Its biggest recent splash was Torre’s reporting on NBA star Kawhi Leonard, Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and Aspiration, an environmental sustainability company later exposed as fraudulent. Torre and his team reported that Leonard received a $28 million endorsement deal from Aspiration that allegedly required no real work, raising questions about whether the Clippers had found a way around the NBA salary cap. One of Aspiration’s co-founders was recently sentenced to 14 years in prison for defrauding investors, including Ballmer.
In May, that reporting earned Torre and his team the Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting. It is not every day that a sports podcast wins one of journalism’s most prestigious awards. Sports media, often busy debating legacy points and gambling lines, did briefly have to look up from the odds board.
Dan Le Batard, Torre’s longtime friend and Meadowlark co-founder, described Torre’s approach as both traditional and updated for the current media world.
“He values journalism’s core principles in a way that’s old-fashioned and modernized,” Le Batard said. “It’s a bit like seeing the most rudimentary of primitive tools turn into a spaceship because people aren’t valuing this thing anymore, and it’s because it requires speaking truth to power.”
How PTFO turns investigations into appointment viewing
Torre’s rise is hard to ignore. HBO’s “Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel” is gone. Deadspin is a shell of its former self. ESPN’s “Outside the Lines,” once a serious investigative brand, has been diminished while the network has leaned heavily into sports betting.
That leaves a gap for reporting that treats sports as more than scores, contracts and debate-show fodder. “PTFO” has stepped into that space with stories on subjects as varied as Jordon Hudson and Bill Belichick, Jeffrey Epstein’s connections to Harvard athletics and the Clippers-Aspiration case.
The show’s format has an unexpected origin: Torre’s fascination with “Ryan’s World,” the YouTube channel built around Ryan Kaji and his family unboxing toys.
“I was like, why the fuck is there a channel called ‘Ryan’s World’ with another vaguely Asian young man who’s opening presents endlessly, and why does he get millions of views and make NBA max contract money?” Torre said. “It’s because he is perpetually being surprised and being joyful in his discovery.”
Torre took that “unboxing” idea and applied it to journalism. Instead of toys, the surprises are documents, reporting threads and carefully staged reveals. His friends and guests often serve as the audience’s stand-ins, reacting as Torre walks them through the evidence.
Chris Tumminello, the showrunner of “PTFO,” said the program is built very differently from a standard sports podcast.
“Most other podcasts are just chat,” Tumminello said. “Our show is highly produced and highly edited, so we’re thinking a lot about how we structure conversations and how we hold back information and reveal it later, documentary-style.”
Torre said the method also helps show listeners how reporting actually works.
“If you can illustrate how you arrived at your findings, people might come to appreciate that the journalistic process is harder than it otherwise looks, and there’s value in that,” he said.
Torre’s childhood taught him to treat sports like a shared language.
Torre’s parents immigrated to the United States from the Philippines and settled in New York City. As a child, Torre often went to sporting events with his father, and the experience quickly became more than entertainment. He carried a small notebook and filled it with statistics for players he liked.
“As a Filipino American kid who was the first in his family born here, sports was the passport to conversations with other kids I had little else, at least superficially, in common with,” Torre said. “I was able to hold court with them, then play basketball with them. Sports was the glue.”
He initially imagined a future in law, not media. That changed at Harvard, where he became executive editor of The Harvard Crimson. He was also classmates with Mark Zuckerberg and, thanks to his dormmate and friend Priscilla Chan, became the 199th person to join Facebook. Torre and Chan have since lost touch.
After college, Torre joined Sports Illustrated, then moved to ESPN in 2012 as a senior writer. He became a regular presence across ESPN programming, appearing on “The Sports Reporters,” “The Dan Le Batard Show,” “Around the Horn” and “Pardon the Interruption.”
As one of the few Asian American personalities at ESPN at the time, Torre said people often made him aware of how unusual his presence seemed to them.
“Before I officially started at ESPN, I was at a barbecue at a friend’s house with a bunch of people I’d never met before,” Torre said. “Someone asked me what I did and I told them I’d just started working at ESPN. And he goes, ‘Oh, tech support.’ There is no prior precedent where someone can intuit that you’re not in tech support.”
He added, “How is it that the most populous group doesn’t have representation in popular culture?”
From ESPN survival mode to a new kind of show
Torre’s time on “Around the Horn” sharpened skills That became central to his later work. The show rewards speed, precision and the ability to make a point before the clock punishes you. Torre practiced with a stopwatch and learned how to compress ideas without flattening them.
He also watched print media become less stable. As colleagues lost jobs, Torre made a calculated shift toward television, calling it a “survival instinct.”
In 2018, he became co-host of ESPN’s “High Noon” with Bomani Jones. The show was canceled in February 2020, at a particularly brutal personal moment: Torre was in the hospital for the birth of his first child.
“I remember being on my phone in the hospital, with my wife next to me, and getting an alert that ‘High Noon’ was being canceled. My daughter was born that day. It was all very cinematically on the nose,” Torre said. “It was incredibly anxiety-inducing because I was like, ‘How am I going to provide for my child?’ And the pandemic was happening.”
He moved next into hosting “ESPN Daily,” taking over from Mina Kimes and producing five shows a week. Torre described it as running “this tiny publication inside of ESPN,” where he could help choose stories, shape guests and sit through edits.
That job taught him how to build stories for audio, not just write or discuss them. One episode, about how the name “Jalen” became the most popular name in sports, won him an Edward R. Murrow Award.
“I felt like these muscles were being activated,” Torre said. “I remember the joy I felt reporting that and putting it out into the world, and the sensation I had toward the end was, ‘What if I could report these episodes myself?’”
Why the Pulitzer has not made him relax
In spring 2023, former ESPN president John Skipper and Le Batard, who had launched Meadowlark Media, offered Torre a daily show. Torre suggested something different: a podcast three days a week, combining reported deep dives, interviews and the looser energy of a chat show.
That became “PTFO.”
The audience has grown quickly. Since the show partnered with The Athletic, Meadowlark Media says its cross-platform following is up 99 percent, while monthly full-episode consumption has increased 161 percent year over year. Meadowlark CEO Bimal Kapadia said more than half of the show’s YouTube views happen in the evening, suggesting people are watching it like an evening television program rather than treating it as background noise.
Then came the Pulitzer, which Torre describes as the biggest professional milestone of his life. Still, he is not entirely sure whether the prize will make things easier or just raise the pressure.
“It’s the greatest professional development of my life and I don’t know if it’s going to make my life easier or harder,” Torre said. “Are you burdened by that expectation? Are you going to let yourself slack off, which I’m clearly not wired to do? Are you allowing yourself to feel the joy that your boss thinks you’ve earned? I think it goes back to that sense of insecurity as an Asian American working in media. This all seems fragile to me.”
That fragility may be part of why the show works. Torre does not cast himself as an all-knowing sports authority handing down verdicts from a studio desk. He is showing the work, inviting people into the maze and letting the evidence carry the tension.
It turns out that can be more frightening to powerful people than a hot take. It can also make Knicks fans very protective of Jalen Brunson.
