Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [146]
MARK GROSS:
Man, I tell you, honestly, I don’t know how Suzy got through it. There were times when I said, “My God,” because Olbermann was being really tough. But he’s also a genius.
TONY KORNHEISER, Sportswriter:
Whenever ESPN2 started, Feinstein and I taped about ten things in a day, sitting outside the Capitol, just two guys yapping for ESPN2. We were called the Wise Guys. They just wanted debate. I don’t know if it was funny or not. We would debate an issue for about a minute and a half, then do another one. I never saw one of them; in fact, to this day, I’ve never seen any of them.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
Now this move became kind of a legend in the business: About four months after we launched ESPN2, I put the North Carolina–Duke basketball game on ESPN2. I seem to remember it was a number one versus number two matchup—obviously a huge national interest game. And that was a really ballsy move that subjected us to a hell of a lot of political and other pressure. I always planned it for ESPN2 but I wanted to cause a consumer outcry so the cable operators had to televise ESPN2. There was great political pressure. Governors, everybody else, calling and saying, “Why don’t you just put it on ESPN? My cable system doesn’t carry ESPN2.” Every citizen in North Carolina and every college basketball fan thought we did a bait-and-switch on them. But it truly established ESPN2 as must-have cable.
SUZY KOLBER:
At ESPN2, we were already the stepchild. Charley Steiner and Mike Tirico were the only two SportsCenter anchors who befriended us and who would come over to our area.
DAVID ZUCKER:
My job was to fill up the schedule, but a lot of the sports leagues that we dealt with, whether it was college or professional, were very resistant; they didn’t want their product on ESPN2. Like with baseball, if we had a conflict and tried to move a game over to ESPN2, there was a lot of resistance. They even tried to sue us. We spent a lot of time working through that one.
Sometimes things actually work out the way they should—at least the way that common sense and simple sanity suggest they ought to. Such was the happy denouement for Olbermann in February 1994, as word came he would soon be liberated from the leather straitjacket and painful perch he’d grumblingly endured on ESPN2’s SportsNight and would return to his royal roost on ESPN’s SportsCenter. It was precisely what Olbermann—as well as the network’s fans, including many college and pro athletes—had been hoping for.
People wondered whether ESPN executives had swallowed their pride and realized the mistake they’d made, or if it was just that they could no longer stomach Olbermann’s demonstrable unhappiness over being exiled to ESPN2 and sentenced to cohost a show that he essentially loathed. Not only would Olbermann be back at his old SportsCenter post on the mother ship, but he’d be reteamed with Dan Patrick, with whom he’d made SportsCenter a much talked-about hit. The change was seminal for SportsCenter in another way: ESPN announced that when Olbermann returned on April 3, the show would expand to an hour, airing 11:00 p.m. to midnight every night but Wednesdays.
KEITH OLBERMANN:
The last ESPN2 show I ever did was after the show had been moved twice, furniture had been changed, segments had been changed, and we had shows where for three hours not one section of the show, one commercial-to-commercial segment, went on the air at the time it was supposed to. There was a C section of the third hour that became the lead section on the first hour and the B section of the second hour became the B section of the first hour. It went through this for three hours but we had no idea what was coming up next. “We’ll be back with something after this.” So this last show had a two-part twenty-minute piece by Tom Friend, a sportswriter from L.A. with