Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [117]
Although obviously not the first sports network in American radio, it was the first and only bearing the auspicious ESPN brand. The name ESPN now spoke more loudly; scarcely had plans for the network been announced when twenty-five stations in the top fifty markets eagerly signed up. Much as it had done in television, ESPN started off its radio network with a minimal expenditure and a skeletal staff putting in sometimes torturously long hours—not so much because of passion for the project as a management demand that they couldn’t refuse.
Keith Olbermann was one of three main on-air personalities signed at the start. The other two were the explosive Tony Bruno, who’d become a highly popular radio star in the sports-crazed Philadelphia market, and Chuck Wilson, least outspoken of the bunch. The radio network was jointly run by ABC Radio’s Shelby Whitfield and ESPN’s John Walsh. For Olbermann and Walsh, it would be the start of a long, winding roller coaster of a relationship.
On January 4, 1992, the ESPN radio network signed on. Luck on timing paid off pronto. By the second night, it had already broken a national story. Eventually ESPN Radio would encompass five owned stations and dozens more affiliates.
JOHN WALSH:
I remember Bornstein calling me into the office and basically putting me against the wall and saying, “Look, I want to do radio, and I don’t want to spend any money. You tell all these guys that they’re going to go on radio and we’re not going to pay them anything extra, and if they don’t want to go on they can leave.” And so radio launched. We started with fifty-one stations and it was on Saturday from 6:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m., Sunday from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m., and Sunday from 6:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m.
JIM ALLEGRO, Executive Vice President:
Steve brought me in as his number two in 1990 and I was not well received. A few of the people up there thought that I was coming in as a spy for CapCities—that was absolutely not the case, but there was definite coolness there.
I had final approval for SportsCenter hires and John Walsh came to me with a bunch of people, one of whom was Keith Olbermann. He was willing to sign on with us for a greatly reduced salary to prove his worth, so we took the gamble. I did his contract. There were a lot of constraints and outs. He had been kind of a renegade out in California and, to be truthful, he was making a lot of money out there and not a lot of people wanted to pick him up. We did, at a very, very cheap price. But one of these deciding factors was that we had decided to launch ESPN Radio and Keith had a good background in that area.
KEITH OLBERMANN:
The deal I reached with ESPN in ’91 was very specific: no radio, and no TV other than SportsCenter. I was going to take a couple months off to go to Hawaii and sit on a beach before I went to Bristol, and then we were going to start up SportsCenter with Dan Patrick in March or April. About a day after New Year’s Eve, there was a frantic phone call from John Walsh to my agent, Jean Sage, saying that they were starting the radio network that Saturday night, but they only had two hosts, needed a third person, and they didn’t have anybody who had enough radio experience to help it. Could I possibly come back for just a couple weeks? Well, for some reason, I decided to cancel my Hawaii trip and instead I went to Bristol in January to do radio for them. My reward for being a team player: I had to keep doing one night per weekend and take split days off well into 1993.
On the first night, there was one seven-hour-long show done by Tony Bruno, Chuck Wilson, and me. On the second night, January fifth, we realized that [right fielder] Danny Tartabull was cancelling visits to potential signing teams. All of us, producers included, had worked the phones and I had narrowed it down to a couple of teams when it suddenly dawned on me that I still had Tartabull’s home number. I reached him around