Taylor Rooks on Entourages, Ring Chasing, and Darkness Retreats

In the rooftop solarium of the lower Manhattan apartment building in which she’s lived for almost a decade, Taylor Rooks finds herself in an unfamiliar position: the hot seat. The journalist and broadcaster, who on any given night can be seen and heard on TNT, Amazon’s Thursday Night Football, or her own podcast with Bleacher Report, has quickly become the darling of sports media for her simultaneously probing and neighborly sit-downs with the most gifted and polarizing athletes in the world. When video leaked of Golden State Warriors star Draymond Green punching his teammate Jordan Poole during practice, it was on Rooks’s podcast that Green offered a mea culpa. And when Ja Morant of the Memphis Grizzlies was suspended last month for brandishing a handgun on his Instagram live, a 2021 clip of Morant discussing his mental health struggles with Rooks quickly resurfaced, attesting to her particular knack for getting athletes to divulge more than they might in locker room soundbites and post-game press conferences.

“Sometimes, athletes’ personas walk into the room before they do,” Rooks told me. “And then, when we talk to them, it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.” But the 30-year-old host of “Taylor Rooks X” sees herself as a kind of conduit, allowing them to demonstrate their humanity. “I understand I cover sports, but above all else I cover people,” she added. “If you’re going to sit down for my show, it’s not like a post-game presser. You’re really going to have to talk.” But when we met up days before the start of the NBA Playoffs, the tables had turned. And in a test of journalistic objectivity, Rooks submitted herself to our Rorschach Test, sounding off on superteams, load management, guaranteed contracts, and Aaron Rodgers’s eccentric modes of self-care.

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THE MAVS

“I’m a big Luka fan. The way he plays the game is so innovative. Obviously, the Mavs need to figure it out. Everything isn’t working.”

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SUPERTEAMS

“I’m big on super teams. I know people feel very weird about that. But I think that if you’re playing this game to win a ring, you do what you can to win that ring.”

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YOUR MENTIONS

“They are crazy. I owe a lot of my career to social media. But there are times when you have to take breaks. The more popular you get, the mentions get a little crazier.”

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AARON RODGERS

“Aaron Rodgers is a very special fella. Look, I am a big proponent of people doing the things that they have to do to figure out what they need to figure out. At his core, Aaron actually is a person that believes in things like a darkness retreat or the benefits of ayahuasca. That’s genuine to who he is at his core. I’ve met Aaron, he is an incredibly kind person. He gets vilified in the media a bit more than he should. Go ahead and do your darkness retreat, boo.”

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THE MVP RACE

“I have an MVP vote so I have to tread a little carefully. But I will say that I voted for Jokić the past two years. It’s a really tight race. Obviously, Jokić and Embiid are the top two candidates. I think Giannis should be getting a little bit more love. What I’ll say is that Embiid, in this last stretch, has done a lot to separate himself.”

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THE GOLD PARTY

“Beyonce is an angel. She is so kind. It’s the best party. There’s a real mystique to it. And I also love how black that room is. It’s just a lot of black excellence.”

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NBA TWITTER

“It’s the most fun subset of Twitter. I am consistently mind blown by how quickly they can get clips up and make GIFs and memes and all the things. It’s all jokes. NBA Twitter will come for all of us. They definitely care much more about what’s funny than they do about what’s factual, but I still love it. I think that I owe a large chunk of my career to NBA Twitter.”

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STEPHEN A. SMITH

“He is a friend of mine, someone I consider a bit of a mentor. I think you could argue he will be the greatest sports personality of all time. He is super polarizing but popular. I think that’s really hard to do. Even people that hate him can’t stop watching. He has revolutionized what it means to be a generalist, he’s somebody who’s made money simply off his opinions. And I think he’s a lot nicer than people who see him on TV would think.”

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LAMAR JACKSON’S CONTRACT SAGA

“First, I have to say that I love that Lamar has decided to be his own media person. It’s like, “I’m going to tweet what happened, I’m going to tell you.” I love that Meek Mill got involved. It’s on the Ravens. When you have a guy that’s that good, that’s that talented, it’s your job to do whatever you can to make sure that person is happy and gets paid.”

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THE EYE TEST

“I think the eye test has become undervalued in today’s NBA. I’m a big believer in advanced stats, I think that they tell you something about the game. But none of these things were meant to exist in a vacuum. So you can’t decide a player’s value based strictly on advanced stats. These things have to coexist.”

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FiDi

“Everybody always makes fun of me for being obsessed with FiDi but it’s the best place to live in the city. I love that it’s quiet. There are so many dogs.”

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REFEREE DISCOURSE

“Oh my gosh, when is that not on my mind? I think they should always be available after any game, not just to explain calls but to simply answer questions. There is a long way to go in bettering the relationships with refs and minimizing mistakes. But I also get that it’s a difficult job for them.”

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THE WHITE PARTY

“The party of the year, hands down. Mike Rubin might be the greatest party host of all time. You enter his house, you see the water, everyone’s in white. You have this cocktail hour, everyone’s drinking. Then he feeds you real food. Then, all of a sudden, they’re like, “Go up to the roof for our concert,” and Miguel is performing. Then there’s fireworks. Then you go downstairs and he has a club inside of his house complete with a stage, lights, another bar. Then Travis Scott is on the mic. Then Drake. Quavo’s on the mic. It’s like Coachella in his basement. You don’t leave until six am.”

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ATHLETES GOING LIVE

“Go live on Instagram when it’s something you would want your grandma to see you doing. That’s my rule for anything I post. Be at home, or in the right state of mind.”

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LOAD MANAGEMENT

“I definitely believe that if you are healthy enough to play, and you can play, then you should play. We all operate within this machine. The players, in some ways, do have a responsibility to show up for the fans who also keep that machine going. I really liked what Jayson Tatum said. He just thinks about the young kid, the kid inside of him from St. Louis, that would go to a game to see the star player. And you lessen the chance of that happening with things like load management.”

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GLAM

“My makeup artists are some of my best friends. You tell them everything. It’s fairly therapeutic. I’m really happy that I have a very consistent look for the times that I’m on air.”

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RING CHASING

“Isn’t everybody ring chasing? Isn’t everybody playing the game because they ultimately want to be a champion? Sports is the only place where, if a situation isn’t working out for you and you want to go somewhere else, people get mad. If something stops serving you and there’s nothing that you can do to make the situation work, you have every right to move on to get closer to that final goal.”

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GUARANTEED CONTRACTS

“I’m in. I think you should be paid whatever the market allows you to be paid. We see what people do with NBA contracts and MLB contracts. The NFL needs to get on that wave.”

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THE KENTUCKY DERBY

“I’ve only gone one time, but it was the most fun I’ve ever had. I went with Jack Harlow and Drake and I was in their music video for ‘Churchill Downs,’ which was really cool. The hats are so grand, the women look lovely. People winning money, so much yelling, it’s great.

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THE PLAY-IN TOURNAMENT

“The basketball purist in me wanted to hate the Play-In Tournament. But I love it. I was in the bubble for the first year that they did the Play-In and you could not script better entertainment. What I really love about the NBA is  that they heard fans and just lovers of the game talk about how much they enjoyed the Play-In and that it should be adopted, and they actually listened. A lot of leagues do not listen.”

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ENTOURAGES

“I like good entourages. I don’t like when entourages are too big. Your entourage genuinely can make or break your success as a person, as a player. It only takes one member of the entourage to spoil the bunch.”

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SOURCES

“I take a lot of pride in the fact that all of my sources tend to come from the mouth of the person that story is about. So I don’t necessarily dabble in unnamed sources very often. Keep in mind, I totally understand why insiders say, “sources said,” and they can’t always put names on their reports. But I like that I can text Jayson Tatum and say, “Hey, what are your thoughts on this?”

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