Joe Coles

The guy who kept Shaq and Charles Barkley in line on TV for 37 years used to spend his mornings shaving and dressing his son, who could barely move and breathed through a ventilator. Then he'd go to work and laugh with those guys all night like nothing was going on. Tonight Ernie Johnson said this season will be his last, and Barkley tried to thank him on air and couldn't get the words out. I don't think most people watching that clip know what Ernie was carrying all those years. He and his wife Cheryl adopted Michael from an orphanage outside Bucharest in 1991, when he was 3. He had Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and doctors didn't think he'd make it to his 20s. He lived to 33. When Ernie was home, getting Michael ready in the morning could take an hour and a half, and Ernie did the showering and shaving and dressing himself. In 2006 he told viewers he had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and by the end of October he was back at the desk while he was still going through chemo. When Michael died in 2021, Ernie wasn't on the show that week, and Shaq, Kenny and Chuck spent about six minutes trying to hold it together while they talked about a kid most of America never met. Then last year he had heart bypass surgery, and this summer he turned 70. Ernie's dad pitched in the big leagues and then called Braves games for decades, and he gave his son a rule Ernie's talked about forever: if somebody spikes you at second base, never rub. If you've ever wondered why nobody's been able to copy Inside, that rule is a big part of it. Barkley could say the dumbest thing imaginable, Shaq could fall out of his chair, Kenny could go running to the big board, and Ernie would just pick it up and bring it back to basketball with that yellow legal pad. Those three got to be chaos because the guy in the middle never made his own stuff the show. He still calls hosting a "get-to job," and he was calling it that the same year he buried his son. So when Charles Barkley, who's roasted pretty much everybody alive on live TV, can't finish a sentence to the man, that's why.