Michael Wilbon, the ESPN personality and decorated former Washington Post sports columnist, is stepping away from television.The 67-year-old has announced his indefinite leave from Pardon The Interruption (PTI) as well as his NBA duties as he faces some unspecified health issues. ‘This isn’t retirement, but it is a trip to the injured list,’ he wrote in a statement. ‘I have no idea how this part of my journey will wind up. The goal of it is to come out of it feeling much better than I do now and ready to return to sparring with Tony.’The ‘Tony’ Wilbon referred to is his PTI co-host and fellow Washington Post alum Tony Kornheiser, whom he’s debated on weekday evenings for the better part of 25 years.Wilbon said he has been showing signs of health issues he should have been paying attention to more closely. Wilbon said he has been facing some health issues and is now going to step away indefinitely Michael Wilbon (right, alongside Tony Kornheiser), the decorated former Washington Post sports columnist, is stepping away from the ESPN show he’s co-hosted since 2001’And as one close friend has said as my issues have become bigger, ‘the bill has come due,” Wilbon wrote. ‘The struggles are all health related, not to alcohol (I’m not swearing off the now-and-then Kier Royale) and not to gambling (those winds of change I find loathsome).’Wilbon has not been on PTI since October 26 and has seen less air time in recent months. ‘I didn’t do the show for a week because I was just exhausted,’ Wilbon recently told Kornheiser. ‘Beyond exhausted, lifeless. And this has been going on for a while.’ The show currently has several temporary fill-in co-hosts lined up, including former ESPN personality Pablo Torre and Frank Isola, a frequent contributor to the Worldwide Leader who is best known for his years covering the Knicks for the New York Daily News. Long-term fill-ins have not been named.A type-2 diabetic, Wilbon previously suffered a heart attack in 2008 in Arizona, where doctors performed an angioplasty on the Chicago native.A graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Wilbon made a name for himself covering Major League Baseball, the NFL and NBA for the Post in the 1980s and 1990s. During that time, he began appearing on ESPN’s The Sports Reporters, as well as other shows on the cable giant. Wilbon (left) and Kornheiser (right) first worked together at the Washington Post But it was in 2001 that he gained national fame as one half of PTI’s on-air duo.The married father has covered ten Olympic Games, every Super Bowl since 1987, almost every Final Four since 1982 and a near-four-decade streak of NBA Finals.Interestingly, he is the only mainland journalist who was on hand for little-known Chaminade’s upset of future NBA star Ralph Sampson and top-ranked Virginia in 1982. Wilbon was in town to cover the No. 16 Maryland football team against the No. 9 Washington Huskies in the Aloha Bowl, but was called on to cover another Washington-area team, the Cavaliers men’s basketball program, a few nights earlier in the Honolulu International Center.What ensued was an upset so unlikely that few basketball fans on the East Coast believed the box scores they were reading – in some cases several days later. Chaminade, an NAIA school, played in relative obscurity but stumbled into a matchup with the country’s top-ranked team by virtue of an NCAA rule allowing teams to play extra games in distant locations such as Hawaii or Alaska. Michael Wilbon released a statement on his indefinite leave from Virginia’s Ralph Sampson (50) battles Richard Haenisch of Chaminade during what many consider to be the greatest upset in basketball history. Wilbon was covering the game, but missed his deadline due to the late ending at the 4,000-seat Honolulu International CenterVirginia head coach Terry Holland then struck a deal with Chaminade to play in a tiny 4,000-seat gym in what should have been an easy game for the Cavaliers.Instead, the 7ft 4in Sampson was held to just 12 points as the Silverswords drained nearly half their field-goal attempts in the historic 77-72 stunner.’People were in disbelief,’ Wilbon told The Associated Press years later. ‘It wasn’t like today. I don’t remember people rushing the floor. It might have been chaotic then, but not by today’s standards. You had the biggest upset in the history of college basketball and no one quite knew what to do.’And because the game was played so late, Wilbon had no chance of getting it in the following day’s edition of the Post.’I was like ‘Oh my god, oh my god,” I called the paper and asked ‘are you guys listening?” Wilbon said. ‘They were like, ‘Yeah, but we put the paper to bed.’ I’ve never been angrier in my life, professionally because they put it to bed and the next morning there was nothing in my paper.’