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two things that really stuck out. He said, “The most difficult lesson I’ve learned about my life and life in general in all my travels, it was really hard for me to accept this, is that everybody wants to shit on somebody else. It doesn’t matter what country it is. It doesn’t matter what culture it is. Blacks shitting on other blacks. It’s not just in America. It’s all over the world.” And he says, “It was really hard for me to accept the fact that everyone needs somebody to beat up on. And it really, really caused me a great deal of pain. And so I’ve devoted what life I have left to really focusing on that with which we can uplift each other, find some way to do it.” Boy, it just really got me. And then he said, “I try to go from the global to the more immediate. I spend as much time as I can seeing my daughter.” Her name was Camera, ironically, because his wife, Jean, was a photographer. “And Camera—the biggest pleasure of my day is to watch my daughter eat chocolate cake.” And I said, “Why is that?” He said, “Because I can draw so much joy in my life seeing her joy, and to watch that child eat that chocolate cake with such abandon, with such love, and such joy, gives me the joy externally to see that.”

CHRIS MYERS:

How I got Up Close was, I’d done some episodes of SportsCenter and Baseball Tonight at ESPN, but I really did want to live on the West Coast, and I kept offering, “Could we open up a late SportsCenter out there?” and heard, “No, no, that’s never gonna happen”—which is funny because it finally did.

Roy Firestone owned Up Close at the time; he created it. But Roy was leaving and ESPN was taking over the show. They called me in and said, “We know you love the West Coast, we’d rather you stayed here to anchor SportsCenter or Baseball Tonight, but there’s an opportunity if you want to go out there.” And I said, “Absolutely.” And they said, “Remember, don’t think about this as a promotion or a raise or anything.” ESPN had raised the profile of that show so it was kind of like coming in after a John Elway or replacing a Johnny Carson—not to that degree but in terms of the establishment of one guy with the show. That was the challenge ahead.

MARK SHAPIRO, Executive Vice President of Programming and Production:

Chris Myers, who they had flown in to take over Up Close when they parted ways with Roy Firestone, was as soft as you can be. Myers deep down wanted to be Johnny Carson or Pat Sajak. Those were his two favorite guys, Carson and Sajak. Every guy who came on the show, Myers wanted to befriend. So if you’re Joe Montana, his goal was to befriend him and take him out to dinner so he could tell his friends that Montana was his buddy. He was so superficial and shallow. He couldn’t hide it, and the audience quickly turned away from him after he took over for Firestone in 1996. The ratings dropped in half from what Firestone was pulling in. This was how I got my first big break. Howard Katz came to Los Angeles and moved me from Rome to Myers and Up Close. They made me producer and signed me to a three-year contract for fifty-five, sixty, sixty-five thousand. I was twenty-five years old so this was a big deal. On the other hand—a producer at NBC is making a buck-fifty at that time, so there is a price you pay. But my dad had said, “How long would it take to become a producer at NBC?” I said six years. So I stayed at ESPN and it took six months.

They told me, “We’re going to either kill the show or you’re going to turn him into a tough interviewer.” I had the total support of Walsh and so I kind of became Walsh’s project, if you will. He loved that I loved interviewing. He loved that I had a passion for research and journalism. He rewarded a hard work ethic. Whenever he was in town, we’d go out for a meal and just talk about the art of interviewing. We were both fascinated by it and we grew close during those one-on-one sessions.

After six months or so, the ratings went up significantly, almost doubled. Clearly people were taking a better liking to him, and it wasn’t just because of better booking. Now don’t get