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By Root 2482 0

away the curtain and say, “Aaah, I’m just a big dumb sports fan.” Like, “It’s okay, I’m just having fun.” And Berman really introduced fun to sportscasting, revolutionized it by introducing fun. Keith introduced satire and brains and rapier-carving, biting comment, first guy to do it, and he’s the best they ever had. Much respect to Berman: Berman carried that place, Berman made that place, but the guy who made ESPN a household word, the guy who gave ESPN a brand, the guy who made ESPN mean something in the market to everyone, was Keith Olbermann. God, he was a genius. He just reinvented sportscasting by being the smartest guy who ever did it. And watching him in the mid-nineties was a pleasure. It was appointment viewing: What was Olbermann going to say that night? And it was largely him, it was his brain, it was his point of view, it was the way he approached it. He was the first super-smart guy just to do highlights every night—not the first super-smart guy to be a sportscaster, the first guy just grinding it out every night, doing the highlights.

MIKE McQUADE:

Sometimes his lead-ins to the highlights would seem interminable. It would be something about the Cleveland Spiders in 1899 that would go on for forty-five seconds! I said, “Look, the lead-in to the highlight cannot be longer than the highlight itself.”

ROBIN ROBERTS:

My big Norma Rae moment was about offices—we didn’t have any. We just had cubicles. And finally, we were like, “Dammit, we’re important, we’re big, we need offices!” So myself and Keith Olbermann went walking into John A. Walsh’s office with all these demands and he looked at us like, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

DAN PATRICK:

“Precedent setting” is a big deal at ESPN. They’re very concerned about that.

They were worried that if they gave Chris Berman an office, we would all want one. Howard Katz initially told us that the fire marshal said they couldn’t have any more offices, that the cubicles were more flame retardant. But if you were there for three weeks as a coordinating producer, you got an office. So we’d always joke, “Is the fire marshal here yet?”

Again, it was all about who has control and precedent. “If we let them do it, then everybody else is going to want to do it.” So we would be in these cubicles and everybody would hear what you were doing and there was no privacy whatsoever. To get dressed, you’d go into a bathroom.

MIKE McQUADE:

I’d do the rundown and Keith would sit behind me, and I wasn’t even done, but Keith had already written everything in the show. He’d say, “Are you almost done?” and I remember the first time I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “I’ve already written the entire show up until the point you’re at.” I said, “Oh come on.” And he wasn’t writing stuff like “the Knicks play the Nets tonight, let’s go to the Garden”; what he wrote was well thought out. It was insane. In thirty-five minutes he had written the entire show. And that happened every day. See, for me, that was fun, because as long as you were, as he put it, “on the raft,” you were good, meaning you were in with him. He had people he was constantly taking onto the raft and putting off the raft.

DAN PATRICK:

Was it the “raft” or the “lifeboat”? I think maybe it was “life raft,” a combination of the two. I just love that expression. Keith would always say, “Who’s in the life raft?” And I remember Gus Ramsey and Mike McQuade would always say—it was almost like semi-regular—“Are you still in the life raft?” If they had screwed up with Keith or he was angry with them, then they would be excommunicated. You didn’t know from day to day—at least these guys around him—if you were on or off, and it was tough for them because they didn’t have the power to be able to say to Keith, “Hey, stop; grow up, fess up.”

Everything he did when he was in there was personal—how he wrote it, how he covered it, how he looked at you, everything was on his heart, or on his sleeve. And that was what made him great there. And if he felt like you had just turned on him, then you had actually turned on him, and that was something