Boerne's Michelle Beadle, once the highest-paid woman at ESPN, finds there's no place like home with the Spurs

For a short time in the late 2010s, Boerne alum Michelle Beadle was the highest-paid woman at ESPN, earning $5 million a year as co-host of the morning sports talk show “Get Up.” Not bad for someone who never played sports after middle school, never studied broadcast journalism and never enjoyed being the center of attention. “I wasn’t an extrovert by any stretch,” said Beadle, 46, sitting in the living room of her home in The Canyons at Scenic Loop on the far Northwest Side. “I was more a sit-in-the-back-of-the-room-mumbling-sarcastically-under-my-breath kind of person.” Not anymore.

These days, Beadle is known for her brash, outspoken opinions and tomboy-ish charm that have helped her cut a peripatetic career path that, in addition to numerous sports-related gigs, has included several stops hosting mostly short-lived celebrity and reality shows on cable channels both large and small. That path has brought her back home, happily ensconced as a member of the Spurs broadcasting team. When she’s not throwing in what she calls “color-ish one-liners and observations,” Beadle is sharing inside jokes about surviving the politics of ESPN with her fellow expat, Sean Elliott. “We’ll make snide comments about our time there,” she said. “Nothing mean, but we'll laugh mockingly — and if people know, they know; if they don’t, they don’t.” She's been a Spurs fan since she was about 12. “The Spurs are the only show in town, and they’ve just always been likable,” she said. “There’s been a random guy here and there who isn’t, but for the most part they’ve always been a team that's easy to root for.”