MALIKA ANDREWS 'You Can't Always See Someone's Pain'

THE FIRST WOMAN TO HOST THE NBA DRAFT REVEALS HER PAST AS A TROUBLED TEEN IN A WILDERNESS THERAPY CAMP AND THE CHALLENGES SHE STILL FACES WITH HER MENTAL HEALTH

- EILEEN FINAN

For the past seven weeks since the NBA playoffs began, downtime has been a rarity for Malika Andrews. “I’m in a stretch of 32 days straight on camera. I think my eye is twitching,” Andrews jokes as she joins a Zoom interview from her L.A. home between duties hosting ESPN’s pregame show NBA Countdown and NBA Today.

But when she does have an hour to spare, Andrews escapes to a riding stable a short drive from the ESPN studios, “where I can exhale when things feel overwhelming.” There she saddles up Val, a 19-year-old chestnut warmblood with a white blaze and an attitude. “He’s tricky,” says Andrews, 29. “You need to be strong to ride him.”

Since joining ESPN in 2018 at the age of 22, Andrews has proved her mettle. In 2020 she quarantined for 107 days as the network’s reporter inside the NBA’s COVID bubble. Two years later she became the first woman to host the NBA draft, a role she will repeat at the end of this month. Known for her unflappable delivery and polished style and substance, Andrews admits, “I feel so much pressure as a woman in a male-dominated industry to show up as my most perfect self.”

At the same time, she’s held a painful, imperfect truth: As a teen she struggled with mental illness that took her from her family for more than three years—and she continues to cope with symptoms. For the first time she’s sharing her story “in hopes that we see people with more compassion,” she says. “You don’t know what somebody’s going through. There’s an expectation that struggling—depression, anxiety, eating disorders— looks a certain way. I was told it doesn’t look like me. But it is me.”