Darren Rovell

Daren Rovell is the sports business reporter for ESPN.com. He appears on numerous ESPN radio affiliate shows, analyzes the sports business world for ESPNEWS, and contributes to ESPN's flagship SportsCenter and its investigative show Outside the Box. In 2004, he won the distinction of being named in NewsBios's "30 Under 30," a list of the top 30 national business reporters under the age of 30.

Before he knew anything about the business side of sports, way back when he was a seventh grader on the Roslyn Middle School cross-country team, Rovell thought that every team with any shot at winning had his favorite drink-the "Drink of Champions"-on the sidelines. "I knew it wasn't in the official rules," he recalls, "but I thought that every team just understood that Gatorade was the 10^th batter in Major League Baseball, the 12^th man on an NFL offense, and the 13^th man on an NBA bench."

Even after he realized that he wasn't exactly track and field superstar material, Rovell remained a fan of the yellow, red, and orange concoction that was guzzled by all the athletes he admired. As an eight grader, the official theme song among his clique was "Be Like Mike," the Gatorade jingle featuring Chicago Bulls superstar Michael Jordan. The closest he got was Evanston, Illinois, where he graduated cum laude from Northwestern University. As he learned more about business, he started to understand that Gatorade's omnipresence in the sports world-from the NFL to NASCAR-was part of a precision-targeted strategy. And the more he became fascinated by the history, the science, and the brilliant marketing behind the brand. Eventually, it led him to write the first and definitive book on the subject, FIRST IN THIRST: How Gatorade Turned the Science of Sweat into a Cultural Phenomenon (AMACOM).

Since 1988, Darren Rovell has consumed thousands of 16-ounce bottles of Gatorade. During his running of the 2004 New York Marathon, he drank a record 38 cups of it.