Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [152]
Now, the show is over and nobody has ever done that before—lose it so uncontrollably—and I go back up to the newsroom not sure if I’ve even got a job waiting for me. I walk into the newsroom and the whole place is on the fucking floor laughing. I didn’t hear anything from management so I went home, not sure what my future would be after this unbelievable loss of composure. I turned on SportsCenter at eleven o’clock, and I think it may be the only time in the history of SportsCenter they actually repeated a segment from an earlier show.
JOHN LACK:
I was the guy who convinced Bornstein—and we almost came to blows about it—that he had to renew Chris Berman’s contract, the first million-dollar deal. Steve was about to let him go. I said, “You can’t. This is our franchise. You can’t let him go. You’re going to see him on CBS.”
CHRIS BERMAN:
I told Steve he was nice to come to me two years early, two years before my contract expired. It was like the Space Odyssey deal. Steve was talking about a seven-year deal, and I said, “Seven years is 2000. Eight years is 2001—Stanley Kubrick.” He says, “Good. We’re done.” We sent out the release and it was great. I was the first network person to be signed into the next century.
HOWARD KATZ:
Mark Shapiro and I go back a long way. I was at Ohlmeyer Communications, and then we sold the company to ESPN, and we had a talk show out of L.A. that Roy Firestone hosted. There was a guy that had worked for me for a long time, named Bud Morgan, and I said, “What I’d love you to do is spend a month observing everything at this talk show and tell me who’s good and who’s not.” He called me one day and said, “You’ve got a real star here: this kid Mark Shapiro. He’s a young Don Ohlmeyer; he’s got Don’s creative instincts and he’s got Don’s ambition.” So we made him producer of the show.
ROY FIRESTONE:
Arthur Ashe was unbelievable. I really felt overmatched intellectually with Arthur Ashe. I mean he’d been all over the world, he’d seen all kinds of things, he had firsthand experiences on everything. And then when he announced that he had AIDS, not just HIV positive, but he was afflicted with the AIDS virus, it was world news, obviously. It was the first time that it had ever happened, and it really hit me because I had just interviewed him, and he looked very thin but I did not know and he did not want anyone to know. USA Today obviously did the exposé or whatever they called it. So I was shocked as I had just done this interview with him and I had called him and I said, now that it’s come out, would you mind doing an interview again? And he said, “I can’t do it right away; I promised I would do something else”—I believe it was for HBO. But he said, “I will do it soon.” And we set up for New York City—I’ll never forget this—on a Saturday. It was a hard-driving cold rain in New York. And my camera crew couldn’t find the place. And it was ten o’clock and I go into what I thought was going to be the studio, in a hotel, and there’s no crew, there’s no set-up. They got lost. As I see that, at five to ten, I see Arthur Ashe dripping wet. And he has AIDS. Dripping wet on a cold day in New York, he walks in, and I have the incredible pleasure of having to tell Arthur Ashe the crew didn’t show up. Oh, God. So I walk up to him and I said, “Arthur, this could be the most humiliated I’ve felt in my professional life, but my crew’s not here.” He says to me, “Let’s do it tomorrow.” He goes back out into the rain, gets in the car, and drives home. The next day, there’s a great interview with him. Now that, in and of itself, to me, elevates him to a level of his own. That’s the kind of human being he was.
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