Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [118]
TONY BRUNO, Host:
I was doing a radio show in Philly, so I would do my show, then jump in my car and drive to Bristol before Friday afternoon when we would begin our meetings. ESPN loves meetings. John Walsh was totally unfamiliar with radio; he came from the structured newspaper and magazine world so the meetings were still part of the whole print way of doing things. We’d have a meeting and then have another meeting and then producers would come in and we’d have another meeting. I mean ESPN is the meeting capital of the world. Everybody knew what they were doing, but when you’re doing a free-flowing seven-hour radio show, you can’t time everything out. After a while, John, to his credit, saw how good we were, and pretty much started letting us do our thing. It was definitely the radio that people remember to this day—maybe the best weekend programming ever available.
HOWARD KATZ, Executive Vice President:
When we ventured into talk radio on ESPN, it was a very difficult time for John, because prior to this, all anchors were created equal. Okay, Chris Berman was a little more equal, he got away with a few things, but generally, everybody did their own writing, and their own research. And everyone was held to a very high standard, with John the taskmaster.
When radio launched, it obviously needed to be a personality-driven genre. And John had a terrible, terrible time coming to grips with that. We hired Nancy Donnellan, best known as “Fabulous Sports Babe,” for example, and she was all about herself. She wasn’t about ESPN, or the work ethic of the place. But I said to John, “To be in this genre you’ve got to accept the fact that we’re going to have to build personalities who people will want to listen to, and they may not act like everyone else.” He wrestled with that a whole lot. In fact, I don’t think he ever got comfortable with it.
TONY BRUNO:
Every Friday night, Keith and I would go out to dinner. That was our ritual. Actually, we would buy baseball cards because Keith was a big collector and then go to dinner. We’d go to the same Italian restaurant, Pallaci’s. I stayed at the Radisson Hotel across the street—for seven years. We would come in on Fridays. We’d all stay at the Radisson. Then Keith finally found a house, he didn’t want to live in the Radisson anymore. So we would go to Keith’s house on weekends and would have pool parties. After the show, I would have what we call “Bruno Bashes” in my hotel room. Saturday night, we’d come back to my room. Somebody would go out and buy a case of beer before the liquor store closed. I’d get ice and fill up my bathtub with beer and ice. And the whole staff would come over and sit in my room having a couple beers just talking about the show. It was more of the feel of like a fraternity. Keith didn’t drive, so I would drive him home.
KEITH OLBERMANN:
Los Angeles was a buyer’s market for cabs and even for rides. The drivers there were so amazed that there was actually somebody who didn’t drive, they were happy to take me somewhere if I told them the story of why I did not drive. I hit my head leaping onto a train at Shea Stadium in 1980. Two years later, at the US Open, my eyes started doing a Marty Feldman. I was sent to the city’s top muscle ophthalmologist, Dr. Renee Richards—still a friend—and she said the damage I’d done was to my inner ear. Essentially, I had no depth perception while traveling more than 20 mph. It took me several seconds to figure out where the other cars actually were. I still sometimes flinch as a passenger.
When I moved to Southington, Connecticut, the big town that adjoins Bristol, I found out that there was one cab company and that it only had three cabs. Walsh always had one on standby because he didn’t drive either, and the state basically used the cab service to get all of its state-care medical cases to and from doctors and hospitals. So really there was one cab for everybody else.