sports Stars

ESPN analyst and former WNBA All-Star Chiney Ogwumike will lead a series of live on-stage conversations with former sports stars talking about the next phases of their lives, including former WNBA star Sue Bird, ex-ESPN scoopmeister Adrian Wojnarowski, and former NFL quarterback Michael Vick.

The events, called Second Acts Live, are being launched in partnership with Folk Productions and sports-business site Front Office Sports, and planned for a variety of venues around the country.

Ogwumike called the live events “an exciting new chapter for me, where I get to learn from and celebrate others who are redefining themselves in powerful ways.”

The focus in sports personalities in their next acts reflects the old adage that athletes die two deaths, the first when their sports career ends, Ogwumike acknowledged in an interview. Ogwumike is her own second act, in media, with her on-air ESPN analyst work after a decade-long WNBA career interrupted by her decision not to play during 2020’s pandemic bubble year. Older sister Nneka Ogwumike remains in the league, playing for the Seattle Storm and just named an All-Star Game starter.

Ogwumike promised the on-stage conversations would be wide-ranging and not, to use a sports metaphor, filled with softball questions. And she said the conversations will be interactive, meaning she intends to interact and even invite audience questions as part of the events.

“The way I would describe these (interview subjects) is they are very much what you see is what you get,” Ogwumike said.

“When you think about picking the talent, who are the people actually going through a second act right now,” said Folk Productions co-founder Tré Scott. “The questions don’t have to be gotchas. She’s embarking on the literal journey as we speak. It becomes something more organic and spiritual.”

Scott said the cadence of events will be about one a month, each to be located on home turf of the personality to be interviewed. Thus WNBA Hall of Famer Bird’s September event will be in Seattle, where she played her entire pro career, and will talk about her efforts to grow women’s sports.

Wojnarowski’s conversation will be in Philadelphia, where he’ll talk about his decision last fall to leave behind decades of delivering endless scoops for ESPN to become general manager of the men’s basketball team at his alma mater, St. Bonaventure University in western New York.

Vick, a four-time All-Pro NFL quarterback before falling from grace and serving nearly two years in federal prison on dog-fighting charges, rebuilt his NFL career after his 2009 release, then became an on-air NFL analyst for Fox. Last December, he was named head football coach at HBCU Norfolk State University. His Second Acts Live event will be in December in Atlanta, where he recorded his biggest NFL success.

“First and foremost, our primary focus is we want the audience to have an amazing experience,” Scott said. “How we bring it to the audience will be truly about live entertainment. People want to hear those untold stories. It’s really about how to drive people to the live, in-person experience.”

The partnership will leverage Front Office Sports’ mammoth online and newsletter presence to both build awareness and audience engagement before each event, and follow up with online material culled from each live conversation, Scott said.

Live events as a category have quickly recovered from the devastations of the pandemic lockdown, with music in particular a hot commodity, as evidenced by the massively lucrative recent tours of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. And podcasts of a bewildering variety have blossomed online, featuring an immense variety of mostly recorded conversations with notables in many areas, including sports.

Even old talk-show hosts such as David Letterman and Jon Stewart have in recent years recast themselves doing in-depth, one-to-one conversations, partly in front of live audiences, with a variety of notables. More specialized live events, such as Live Talks Los Angeles, have put on hundreds of events in specific markets, in Live Talks’ case pairing authors of prominent new books with interesting interlocutors from many fields.

Second Acts will launch focused in sports and media, where Ogwumike has her strongest roots, connections, and behind-the-scenes stories, she said. But her long-term ambition is to expand the potential conversational partners into other areas.

Scott said event venues will generally range in size from 1,200 to 2,000 seats, such as the Met Philadelphia, which has upcoming shows featuring Cat Stevens, Jon Batiste and John Mulaney, the comedian who’s recently presided over a series of live late-night talk shows on Netflix.

Theaters of that size are big enough to create the energy and scale to connote an “event,” while still allowing the resulting conversation to remain intimate in feel, Scott said.

Holding live events may limit the initiative’s initial scale, Scott acknowledged, but said “scale can exist outside the walls of the theater, and that is the magic. That’s how we end up with a platform.”