Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [154]
And the turnaround success of that show opened the door for me to run SportsCentury.
BILL WOLFF:
SportsNight on ESPN2 was one of the more lavish and expensive failed experiments in the history of televised media. The restrictions couldn’t have been fewer; the vision couldn’t have been more blind; the instruction couldn’t have been more vague. There was no idea.
I went, around Christmastime ’93 or ’94, to St. Louis, my hometown, and I had three stories to do. One was a coach from the toughest, roughest, all-black high school in St. Louis—Central High, home of the Redwings. He was a big deal with a big Superfly hat in the seventies, very famous guy, but he had quit, and he was now coaching the Block Yeshiva High School, where the kids all wear yarmulkes. So it was hilarious. And they had become okay. They were now acceptable. They could play basketball because this Black Shadow had come to this all-Jewish school. So that was one story I told. And then the other one they sent me to do was that Brendan Shanahan, the hockey player of the St. Louis Blues, was reputed to know every single thing about The Flintstones, the old cartoon series. And I thought, “What am I going to do? What is this going to be? Two minutes on Brendan Shanahan? That is pure shit. In fact that’s the stupidest story I’ve ever been sent to do and I’d been doing this for a while. This is the worst ever. What shall I do? What will I do?”
And, it’s the night before I’m going to go, and I’m sitting in the breakfast room where I grew up, and I decide that I’m going to just make fun of the very fact that I’d been sent to do that story. And I’m going to be an over-the-top, super-self-serious idiot reporter, and I’m going to report the story that way.
And so my mother came up with the name of the reporter, Victor Star—“victor” meaning winner, and “star,” well, speaks for itself. And so I went as Victor Star to do this super-drippy, over-the-top human interest story about a guy who likes The Flintstones, and I sort of told Brendan what I was doing, and he was a great guy, he was totally down with it and played it totally straight. And, in the meantime, I’m giving him the over-the-top Roy Firestone, Barbara Walters treatment about The Flintstones.
First we shot him being interviewed on mic, then we shot the cutaways, and there’s one where I’m crying and another one where I’m gargling—and it’s completely ridiculous. And I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing. Then I went back to Los Angeles, where I was living, and I constructed this piece, the front half of which was over-the-top, idiotic, generic ESPN sports—“He’s a wing-footed, bladed warrior fighting,” all that crap. And then you get to the middle of it, you take a turn from the rock music into the drippiest possible piano funereal music, and the line is, “He’s a complicated superstar.” And then there’s a closing stand-up where I’m standing on the ice at the arena in St. Louis and I was saying something about Brendan Shanahan and then they throw me a hockey puck and I catch it and I throw it back—it was to Keith Olbermann and to Suzy Kolber, they were the hosts, and I threw it back, saying, “Ken and Sally, back to you.” And I sent it in—to my friend, Mark Gross. He was the head producer on that show. And I said, “You’re going to get this and, if you think it’s wrong and bad, just destroy it, just don’t fire me. It’s not what you expect it’s going to be.” And I was nervous that they would say, “You’re an asshole. You’re out.” So I sent it to him, then I waited and waited—like two weeks without hearing anything. I’m thinking, “I’m fucked. I got no job. What am I going to do? Am I going to move back in with my mom?”