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to move. It was like trying to stand on a waterbed, except it was concrete. The lights in the stadium were whipping back and forth like weeds in the breeze. It lasted about twenty seconds, long enough to start a Hail Mary, not quite long enough to finish it. They had TVs throughout the section, and it was all dark. There was no power. Then I looked at the field. The scoreboard was out. I ran back to the production truck. Everybody at that moment knew without being told: “Do something important. Get on the air. You do this, you do that; don’t stand on ceremony.” Joe Torre was working with us as an analyst on that series, and to this day, I remember Joe saying, “Give me a camera. I’ll go out and see what I can get.” He went out and started getting Q&A. I think he might have gotten Willie Mays.

PETER GAMMONS:

It still cracks me up that Rene Lachemann, the As’ third-base coach, and Walt Weiss, their shortstop, were in the outfield doing their pregame running when the earthquake hit, and never realized there was an earthquake.

ABC stayed on the air briefly, broadcasting live from the stadium—the first “live” telecast of an earthquake ever—but then its equipment failed. (ABC was there to televise the entire game; ESPN was there to offer coverage but not play-by-play.) ESPN producers had shown the foresight to bring along a backup generator, however, and so the sports network was quickly back up again, and soon it had the live coverage. Its team of sportscasters was drafted into service as newscasters, a reminder that the qualities required to be the best at either job are largely the same. ESPN’s team was supplemented by Joe Torre, Chris Berman, and Chris Myers at the stadium, with Bob Ley joining them eighteen minutes in—as fast as he could get from row 17 of the upper deck to the ESPN booth.

“It was my first earthquake,” Ley said later, as if recalling a wedding or a graduation or some other rite of passage—which, in California, an earthquake sort of is. This quake was formidable; it would take sixty-three lives, cause injuries to 3,700 people, and do $6 billion in damage to structures in the Bay Area.

It was a source of considerable pride at ESPN that it proved its mettle at this hypercritical moment and that ABC would have been up a creek without ESPN and its faithful backup generator.

JEFF ISRAEL:

Joe Torre and I went out to the field and talked to players and their families—all of it was seen minutes after the earthquake happened. ABC didn’t get up for a little while longer after that. We had power. So in a tragic situation, things were coming up roses for us.

CHRIS BERMAN:

We were still little ESPN then, and ABC was getting credit. They did a great job, but they weren’t really on. It was our power. Even the police used our generator. We did a good thing for the city. Everything was out. We were the only ones on. We looked across the bay and saw the fires in the refineries over in the East Bay, then we heard about the bridge and other fires. Oh, this is more than just a little earthquake now. This is a pretty big earthquake. And every five or ten minutes we were learning more and more about it all. There were ten or twelve of us, doing what we were supposed to do. We weren’t trained by management on how to be newspeople, but we were doing a great job covering this news story.

BOB LEY:

We had the only two phone lines in a twenty-mile radius that were working. We gave one to the police so they could have it, and we kept the other one for ourselves.

SCOTT ACKERSON:

I was in Bristol. We were no longer a sports network, we were a news operation.

MIKE McQUADE:

I remember at one point I looked up and saw ABC’s World News Tonight and Nightline had used part of our coverage. That was kind of a watershed.

CHRIS BERMAN:

At the end of the night, as appreciation for what we had done, we got an escort into town by the police, because the drive in to San Francisco was without lights. I thought of London during the bombing in World War II and Churchill. This is what it must have been like. The lights were all knocked out