Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [122]
LINDA COHN, Anchor:
Before I got to ESPN in 1992, I was working in Seattle at a CBS TV station out there, so when I got the job at ESPN, I was a little nervous because even back in ’92, it was a bigger deal than working at an affiliate. You knew you had to step it up. You weren’t doing four-minute sportcasts anymore, and there was a lot of pressure on me because there weren’t a lot of women. I got on the phone with Dan Patrick, who is actually funnier off-screen than on, and I was so excited to talk to him. And one of the first things he says on the phone is, “Hey, Linda, I just gotta tell you, all the women before you have failed.” So that was my roll-out-the-red-carpet type of thing.
KEITH OLBERMANN:
My first year there, they came to me and said, “Hey, we’re going to have an expansion draft in the National League at the end of the ’92 season—the one that created the Rockies and the Marlins—and we think it’s a no-brainer but would you want to be the anchor?” And I said, “Well, what are you going to do?” “Oh, we’re going to televise the whole thing.” And I said, “You’re gonna televise the whole thing?!” It was simply every baseball geek’s dream just to attend one of those things. My friend—let the name drop, but just to give you an idea of what we’re talking about—my friend, Jason Bateman, who is now in every movie that is being made, says his baseball drafts every year are the highlight of his year. Well, one year they weren’t because his daughter was born, but to have a draft count and actually have it create real franchises, and be the anchor, was great. Sometimes I’ve been unable to sleep or having to fight for sleep the night before a big broadcast in anticipation of the anxiety. That night in November of ’92 I just thought, “My God, I can’t wait for this to get started.” We were on the air about ten hours, twelve hours, and it was a feat that could not possibly have been achieved anywhere else.
DAN PATRICK:
I was there fourteen hours a day, spending more time with Keith and the people on the show than with my real family. I really enjoyed the staff. I talked to them and had fun with them because they were the guts of the place. I cared about those people more than I did anybody else in that building. But the hours I was putting in were mostly about the work, and insecurity was a big part of it. Insecurity has driven me my entire life, from a family of six where my mom also lost six kids at birth to a Dad who died at fifty-four. I never took anything for granted. I never wanted to ease off the accelerator and say I’ve sort of made it. I used to look at the tape of the show after every show I did with Olbermann—every single show. I would take it up right after it was done and I would analyze what I didn’t do. Finally, Keith said, “Will you stop looking at the fucking air check! Relax, you got the job.” It got to the point where I wasn’t having any fun because I was so worried, and Keith really shook me out of it. He just said to me, “Just be the fucking guy you are off the air when you’re on the air.” And I just said, “Okay.”
There were two moments when I realized people were actually watching. One was talking to Jerry Seinfeld and he said, “I use your home-run line when I leave the set. I say, ‘I am gone.’” And I said, “Wow, okay.” And then a couple weeks after I had said on the air that one of the toughest things about coaching at Tennessee would be to find that color tie to go with all your outfits, Bill Murray grabbed an orange tie on an A to Z pub crawl in New York and said to me, “Here’s your fucking tie. It’s not that hard to find.”
ROBERT WEINTRAUB, Assistant Producer:
Dan Patrick was first among equals in terms of star anchors being beloved, at least at my flunky, production assistant/peon level. One day, one of the senior producer guys was unloading on one of the new low-level guys, a production assistant, just taking him to task—I don’t remember for what, but screwing up somehow,