Yahoo Sports The World’s Best Athletes Tell Her Everything
It’s Thursday night in Philadelphia; the Eagles and the Washington Commanders are about to square off at Lincoln Financial Field, and I’m just trying to keep up along the sidelines. It’s bright, and it’s loud. Bone rattling, even, thanks to the stadium’s pumped-up pregame playlist. But the biggest star on the field isn’t padded up. It’s not A. J. Brown or Terry McLaurin. Instead, it’s 32-year-old sideline reporter Taylor Rooks.
In mid-November, it’s roughly 30 degrees outside, yet Rooks is comfortable in a cream, checkered, skirted suit and jet-black heels. Jayden Daniels and former Super Bowl winner Malcolm Jenkins walk over just to say hello—not the other way around. So do some of the players’ parents. I even spot a few members of the Commanders training staff who are more nervous to ask her for a photo than quarterback Jalen Hurts. She’s a magnet. Rooks can’t take three steps in any direction without pulling in another familiar face. “It’s always like this,” one of Rooks’s photographers tells me.
But as fun as this sideline party is, Rooks still has a job to do tonight. Thursday Night Football is airing her exclusive interview with Eagles running back Saquon Barkley during what is easily the greatest stretch of his football-playing career. The week prior, Barkley wowed football fans by performing a reverse hurdle over a defender. The move looked straight out of a video game—it simply wasn’t possible before he did it. Naturally, Barkley went to Rooks for the story. Who else?
Do you know how hard it is to interview an athlete? At the top tier—like, say, in the NBA and NFL—athletes are notoriously tight-lipped, extraordinarily competitive, and often laser-focused on just one thing: the game. Getting them to sit down and reflect publicly isn’t just a challenge, it’s often downright difficult. At least for most people.
Taylor Rooks makes it look easy. Those on the receiving end of the 32-year-old sports reporter’s questions always seem to be relaxed. Comfortable. You can see it in the way they lean back in their chairs, arms and legs uncrossed, baring their souls like they’re confiding in a trusted therapist. In a recent sit-down, she had former NBA Slam Dunk Contest champion Vince Carter talking about how Kobe Bryant helped him through his fears of retirement. Wide receiver Garrett Wilson, meanwhile, told her the story of how doctors informed his parents on the day of his birth that he likely would not survive the night due to lung complications. She even had Bam Adebayo of the Miami Heat admit how much it bothers him that he has never won the NBA Defensive Player of the Year Award. No wonder she is sometimes called a “Dr. Melfi for athletes.”
Rooks wears the psychologist comparison with pride, but as she says, it’s not some grand, complicated trick she plays on her guests: “People feel like it’s therapy just because I’m asking them, ‘Why?’ ” she says by way of explanation. It helps that Rooks is also naturally disarming. Easy to be around but full of surprises. The first time we speak, via Zoom in early October, she even came to our conversation with prepared questions for me. Rooks asked for a movie recommendation. I told her about Perfect Days, a new Wim Wenders film about a janitor in Tokyo—and wouldn’t you believe it? She actually watched the movie by the time we met up in Philly. She can’t help it. When she was growing up, Rooks’s mother told her that she was born to be a “yapper.” Mom turned out to be prophetic.
If you follow sports with almost any level of enthusiasm today, you know the name Taylor Rooks. The on-air personality for Thursday Night Football, the NBA across TNT, and Bleacher Report (where she hosts her own show, Taylor Rooks X), Rooks won’t settle for an athlete’s prepared statement. She pushes back on them—often leading with humor—and her efforts are rewarded with revealing conversations that go beyond the traditional X’s and O’s of game play. She calls celebrities like Drake and Jack Harlow (ever heard of ’em?) her personal friends, and she wears designer outfits both on the football field and at exclusive Oscar parties hosted by Jay-Z. Confidence of her caliber is a prerequisite for on-air work. Lucky for Rooks, she has enough for both her and her celebrity guests.
“Her curiosity is very rare,” Harlow tells me over email. “She has an insatiable interest in other people.” Rooks and the Kentucky-born rapper first connected in 2019. She hosted the first game of the season for the University of Louisville’s men’s basketball team. According to Harlow, he instantly felt that they would be friends for the rest of their lives. “She’s made every person I’ve ever introduced her to feel seen,” he says. “She’s jumped on countless flights just to be present for the key moments in my life. I don’t know another person like her.”
At an age when most sophomore college students are bumbling through a Chem II syllabus or drunk at a frat party, Rooks was already interviewing legends. At 19, the Georgia native somehow secured a spot in the press line to speak with LeBron James at the 2012 NBA All-Star Game despite not having an assignment or credentials from any media outlets. After graduation, she broke news on college athletes like Jayson Tatum and Jalen Brunson while working for the Big Ten Network. She became an insider with these future superstars before any of them were old enough to buy a beer. And now she’s challenging the sports-journalism establishment—generally flooded with older, and predominantly white, men—to lead a new generation of reporters. One that knows that sometimes, the way to go deep is to get silly and be willing to laugh hard with a guest.
She’s still talking to those familiar names, by the way. And in hustling alongside them since the early days of her career and theirs, she’s earned their respect. “So many of the athletes that I cover right now, I’ve covered since they were 16 years old,” Rooks says. “We are on this parallel path together. And I know that we both feel so proud whenever we work with one another, because we have seen that grind. We have seen that journey.”
Tatum recalls meeting Rooks when he was a teenager touring the University of Illinois. Rooks was a college student at the time, reporting on potential incoming first-years. “That entire process—speaking to the media—was all new to me,” the athlete (now 26 and a member of the Boston Celtics) tells me. Rooks helped him feel seen. “She does a very good job at telling the story the right way,” Tatum says. “Everyone who works with her, I’m certain they would all say the same thing.”
Saquon Barkley certainly agrees. “We go back to day one,” he tells me with a laugh. Barkley remembers the first time he saw Rooks—in the crowd, for his very first press conference as a pro athlete. The two connected after and struck up what's become a close friendship. “She’s like another sister to me,” he says. “We’re honest with each other. When I’m not doing what I need to do on the football field, she’ll let me know—and vice-versa.”
Sometimes, she’ll even do so on camera. There’s a special moment during her 2019 interview with Barkley following his NFL Rookie of the Year Award win. After pointing out how little he ever boasts about his own talents on camera, Rooks coerces the star to finally admit that he’s one of the best running backs in the league. Five years later—and firmly in the NFL MVP conversation—Barkley now boldly proclaims that he’s one of the greatest, period. “People confuse humility with confidence,” Barkley says. “I trust my talent, but she was the one who got me to say it out loud for the first time. She’s a real one. And I’m blessed to have her as a friend in my life.”
Rooks grew up in Gwinnett County, Georgia, about an hour northeast of Atlanta. There, sports are religion. For Rooks’s family, it was as if God created the earth, heavens, and man, rested on the seventh day—and then the Atlanta Falcons played on the eighth. “Football is what you wake up and eat,” Rooks says of her childhood surroundings. “It is what you snack on at lunch and it's what you dream about when you go to bed.”
Her father, Thomas Rooks, is fourth all-time in rushing yards at the University of Illinois, but it’s not just football in her blood. Her great-uncle, Lou Brock, is in the Baseball Hall of Fame. “Sports were always around me,” says Rooks. And being raised by and around elite athletes gave her a unique perspective: “I understood the discipline that it takes, the sacrifice, and the many things that you give up when you decide to enter into this life.”
Rooks ran track in high school and was, she admits, a pretty good sprinter, generally competing in the 100- or 200-meter dash. But one day, without warning, her coach told her to line up for the 400-meter race. Rooks didn’t feel confident, but she took her place. The gun went off and the race began—and then took way too long to end. “I’m at the very end, barely jogging, and it's bad,” she recalls. Rooks placed last, as the crowd cheered for her just to cross the finish line. Her dreams of pursuing the sport beyond high school died right there, but Rooks found a different sort of victory in that defeat. After the race, she decided to pursue sports journalism.
“I enjoyed interviewing ever since I was a kid,” says Rooks. “I would literally set up my camcorder and interview myself.” She always saw herself on TV and has an eclectic taste in journalism idols, citing Pam Oliver, Chelsea Handler, Howard Stern, and E! True Hollywood Story as sources of inspiration. Rooks gleaned early on that viewers become loyal when the line between the TV and your living room begins to blur. “It’s the personalities that people connect with, because you feel like you know them,” she says. “So I’ve always tried to just tap into the things that make me me.”
For Rooks, that means following the genuine interest to wiggle inside the minds of her favorite athletes and walk away with something new. It means watching back her old interviews like an athlete reviewing tape of their last game and traveling so much that she’s only home “seven days this month, and even less last.” The only time that she is truly unplugged from the world, she says, is when she’s at cruising altitude, 30,000 feet in the air on the way to the next game. (What does she do with that time? Sometimes work; sometimes crack open a book.) “On a Tuesday, I will do sideline for Lakers vs. Timberwolves, and on Thursday I will be doing a feature for Thursday Night Football,” Rooks says. For those at home, that ain’t nothing. But Rooks makes the quick pivot look easy. “It’s become my normal,” she says simply.
When we talk, it’s clear that Rooks is still chasing something. As a kid, she noticed how people were glued to their television screens when Oprah was on. When Oprah talked, she saw, people listened. For Rooks, there would be no greater honor than earning that kind of audience loyalty. And she’s not going to stop working until she’s appointment viewing herself.
Still, I ask her if she would take the devil’s bargain and trade her whole career to go back to that high school track meet, win the 400-meter race, and live out the life of a successful professional athlete. Rooks hesitates but says no. “What I do in this space is super necessary,” she says. “It’s important for young Black girls to look at me and say, ‘I look like this person. I talk like this person. I act like this person. I can be this person.’ ” Representation matters. And she's still competing on her own terms.
“I feel very proud of that,” she continues. “And if somebody ever said that there’s something I can’t do, I would say, 'Watch the tape.”
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