Missing Link was a television series that aired on the American network ESPN Classic. It debuted on March 7, 2007 and aired every Wednesday night at 10 p.m. Eastern time. Colin Cowherd was the host of the show. Missing Link is best described as a version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon involving famous athletes, coaches, and other sports figures. Each end of the chain is seemingly the exact opposite of the other in some way, but are somehow connected. The length of each chain varies between five and seven names. In a television-worthy twist, one end is connected, then the other, with a middle link revealed only at the end, following a commercial break. Missing Link was pre-empted on April 25 for a replay of the heavyweight boxing championship match between Lennox Lewis and Frank Bruno, but the show returned the following week, amidst a blog report that indicated that ESPN Classic would halt all original productions. It was then quietly dropped again two weeks later and did not return. ESPN Classic now fills the hour once taken up by Missing Link (it aired in a two-episode block) with various programs like Who's No. 1?.
Example
The first chain on the premiere episode was Lou Gehrig to Mike Tyson, as follows:
- One of Gehrig's teammates with the New York Yankees was Leo Durocher.
- Durocher was Willie Mays' first manager when Mays played for the New York Giants.
- Mays was once represented by attorney Howard Cosell.
- Cosell and Muhammad Ali conducted many memorable television interviews.
- Ali lost to Trevor Berbick in his final professional fight, in 1981.
- Berbick lost to Tyson in a 1986 title fight; this completes the chain.
Highlight issues
On episodes on which this was applicable, the National Football League was represented by still photography, while other sports were represented by videotape. There has been no official information explaining the omission, but it is interesting to note that NFL Network debuted NFL Top 10, a new Wednesday-night countdown-style documentary series, several weeks after this show's first episode, so the network may have demanded exclusivity. The omission is similar to the snub the league gave to ESPN25 in 2004 in the aftermath of the Playmakers series. Similarly, despite the recent return of NASCAR to ESPN, only pre-2001 footage of Dale Earnhardt, Jr. was shown on the episode on which he was linked to Carl Lewis. 2001 was the year NASCAR began to centralize its TV contracts.
