Chris Harrison Wasn't Always Surrounded By Roses

The Bachelor franchise would not be the same without Chris Harrison. No one else could tantalize us about the "most dramatic rose ceremony yet" quite like him. He has been a part of the fans' experience from the very start of the original series and its spinoff shows, but what did Chris Harrison do before he hosted The Bachelor ?

Well, you probably won't be too surprised to hear that he did reporting and hosting, but that it had nothing to do with romance or dating. He started out hosting for a pretty different audience, unless you count that crossover audience of Bachelor and Oklahoma City sports fans. It's a little surprising that Harrison went from sports to facilitating matchmaking on a reality dating show, but whatever, he's a well-rounded dude.

Harrison's hosting career really got into full swing when he worked as a sports reporter for KWTV, a CBS affiliate, in Oklahoma City. He did this from 1993 to 1999 and worked his way up from a part-time reporter to a weekend sportscaster. He also had opportunities to cover news stories in other genres. (For the record, before getting into sports reporting, he was actually on a soccer scholarship at Oklahoma City University.)

Then, in a seemingly random move, Harrison started working for the horse racing channel TVG Network in 1999. He stuck with the horse reporting for about a year until he started working as a host for the HGTV show Designer's Challenge.

And then, finally, he got the break of a lifetime when ABC hired him in 2001 to host a little show called The Bachelor. Which worked out pretty well for him, to say the least. Fourteen years later, he is now a household name and the king of a long-running reality show franchise. It just goes to show you that you never know where you're going to land in life. I don't think that Harrison expected to go from attending school on a soccer scholarship to handing out roses on prime time television, but that's just how life ended up!