Taylor Rooks’s days can run into one another. Known for her revelatory interviews with professional athletes, Ms. Rooks this season became the host of Amazon Prime Video’s N.B.A. studio show, where she marshals pre- and postgame conversations with former players, including Blake Griffin and Dirk Nowitzki. Late-finishing games can have her too charged to go to bed until the wee hours of the next morning.
“I’m still kind of living in the rush and my mind is going crazy,” Ms. Rooks said. “I get a lot of my ideas done at night.”
Ms. Rooks, who also conducts feature interviews for Amazon’s “Thursday Night Football,” said day-to-day unpredictability had been part of the draw of a career in sports media. But at 33 and having gotten married this summer, her approach to routine is starting to change. “I found peace and joy in my days not looking the same,” she said. “Now I feel like I crave to sort of know what is coming next.”
Though she spent most of her 20s in New York, Ms. Rooks and her husband, Shane Fowler, (and their goldendoodle, Bean) now split their time between the city and Los Angeles, where the Amazon show is taped. The couple caffeinate together in the morning (coffee for him, matcha for her) and eat dinner at 7:30 p.m. on nights when she isn’t working. “The most clear part of my routine is him,” she said.
Returning to New York about once a month, Ms. Rooks bounds around the city with a working itinerary — and the latitude to accommodate serendipity. “I don’t know that I have an exact routine when I return, because I’m trying to do everything,” she said.
Ms. Rooks recently spent a Monday with The New York Times as she visited friends and some of her favorite spots in the city.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited.
MORNING READ I wish I was one of those people that could say they were a morning person. My flight landed last night around 11:45, and I got in the car and connected to the Wi-Fi, where I did a lot of work. I ordered some soup from room service and went to bed. Woke up this morning, caught up on some of my emails, read a little bit of my book, which is “Expensive Basketball” by Shea Serrano.
PISTACHIO AND PODCASTS Whenever I come back, I always stay downtown. I own a condo in the building right across from this Blank Street Coffee — I’ve only lived in downtown Manhattan — but I’m renting it out now, so I’m at the Four Seasons. I’ll pop into Blank Street to get a salted pistachio matcha. I indulge in my sweet tooth.
My normal routine would be to do the treadmill for about 30 minutes and listen to pods. I cycle between “The Athletic NBA Daily,” Zach Lowe’s show, [Brian] Windhorst. I’ve started to really like Austin Rivers’s show. But then I’ll do TED Talks or Esther Perel.
SOLIDCORE I almost feel like my day doesn’t really start until I’m moving my body. It helps me just feel a little bit more grounded. I didn’t actually start working out until the pandemic, which I spent here, and I started going to Solidcore. I’m at 441 classes. I am pretty good at it, which I feel a lot of pride in because something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the regret I have over not dedicating to a sport. Historically it’s been difficult for me to stick to things that I feel like I’m not great at immediately.
THERAPY I do it every Monday. Normally it’s at 2:30. It’s super important. I was one of those people that thought I didn’t need therapy. Very quickly, once you do therapy, you realize that everything affects everything else. Traumas show up in ways that you don’t necessarily recognize.
One of the reasons I feel like I’m good at speaking to other people or listening to other people is because that is something that I lacked. So I know what somebody wants to hear — the time that maybe they feel alone or they want to express something — like I’m able to pick up on that differently. Getting to explore myself more and be more honest about what my shortcomings are has helped in my work, but it also doesn’t make me feel so tense and wound up.
EATING GOOD I tend to do a protein and a carb after I work out. Where I fall off the cliff is the weekends. But Monday through Thursday, I’m pretty good. I try to be gluten-free four out of the five weekdays.
But Sunday is football day, and so we just sit on the couch and order whatever we want. We’re getting pancakes, we’re getting waffles, we are getting French toast. They will try to force it down your throat that if you want to be on TV, if you want to look good, you have to eat a certain way. The only reason I’ll ever work out is so that I can eat. It’s not for anything else, honestly.
GETTING GLAM TV glam, of course, is different from this. I’m hosting a panel and I want to look a little more fresh — not too overdone. I like lashes, blush, a frosty shimmery lip and brown lip liner. Brown liner is very important to me. I like the ’90s look. Regardless of the glam, whenever Elle [Valle] does my makeup it covers my mole, so we always put my mole back. That’s an important step.
I’m not a makeup person; I am not a hair person. I enjoy getting them done, I enjoy looking good, but I’m not really great at doing either of them. But if I have to go on a Zoom or something, I can get myself together.
I always want to look really classic and timeless.
PANEL APPEARANCE It’s a Boardroom Talks event; I’m one of their strategic partners.
I thought that being on television and being a sports journalist meant something very specific, and in a lot of ways that very small frame of mind hurt me. Outside of even just thinking about business, it made me think that I couldn’t always be myself in certain areas. I thought that it was about focusing on the sport, putting your head down, not making it about yourself. It didn’t happen until two or three years ago — I think more about corporate life and entrepreneurship and what things look like after I’m on TV.
DINNER AND W.W.E. I was going to go right back to my hotel, but a little wrench got thrown in the plan. My friend Charlotte Flair is here. She’s a wrestler and they’re at Madison Square Garden tonight. I’m going to see her and then I’m going to grab dinner with some friends at Beefbar here in TriBeCa. But then I will come back and I will have my glass of wine and I’ll read my book, and I will have to watch this week’s episode of “Law & Order: S.V.U.” because I haven’t seen it yet. I have never missed an episode.
Elena Bergeron is an editor and writer in the Culture section of The Times.
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