Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [123]
DAN PATRICK:
I didn’t want separation between myself and the producer who was talking to me in my ear or the director or anyone else working on the show. I saw us all as being on the same team. That’s why I had these guys, including PAs, over to my house. I even had them over for Thanksgiving, just because they had no place to go. And guess what? When I brought my son home for the first day from the hospital, you know who was there in the driveway? Three kids who cut highlights for me on SportsCenter. They just wanted to offer up any help they could. How fucking unbelievable is that?
So began a new era of serenity and tranquility, destined to continue for—oh, about five minutes. Indeed, anyone who’d thought there would be peace in the valley had to be kidding themselves—and forgetting, perhaps, that wars can ignite from the most unlikely of disputes.
KEITH OLBERMANN:
One night right after we started, swamped by the work and a little jealous that CNN was just a thirty-minute show and we were doing an hour, I said, during a commercial, off air, to Dan, “This is a BIG fucking show.” He laughed, I laughed, and so I figured I’d get him to giggle on the air by saying, on the air, “… when this BIG… show continues.” The next day a dozen people came up to one or both of us and said, “The big show!” Walsh may have even been one of them. So I started using it.
DAN PATRICK:
Keith’s whole thought was, “Let’s mock ourselves.” We didn’t know who was watching. And so it was, “Welcome to The Big Show.” I remember we did it for a while and the guys on the six o’clock—Bob Ley, Robin Roberts, and Charley Steiner—didn’t like the fact that we called it The Big Show, like we thought we were better.
KEITH OLBERMANN:
Charley and I always had gently gone back and forth with crap in every possible relationship between two guys who worked together and were in the same field for thirty years. It was never personal with Charley. I think Bob resented it and Robin couldn’t have cared less. And management was saying, “We don’t want you putting an individual stamp on your SportsCenter.” I was thinking, “Yeah, right, that boat sailed already too.”
Dan and I essentially tried to escalate it every week just to stick it to management.
JOHN WALSH:
We had one huge editorial blowout. Huge, huge, huge. It was the July Fourth weekend, I watched the show, and they were going off the rail, it was crazy. So we had a meeting, Tuesday morning. The genesis of the meeting was basically Keith was taking over SportsCenter, it was no longer SportsCenter, it was The Big Show; he kept calling it The Big Show. One of the points of the meeting was, “It’s SportsCenter, it’s not The Big Show. You can have your nickname but when you’re going to break, it’s not The Big Show, it’s SportsCenter.” So Keith said, “What do you want us to say, just ‘This is SportsCenter’?” I said, “Yeah, that’ll be just fine.” So they started to say, “This is SportsCenter.” It was Keith sticking it to us as management because he was going to promote it in the least promotable way: “This is SportsCenter.”
DAN PATRICK:
My philosophy was: the bigger the room, the more trouble you’re in. So we went into the big conference room with wood paneling all around. And it was Keith, myself, and Mike McQuade, our producer. And we got a tongue-lashing by management, pounding on the desk, the whole thing. “We’re not going to put up with this, calling it The Big Show!” Walsh was pissed. He railed on us. “You will not call it The Big Show. From now on, when you’re getting ready to go to break, you will say, ‘This is SportsCenter,’ and nothing else.” I walked out of that meeting thinking—at the time I had two children, maybe three—and I remember