uncomfortable conversations with a black man episode 4

Uncomfortable conversations with a black man episode 4 tv#

“Let’s have this conversation so you can learn …” Based in Austin for the duration of his time at Longhorn Network and ESPN, Acho would travel to New York and Bristol, Conn., to make appearances on “Get Up” to talk college football and the NFL. “I remember telling my boss as we worked on Manny’s first deal, ‘We’re going to have to replace Manny soon, we’re not going to keep him long.’ I was surprised we had him two years, instead of one.”Īfter two years at Longhorn Network, Acho signed a multiyear contract and transitioned from Longhorn Network’s “Texas GameDay” to ESPN’s college football programming in July of 2018. He was like, ‘You think I can do this?’ And I was like, ‘Absolutely, you can,’” said Wall, who knew Acho was too good to stay for long. Acho took a temporary job in 2016 as an analyst for the network - before transitioning to a full-time analyst that fall. Wall, who had been closely monitoring his NFL career, was eager to bring Acho back (even while he hoped to be signed by another team). By 2015, the NFL chapter of his life ended. After being drafted in the sixth round by the Cleveland Browns in 2012, he had a seesaw four years in the league, spending time with the Browns, Giants and Eagles but never finding his footing. As a 6-foot-2, 240-pound linebacker, he was a force in college - starting 26 of his 48 games at Texas - but that light didn’t follow him to the NFL. Acho, 29, got his start as an analyst at ESPN-owned Longhorn Network in 2016 before being tapped in June this year to partner with Marcellus Wiley on the FS1 afternoon studio show “Speak for Yourself.”Īcho grew up in Dallas as the youngest of four siblings to parents who had arrived from Nigeria in the 1970s.

Widely recruited, the 6-foot-2, 240-pound linebacker chose to attend the University of Texas before embarking on a short-lived NFL career. Mark’s School of Texas in Dallas, lettering in football, basketball and track and field. The Fox Sports 1 analyst (friends call him Acho) graduated from the St. I remember saying to him at the time: ‘Hey, you’ve got a future in this business whenever you are ready.” “There are people who are talented in different ways Manny had everything … just impressive - in so many ways. “He had something - you could just tell,” she said of Acho. She was taken by Acho’s presence when he stopped by the studio during his final year at Texas to talk UT sports. “I knew he was struggling, because he was so overwhelmed with everything going on.” “Impressive - in so many ways.”Īs the lead studio producer for the ESPN-owned Longhorn Network, which launched in 2011 and focuses on varsity sports at the University of Texas at Austin, Wall had an eye for up-and-coming talent.

Uncomfortable conversations with a black man episode 4 tv#

“I knew he was in a fragile state,” explained Ande Wall, Acho’s friend and former boss at the Longhorn Network, the site of his first TV job after graduating from Texas in 2011. I was just busy, ‘What the hell can I do? What the hell can I do?’” Anger wasn’t going to solve this world’s problem. “There was a little righteous frustration, but what am I going to be angry at? The cops? And then do what? I’m solution-oriented, so anger wasn’t going to solve my problem. “Anger doesn’t solve anything,” Acho said. Missing was any mention of the word anger. “I was like, ‘This is the state of America? Is this truly the state of the world in which a Black man has to live?’” Speechless because of what I had just witnessed - another Black man literally murdered in front of our eyes while he was begging for his own life, and some were begging for him for the officer to stop. “I remember being speechless being devastated being distraught being utterly perplexed. “I don’t want to get into that emotional space because that was a very heavy space for me,” Acho responded in a tone far different from the one he maintains while on television. Fox Sports hired Emmanuel Acho in June to co-host “Speak for Yourself.” fox sportsĮmmanuel Acho bristled when urged to relive the anguish he felt as he watched 46-year-old George Floyd pleading for his life and calling out for his mama as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his left knee on the back of Floyd’s neck for an excruciating 8 minutes and 46 seconds on May 25.Īcho, a 29-year-old former NFL linebacker, was recently tapped by Fox Sports 1 to drop hot takes on cue as co-host of the daily studio show “Speak for Yourself,” alongside Marcellus Wiley, but he was admittedly slow to opt in to an uncomfortable conversation that has elevated the Black Lives Matter movement to the world.