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my thing. And when I say mine, I mean I had the go/no-go, but the brain behind it was John Walsh. It was originally planned to be a two-hour show, but it grew and grew. I would ask Steve if he wanted to come to the biweekly meetings to review the progress, and he said, “No, you just keep going with it.” About two months before the show, I went to Steve and told him I had some bad news. I said, “Steve, this thing is starting to grow,” and he said, “I want a two-hour show, and that’s final.” Well, it had gotten to be three hours and twenty minutes, and we tried and tried to make cuts, and two nights before the show, I went to Steve and I said, “Steve, I got great news, I got it back to three hours.” Steve looked at me and said, “You gotta be crazy. I don’t care what you do, but get it under two hours.” So Walsh and I worked all night cutting out things, but finally I called Steve and said, “Come and do it yourself. We can’t do it.”

Everything about the show was tense. Dennis Miller was the host, and during the show one of the producers was trying to give him hand signals about what to do, and Dennis was giving him the finger. There wasn’t a lot of harmony. Two days after the show, I wound up in the hospital with heart palpitations. It was a very, very strenuous event. But most enjoyable.

DENNIS MILLER, ESPY Host:

At the time I was friends a little bit with John—what is his name? Sweet man. I think he’s an albino. You know the cat I mean? Anyway, he called me and said, “Let’s have breakfast.” I remember I had some eggs that were really good. He told me they were thinking of doing a play on the Oscars for sports and I said, “Oh that sounds like a cool idea,” and he let me do the first one and I think I may have done the second. I actually think I did the first MTV Movie Awards, too—my kids can’t believe I was hip enough to do that—and a couple of Emmy Awards. I had like a five-year period there where I was hosting all these things. But the ESPYs were cool. I’m a sports nerd so to meet some of those guys really meant a lot to me.

JOHN SAUNDERS, Anchor:

I’d known Jim Valvano over the years when I was covering basketball. When he got hired at ESPN, he was immediately the best analyst there ever was. He wanted to teach the game with a sense of humor. Right after the first game we did together we went out for a drink. There was a bar next door and I didn’t know if he was a party guy or whatever, but a bunch of people came along because that’s what Jim was like, he’d walk around and people would just follow him, people would just light up. So we go in and sit down at the bar and this very attractive girl and a biker kind of guy sitting next to her are talking and looking over at us. Finally the girl comes over and says, “You’re Jim Valvano, aren’t you?” He says, “Yes, I am.” She said, “I think you’re very, very cute and my boyfriend doesn’t mind that I come over and talk to you.” Mind you, this is his first day on the job! So he talks to her for a while, she goes back to her boyfriend, and then she comes back again and says, “My boyfriend says he wouldn’t mind if I went home with you tonight.” And Jim says, “That’s very, very nice of him, and I appreciate that, but no, I’m going to have to pass.” So she says, “Can I at least get your autograph?” She pulls down the top of her pants to reveal her underwear and says she wants Jim to sign it. So he looked at me, took the pen, and in big letters wrote, DICK VITALE.

Jim and I used to talk every day, and so one day he calls and says, “My back is killing me!” I told him, he had been on an airplane and it was probably just sore, but the next day he called me up and said, “John, I just got back from the doctor. I’ve got cancer. I’ve got less than a year to live.” And I was instantly, literally in tears. Now he’s trying to calm me down: “Don’t worry, John, I’m going to find a way to beat this.” He wanted to keep working, and he kept coming up to Bristol, and either his daughter or his wife would come with him. We would do our shows three days a week, and go up to a game, but he’d be in