Jerome Bettis Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Late last month, Jerome Bettis, a former Pittsburgh Steeler, race-walked into a meeting room above the cafeteria at ESPN headquarters. “They got me doing the shuffle,” he said, removing his suit jacket, loosening a purple polka-dot tie, and guzzling from a glass of water, as if rehydrating at halftime. Bettis had just taped a segment on “SportsCenter,” his second appearance of the day, and was now preparing for an hour-long film session with Barry Nash, an on-air performance coach employed by ESPN to help retired athletes become more proficient talking heads. Fans remember Bettis as “the Bus,” because he wasn’t much smaller than a Greyhound. Nash, who wore a plaid shirt and red tortoiseshell glasses, was slight enough to squeeze into half a seat. He cued up a clip from one of Bettis’s recent appearances and began speaking in broadcasting koans: “People want to know—how is this Jerome different from all the other Jeromes I know?”

ESPN, the Megalodon of sports broadcasting, has no shortage of retired millionaires sending job applications: both the N.F.L. and the N.B.A. host annual seminars for players interested in broadcasting, and a current Pittsburgh Steeler recently asked if he could work as an unpaid intern. But finding linebackers who understand the difference between B-roll and a boom mike can be difficult. “They go from a job where you’re trained to say as little as possible to a job where you need to say as much as possible,” Gerry Matalon, a senior producer who helps run ESPN’s on-air talent development, said recently.

In 2008, to remedy the problem, ESPN created a talent department staffed with several performance coaches like Nash. When the network hired Ray Lewis, a voluble former Baltimore Raven known for his enthusiasm and his incoherence, in equal measure, it asked him to undergo training with Arthur Joseph, a vocal coach who often works with opera singers. “We wanted him to focus on delivering that same intensity, but to put it in a proper sentence structure,” Tim Scanlan, a vice-president in the talent department, said. Joseph met Lewis at his home, and put him through a series of exercises that he calls “vocal yoga.” Football fans can thus thank Joseph for the following images: Ray Lewis extending his arm and staring into the middle distance, to “trace the arc of sound”; Ray Lewis loosening up his jaw with a “yawn-sigh”; Ray Lewis pulling on his tongue with two fingers and saying the word “hat.”

Bettis had joined ESPN in September, and was treating this opportunity like a rookie given one more chance to make the team; he had previously worked for NBC as a studio analyst, but the network eventually let him go, a decision that was lauded on the Web site Awful Announcing, which catalogues what its name describes. Nash and Joseph both say that athletes, having been coached all their lives, tend to be responsive students. Once, when Lewis averted his gaze while answering a question, Joseph said, “Ray, please look me in the eye,” and Lewis never glanced away again.

In their sessions, Nash had been encouraging Bettis to accentuate his size on camera—ESPN has not asked the Bus to lose any weight for TV—and to be more expressive with his hands. (Bettis had also been working to limit his dependence on “umm”s and “like”s.) Nash pulled up a clip on his laptop in which Bettis had been asked to stand and use a touch screen. “Did you see what happened when you opened yourself up to the camera?” he said. “All of a sudden, you’re the king of the room—kind of like a weatherman.”

“You’re holding court,” Bettis said.

“It’s like football players when they play at home—that attitude of ‘This is my house,’ ” Nash said. “It becomes ‘The Jerome Bettis Show.’ ”

“It’s my moment,” Bettis said, before thanking Nash and rushing off to his final appearance of the day, an hour-long N.F.L. show alongside Jeff Saturday, a former offensive lineman who had also recently joined ESPN, and received coaching from the talent department. Trey Wingo, a longtime ESPN anchor, was the show’s veteran, and tried to put the new talent at ease. Watching a pre-taped interview in which he flubbed a line, Wingo said, “Me speak for living . . . like football . . . yay!”

Throughout the show, Bettis sat with his arms spread wide on the desk, as Nash had instructed, and occasionally darted off-set to the research desk during commercial breaks. “I’ve got to find a stat they’re not using,” he said. The producers complimented him on a fantasy-football segment—“Good information, Jerome”—while Saturday, a thirteen-year N.F.L. veteran, asked Wingo, sixteen years with ESPN, for pointers.

“Which camera do I look at?” Saturday asked.

“Whichever camera you want, big boy,” Wingo said. “You’re Jeff Fucking Saturday. The camera will find you.” ♦