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the airport. I think I met with John Walsh twice, and had lunch with Al Jaffe, and then I met Vince Doria. But it was very stressful. The CNN interview was just the opposite. I just loved Bill McPhail and Jim Walton. We had lunch. We hugged. They offered me the job, and I accepted. A couple weeks later, Al Jaffe called and said, “We really like you, and we want you to come back for an audition for this new network we’re starting, ESPN2.” I reminded them that I had said I was interviewing elsewhere and then told them I accepted a job with CNN. He said, “You didn’t sign anything, did you?” I said, “No.” He said, “Don’t do anything,” and wound up offering me more than triple what I was making.

KEITH OLBERMANN:

I think the answer to why I was shipped to ESPN2 is contained in this: In ’92 to ’93 Dan and I foreshadowed our real success and Walsh could see it coming and knew it meant only one thing: it would no longer be his show. Putting me on ESPN2 solved that—or so he thought. John Lack was coming up and whispering into my ear, “Ignore what the rest of them tell you, you’re the producer of the show on the air, you do what you want to.” My cohost had been selected, if I remember correctly, by the CEO of CapCities. Walsh told me Lack was in charge, but he was clearly heavily influential in what was being done. Lack told me Lack was in charge. Then they brought in Vince Doria because Walsh was apparently still pushing for ultimately making ESPN2, as he put it, “the Christian Science Monitor of sports.” He was going in a totally different direction. I did not know that the Christian Science Monitor scored particularly well with the young demographic. But then Doria came up to me, maybe three weeks into it, and said, “Hey, you know I have just realized I don’t know as much about television as I thought I did. Can I tap your brain on some of these things ’cause my instincts are not what I thought.” I said, “God bless you. I’m happy to do it. I’ll stay after class.” But there were two other people who were “in charge”—Norby Williamson and Mike Bogad, who were the line producer and the coordinating producer, respectively, of the eleven o’clock SportsCenter.

In the middle of all this, just weeks before we went on the air, Howard Katz came in as an executive. So in addition to not knowing who was in charge, now there was a new guy whose title was, I think, executive vice president—a title that sounded bigger than Walsh’s. So I went to him and asked if he was aware of this whole project, and he said, “Well, I’m in charge of it.” I think it was around this time that I made this joke: “Let’s stop people in the hallway and see how many think they’re in charge of ESPN2.” It was like the documentary about screenplays in Hollywood where you just stand outside a supermarket and ask people, “How’s your screenplay?” And only 33 percent of the people that they stopped said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about; I don’t have a screenplay.” But the other 66 percent all said, “Well, it’s in development, well, it’s over at Metro.” Little old ladies pushing grocery carts had screenplays. It was like that at ESPN2. I simply could not tell you who was in charge.

VINCE DORIA:

The truth of it is none of us knew exactly what we should be doing. There was much discussion in the business of what was the need for a second all-sports network: Is there enough even for one all-sports network? What are they going to do with two?

I do know that if John Lack had ever gotten Steve’s job, he probably would have paid off John Walsh and shown him the door. But at least Walsh would have left with something.

MITCH ALBOM, Author:

Walsh was a big champion of mine. He believed in good writing and he thought that I was a good writer. At least, that’s what he said. And he thought that because I was working with college football and it was a young sport, I should be part of this new network. At the time it was like, “What is this, the minor-league ESPN? How can there be a second ESPN? It’s just ESPN, that’s all there is.” So I was a little bit hesitant about if it