Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [127]
They’d never fire an executive, but they fired a PA because he was e-mailing to another PA about a girl across the room. She was kind of a hot blonde, and the kid got fired because he was writing, like, “She’s really hot,” or “I’d like to fuck her,” or something like that. And they fired the PA. He was just a kid, doing what kids do. At most they should have put a little note in his file.
MIKE TIRICO, Anchor:
Most of the people over time who have worked with me have enjoyed working with me. I hope they have. At least they said they have, and I hope they always will. I’ve worked with a lot of our people in remote production—the different sports, covering events—and it’s given me a chance to interact with a lot of folks, and I’m pretty sure from what they’ve said that they’ve enjoyed their time working with me, and that they feel we have a common goal: to give the person at home the best show, and to enjoy the camaraderie of everybody along the way. And hopefully we’ve done that. That’s what I hope my legacy is there, and I’ve done a lot the last eighteen years toward that. Hopefully.
GARY MILLER:
I wasn’t in the screening room where a lot of this stuff supposedly went down, or around for the daily conversations. I imagine it had to be awful, because it was kind of like a locker room. But most of the girls that were working there then were kind of like jocks. They would tease and give the same kind of stuff, stuff that in today’s world would get you sent down to human resources right away. And they might even initiate some of it, but it was so 90–95 percent male that, at the beginning, it wasn’t even an issue. I didn’t see any of the sexual harassment stuff right in front of my face. I knew the people that eventually—years into their behavior—got called on the carpet for it, but I would only see just the real icky stuff: He’s wearing his shirt open, and doesn’t he realize how cheesy he looks? Or: he’s always paying attention to this person.
JOHN LACK:
The first thing I did to fix the place was I hired a lady that worked for me at MTV by the name of Harriet Seitler as vice president of Marketing. She was not a sports lady; she was the antithesis of sports. I brought her in to really get a sense of who we should be, and as I was bringing her in, I hired Wieden + Kennedy as our ad agency, which was a big deal. I had gotten to be very friendly with Dan Wieden and saw what he had done with Nike and making that company a cultural phenomenon that went way beyond box scores. We made a deal with Dan that he would never admit. I said “Dan, we really can’t afford you. The culture here is such where hiring a big ad agency is not what we’re about. So you gotta work the first year for no profit. We’ll pay your costs but you can’t make a dime on us, but we’ll give you a three-year deal. If you do well the first year, you’ll make a little money the second year and, hopefully, the third you’ll be back up to what you should be making. If you can’t do that, I can’t make the deal.” They wanted us so badly because of their experience with Nike and knowing what they know about sports that Dan finally said okay. He acquiesced. That hiring alone was a little bit of a shock to some in Bristol. Walsh looked at it and said, “Oh, we’re going to be like Nike television now.”
Harriet fought valiantly for all the right stuff. SportsCenter was good when we came, but it wasn’t hip. Now it became hip. Spike Lee did a couple commercials for us. It was all really great stuff, and that was all Harriet. Walsh looked at Harriet as the Antichrist. He thought: “It was bad enough Lack was here, but now Harriet Seitler?” He wanted to kill her.
GEORGE BODENHEIMER:
I give John Lack a lot of credit for hiring Harriet. Her marketing acumen was not something that had regularly been seen at ESPN. She really involved herself in the creative look, and her artwork was some of the best stuff we ever produced.
HARRIET SEITLER, Vice President of Marketing: