Chris Mortensen, an award-winning NFL journalist at ESPN for more than three decades, died Sunday morning at the age of 72.
ESPN announced the news on-air on Sunday afternoon, too, and the NFL Network ended it’s coverage of the NFL scouting combine by paying tribute to Mortensen.
Mortensen first joined ESPN in 1991, and quickly became one of the top NFL reporters in the country. He was a regular on the network’s top shows and frequently broke some of the biggest news across the league — including in 2016, when he revealed that longtime quarterback and Hall of Famer Peyton Manning was retiring.
Mortensen, who also worked at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The National before joining ESPN, stepped away briefly in 2016 after he revealed that he had been diagnosed with throat cancer.
He eventually returned and made television appearances on ESPN again, but his role was revised in 2019 so he could focus more on breaking news.
Mortensen also spent time as a columnist for The Sporting News, a contributor to Sport magazine and worked as a consultant with CBS Sports’ “NFL Today.”
He began his career at the South Bay Daily Breeze in California in 1969. Mortensen won 18 total awards and was nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes throughout his journalism career.
Plenty of his former colleagues, friends and others in the sports world took to social media to pay their respects after the news was announced on Sunday.
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