Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [151]
But Roberts, who’d played basketball while at Southeastern Louisiana University, had to surmount obstacles facing two minorities—and years of built-up, built-in opposition—to become a star in what was, for an African American woman, a sometimes hostile field. Surveys repeatedly told ESPN that its audience did not—N-O-T, not—want to get its news from a woman. Even so, separate polls, with similar respondents, gave a big thumbs-up to Roberts for her performance; apparently if they had to have a woman, they wanted that woman to be Roberts, and they got her.
And they loved her.
ROBIN ROBERTS:
When I was hired by ESPN it wasn’t because Gayle Gardner had left, it was just because they were looking to expand the roster. I appreciated the fact that I wasn’t just being hired to replace a woman. ESPN has never done that. At the other networks, when they lost a woman, they replaced her with a woman; they didn’t just hire a woman because they thought she was good, there always seemed to be something behind it.
I loved doing SportsCenter but it killed me. It was heavy lifting in a sense but many of us came from local TV, where we were given two minutes and treated like the stepchild of the news department—you know, “Sports is a necessary evil and you’ll get two minutes in a thirty-minute show and be glad.” So when you go to ESPN, it’s 24/7 and it’s all about sports.
We would try new things sometimes, like once we changed the music to this jazzy thing, and our switchboard really lit up with, “How dare you!” and, “My son can’t fall asleep to that! He needs dah-dah-dah, dah dah dah!” That new theme lasted less than a month before we went back to the old one. I think that’s when we realized people were actually watching. And then, athletes started saying, “Yeah, we’ll probably get on SportsCenter tonight with that highlight.”
Bristol was a big part of why it succeeded, there was nothing else to do. You didn’t mind being in the building 24/7 because you almost didn’t want to go home. There was nowhere to go, no one you were going to meet, so why not just work your tail off. We did get out sometimes. The White Birch was a little restaurant right nearby, and I thought I had hit bottom when I was there having Jell-O shots at two in the morning because there was absolutely nothing to do. That’s when I was like, “What have I done? Why did I come here?”
CHARLEY STEINER:
We’d call each other the Mod Squad, only we were the negative photo of that. Instead of the black guy and white woman, we had Robin and two white guys. We worked together, Bob, Robin, and I, for six or seven years. Every day. The chemistry was just there. She used to call me Big Bro and I used to call her Little Sis. When Robin came over, the only big question was, “Okay, how are we going to configure the set?” So Robin and I were on the anchor desk and Bob had his own little set. The very first night we used it, I entitled Bob’s set the General Store. We had a coordinating producer who told us we couldn’t write that about the store, so I ad-libbed it.
MIKE McQUADE:
All the shows were competitive, and there was competition among producers. Now the ongoing joke was, “If news happened at seven o’clock, it was news to the six o’clock.” But their show was a much more difficult show to do. Ours was just reacting to highlights. Just put them all in and figure out how to mix it up. But they got to go home at a decent hour and have a normal family life. We never had that option.
CHARLEY STEINER:
I was driving into work one morning and listening to WFAN, and they had like ten seconds of Carl Lewis butchering the national anthem. So I went in and told everyone I thought that would be a nice way to end the show if we could get a tape of it. So we get the tape in the morning, and I’m watching it and just losing it. I saw it maybe twenty-five or thirty times that day, and I’m figuring by the time I get on the air I would have laughed myself out. But when we go to it on the show, I’m feeling like the kid in the back of the class with the substitute teacher and trying