Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [150]
MIKE McQUADE:
One time, while Dan was talking on camera, Keith got really agitated—“why are we doing it this way, why are we not doing it this way,” that kind of thing. I finally said, “This is how we’re doing it. Shut up.”
Then there was the night we were doing the show and, during a commercial break, I said to Keith and Dan, “Who are those people back there?” The guys turned around, looked, and said, “Uh, looks like some kids just walked in from a nearby school or something.” And they were right. These guys had just walked into the studio! That’s how lax security was then. I said, “Look, could you at least tell them to be quiet?”
It took me a good hundred shows to have full command of the show every day, and I should preface all of this by saying, I learned so much from those two in producing the show.
While Olbermann and Patrick were being lavished with attention—and loving it—for their ad-libbed hijinks on the 11:00 p.m. edition of SportsCenter, the 6:00 p.m. triumvirate of Robin Roberts, Bob Ley, and Charley Steiner was, with fewer gags and antics, putting on their own solid, straightforward edition.
Two shows, two different approaches. The Olbermann-Patrick team came across as smart, edgy, and full of attitude. They were in fact developing what could be called the new ESPN style, a smart-alecky outlook and flippant delivery that owed something to the comedy of Bill Murray and David Letterman. The six o’clock team was more old school, holding themselves to broadcast standards and styles of yesteryear—and doing a very good job of it.
At eleven o’clock, Olbermann and Patrick arguably had the most to work with—a huge trove of raw materials collected all day every day, and into the evening, from satellite feeds and other sources. That’s in part why the six o’clockers’ in-house cheering section maintained that their team had it tougher, because they had fewer highlights to show, fewer scores to report, and yet all that airtime to fill (a half-hour at first, soon expanded to an hour).
Indeed, when they signed on at 6:00 p.m., many of the day’s games had yet to be played. Insiders also noted one more factor that made the earlier show harder to do: many ESPN executives were routinely still in the building at that hour and loved dropping by the studios to see how things were going; you couldn’t get away with much mischief if the bosses were staring right at you.
Ley and Steiner were compatible on the air and off, despite their constant awareness that Ley, the conservative, and Steiner, the liberal, rarely agreed on anything away from a field. Ley got probably his most important early journalism experience in print, at the Passaic Herald-News in New Jersey, while Steiner was working for such radio stations as New York’s WABC, where he covered the Jets. Both men worked at New York’s WOR for a time—but not the same time.
Roberts had an unmistakable aura of authority, a true pro’s unflappability when it came to crises and last-minute changes to the rundown, and an ability to coexist on an equal plane with “the guys,” without trying to become one of them. Statuesque and tirelessly enthused, Roberts was recruited from her native Atlanta. Her father had been one of the original Tuskegee Airmen, a unit of African American flyers—the first ever in U.S. history—who served with honor