@thesportsontap: In 1991 his wife called him from Romania about a three year old boy who could not walk and could not talk. Here is what she said on that call. "this guy's so much more than we can handle" They took him anyway. He became their sixth child. His name was Michael, and the man on the other end of that phone was Ernie Johnson. Within a year the diagnosis came back. Duchenne muscular dystrophy. It takes the muscles one at a time, and it mostly takes boys. Michael went into a wheelchair. Later he needed a ventilator to breathe. Here is what Ernie Johnson says about getting that news. "What's amazing is the value reveals itself." The boy from Romania lived 33 years. Here is how his father said it when it ended. "lived a miraculous life of 33 years" That was five years ago. Today Ernie Johnson announced that this is his last season hosting Inside the NBA. Thirty-seven seasons in that chair. He wanted one thing understood. "Just to be clear, I'm not retiring." "Just cutting back." He is still doing March Madness and other work for TNT and CBS, and he started a production company and named it 32 Bowties. The whole point of it is telling feel-good sports stories. Of course it is. Now go back one more generation. His father was Ernie Johnson Sr., who pitched for the Milwaukee Braves, was a teammate of Hank Aaron, and was on the 1957 team that won the World Series. Those Braves are still the last team from Milwaukee to win one. Be straight about it. A man leaving a studio show is not a tragedy. He is 70, he had a long run, and he is not even fully leaving. But here is the line he keeps coming back to, from a speech in 2019. "There's value in everybody." He did not learn that in a television studio. He learned it from a boy in Romania that his own wife said was more than they could handle. #NBA #nbanews #nbabasketball #nbatiktok #basketball

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Wednesday 28 October 2026 19:15:57 GMT