Let’s not forget that, in the beginning, Skip Bayless was a really fine journalist. As a columnist at the Los Angeles Times, for instance, he broke stories about how many Dodgers players resented Steve Garvey and called him “Golden Boy” — the type of behind-the-scenes reporting that was somewhat rare at the time.
Bayless won a slew of awards, among them the Eclipse Award for Outstanding Newspaper Writing in 1977 for his coverage of Seattle Slew’s Triple Crown win. But by the time he migrated to the Dallas Times Herald in the 1990s, it all began to unravel.