Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [141]
SUZY KOLBER:
My version is Keith was a genius who finished writing the three-hour show in about twenty minutes and he was outside smoking his pipe and he had thrown on his leather jacket over his goofy print shirt and John walked by him and said, “That’s the look I want.” They had given me so much money to go to New York and buy clothes, it was unbelievable. I had worn one of my favorite outfits from West Palm to a preview show and John Lack’s comment was, “She looks like she’s in West Palm.” But at least we got makeup. They didn’t even have makeup at ESPN until the start of SportsNight on ESPN2.
CHARLEY STEINER:
Shit, when I got there they had maybe ten anchors, if that. Now comes ESPN2 and they’re adding more, and it’s the next generation. They wanted to emulate a new ESPN attitude. See, all of us back on the original didn’t have an attitude, we were just being ourselves.
The problem about the birth of ESPN2 was, you can’t try and be hip; either you are or you aren’t. It’s that simple. Likewise, you can’t try and be smart; either you are or you aren’t. But putting poor old Keith in a black leather jacket like he’s heading for a dominatrix studio, come on!
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
It was irrelevant to me whether Olbermann was wearing a leather jacket or a fucking tutu. All that creative stuff and tensions wasn’t the battle. The battle was getting distribution. I was much more concerned about working with Bodenheimer to get TCI, Time Warner, and other operators on board. We needed to quickly figure out how we could leverage our service to make them distribute ESPN2. All I wanted was shelf space and more sub fees.
MITCH ALBOM:
They told us how to dress, which was the first time in my career that anyone ever did that. And they said, “Well we want Suzy to look a certain way, and we want Keith to look a certain way, and we want you to look a certain way.” We were all going to have our own kind of ‘way.’” I had to have the Don Johnson look: I had to wear sport coats with T-shirts underneath them, but I had to pull the sleeves up on my sport coat. Keith was wearing a leather jacket, and we were teasing him about being Fonzie; everyone was saying, “So we have the Fonz.”
KEITH OLBERMANN:
Those who have that little touch of paranoia in them about a certain group—as I do about management—really are a little bit more—comfortable might be the right word—in a situation in which management is failing utterly. You don’t have to say, “See, I told you so,” because everybody is seeing it in real time. So my attitude was, “Let’s see what we can do with this. I don’t think it’s going to work. But they said I could go back in six months if it doesn’t.”
As opening night for the new network and the launch of its flagship series SportsNight grew closer, the atmosphere around ESPN2 was filled with doubt. If not doubt, then trepidation. A full dress rehearsal for SportsNight confirmed some of the darkest fears harbored by Olbermann, and on the morning after a September 26 dry-run that he considered a medley of calamities, he fired off a three-page, single-spaced memo on what went wrong. Since Olbermann is such an erudite and accomplished writer, the memo reads beautifully. It also says the show sucks.
Olbermann found the show to be “neither hip nor particularly informative” but instead “purposeless,” about the worst thing a show could be. “It is not an expansion on SportsCenter but an apparent redundancy,” he wrote. “Neither is it a new generation’s version of SportsCenter but merely the proverbial fifty-year-old wolf in twenty-year-old sheep