Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [140]
CHARLIE PIERCE, Columnist:
I was one of the people who was brought in to try out. This was one of the more preposterous exercises of all time. They called Bud Shaw, me, and a whole bunch of people and they kept rotating us through these tryouts. When I walked into the studio and saw Olbermann and Suzy, I thought, “This is really a chemistry experiment gone wrong here.” And then Mitch Albom. I don’t mean to sound like Jerry Seinfeld, but I don’t know what consulting genius put those three together. I had known Olbermann for a while and I went outside and he was sitting on the hood of a car smoking an immense cigar, just shaking his head very, very sadly. I think they offered me some sort of Crossfire thing with John Feinstein to argue about college basketball, but I turned it down because I didn’t want to argue professionally.
JIMMY ROBERTS:
Bornstein had let it be known that there was going to be this internal contest to come up with a nickname for ESPN2. I’m guessing this is September. I was in my office, which was where the corporate offices were, and I went into the copy room. There was this woman named Kitty, who was John Lack’s secretary, and she was getting some stuff ready for John. She said, “He’s going out to the Western Cable Convention. We’re announcing the launch of ESPN2.” And I said, “Oh, you mean the Deuce?” And she looked at me and I said, “Oh yeah. That’s what we call it around here,” just kind of joking around. And I didn’t think anything of it. Sometime later, close to the launch, I was watching the feed from the press conference where Steve was introducing ESPN2. “But I’m going to let John Lack here tell you more about it.” And he says, “Well thanks, Steve. Thanks for launching ESPN2, but around the office we like to call it the Deuce.” And I remember having that Albert Brooks moment—you know, from Broadcast News? “Oh my God. I said it here, and it came out there.”
GEORGE BODENHEIMER:
Those of us trying to sell ESPN2 were constantly being asked, “How does it differ from ESPN?” So, for instance when “Jock ’n’ Roll” was conceived, that was something important to us. We could tell affiliates that on ESPN2 we were going to be putting sports highlights to rock music, which of course hadn’t been done before. And John Lack deserves the credit for that. We were also able to say SportsNight with Keith Olbermann was going to focus on action sports. All of those things ultimately went by the wayside, but they served a very valuable purpose in helping us launch ESPN2 by creating a difference from ESPN.
STUART SCOTT, Anchor:
I was hired for ESPN2. I didn’t watch much TV in college, and my roommate and I had this little black and white, and we didn’t even have cable. So I didn’t watch ESPN. I had worked in news and then I got a chance to anchor sports on the weekends, but ESPN was my first full-time sports job. I don’t think any of it ever came easy, but that’s not to say it wasn’t fun back then. Something can be difficult and fun.
VINCE DORIA:
Keith was standing outside the building one day in a leather jacket and Lack came running up to him and said, “You need to wear that on the set.” It was that kind of a kneejerk, “Hey, this looks good,” kind of thing. It’s a good thing he wasn’t wearing a mink stole.
KEITH OLBERMANN:
The reason I was wearing that awful leather jacket when we went on the air was that I had been wearing it in rehearsals because it was so cold. Suzy Kolber was so