Salary: $3 million per year
ESPN SportsCenter anchor, Linda Cohn, is one of the 25 most influential women in sports. Her love for sports started at a very young age, as she was a big sports fan from the time she was little and would watch games on TV with her father. Cohn started playing hockey in high school and continued throughout her entire high school term.
Her first job as a sports anchor started as the WALK-AM radio station anchor in Patchogue, New York and continued working radio for 7 more years until she was hired by ABC, making her the network’s first full-time U.S. female sportscaster on national radio. Cohn has worked with ESPN from 1992 and later became a SportsCenter anchor, a role that she still plays today. One of the most widely recognized moments in her career was anchoring her 5,000th SportsCenter episode, that’s more than any other episode in any ESPN anchor’s history.
Chuck Harmon - MLB
Salary: $1 million per year
Chuck Harmon, who set the path as the first African-American Reds player, was playing baseball way before many of us were even born between 1954 and 1957. Harmon was born in 1924 in Washington, Indiana, as the 10th son out of 12 children. He was trained to be an athlete by Indiana Hall of Fame basketball player Franklin Wonder Five and went on to win 2 championships in 1941 and again in 1942. After retiring from the Navy, he began his professional career with the NBA and quickly moved up to play professional baseball.
The legendary player played a total of 289 games and was inducted into the University of Toledo Athletic Hall of Fame. Harmon was a loving husband and spent 62 out of 94 years of his life married to his wife, Daurel "Pearl" Harmon. The two had three children. Harmon passed away earlier this year due to old age, but the legacy of contributions to sports will always be remembered. He will always be looked towards as the man who paved the way for African Americans in the NBA.
Michael Kay - YES, ESPN Xtra
Salary: $3 million a year
As veteran sportscaster and host of the Michael Kay Show, Michael Kay has spent the last 2.5 decades covering play-by-play sports games and currently holds multiple Emmys for his outstanding coverage of various games. As a native New Yorker, the broadcaster began his reporting career in high-school and began his career in sports in 1982 by working for the New York Post as a general sports writer.
Kay has since become an announcer for the New York Yankees and remains their announcer to this day. In 2002, he began hosting his show, The Michael Kay Show on YES Network and Sirius XM Radio channel 202, in which he talks about a variety of topics related to current sports and popular culture.
Brad Nessler - CBS
Salary: $1.5 million per year
You can catch Brad Nessler's commentating whenever you watch college football or a college basketball game on CBS Sports. The 63-year-old sportscaster from St. Charles, Minnesota, began his career broadcasting for radio stations on Georgia Tech basketball on WGST-AM from age 24 until he was 28. In 1990, Nessler started working for CBS Sports calling various games in NFL and college football and basketball.
The sportscaster also appears annually in the NCAA Football video-game series made by EA Sport. He left CGS Sports for a few years and commentated with ESPN and ABC Sports - before returning to CBS in 2016 as lead play-by-play announcer. In his Twitter account's signature, Nessler claims he's "New to Twitter, but not to the game." He also landed 2 small roles in film. One in 2018's drama "I Can Only Imagine" and another role in the 1985 comedy, "The Slugger's Wife". He played the role of an NFL announcer in the first and as a reporter in the latter.
Paul Maguire - HDNet
Salary: $300,000 per year
Former Los Angeles Chargers and Buffalo Bills linebacker Paul Leo Maguire is almost 80 years old and still kicking. At the time of his peak in the mid-’60s, Maguire went on to break many AFL records in punts and punt yards and has since changed careers and become the popular color commentator for ESPN and NBC. The retired AFL player has appeared in many Chick-fil-A commercials during the Super Bowl. He was originally scouted by an AFL representative and was offered an $8,000 salary which was a lot of money at the time.
Maguire was born way back in 1938 in Youngstown, Ohio and has been happily married to Beverly Bauer since 1962. His main career highlights include 3 AFL championships in 1963, 1964 and 1965. He has played a total of 151 games throughout his professional career. Maguire was inducted into the Youngstown Sports Hall of Fame and the Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame.