Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [156]
LESLEY VISSER, Reporter:
When CBS lost the NFL contract in 1993—they had televised the NFL since 1966—it was an enormous blow to all of us. Most people went to Fox, like my husband, Dick Stockton, John Madden, and Pat Summerall. I had always wanted to work, sometime in my career, for John Walsh. Everybody used to hang out at Runyons, a subterranean sports bar that had a literary feel—it was where Dan Jenkins wrote his “Ten Stages of Drunkenness”—and John Walsh was central to the party. Just about everyone wanted to work for him.
At the Super Bowl in 1993, John said, “Come on over to ESPN, with ABC. We’ll have a buffet of things for you to cover and it can be in conjunction with a terrific contract with ABC.” So it was sort of an end-of-the-rainbow opportunity for me because at ESPN I did college basketball, figure skating, horse racing, SportsCenter, Monday Night Countdown, and NFL GameDay. And on ABC, I got to do the Super Bowl, the U.S. World Figure Skating championships, the Triple Crown, the World Series, and Monday Night Football.
PETER ENGLEHART:
Bornstein would ask very pointed questions. Back then the budget was fairly large—seventy to ninety pages, just on the cost side, and everybody was responsible for a certain portion of it. You had to come in there so totally prepared that you would have to memorize a lot of stuff just to anticipate his questions. And it was pretty easy to get tripped up. He believed the cost side of the business had to be run frugally so that there was no margin, that it was essential you know it inside and out. So instead of looking at the bottom line of a race, he would want to know what the cabling costs were at North Wilksboro. “What percentage of your cabling costs went up?” Nobody can answer that question, and so he starts to roll his eyes. At that point, it was better to say, “I don’t know, but I’ll get back to you,” than to try to make up an answer. That’s when he would chew you out publicly. But what he was trying to get at was, we could not afford to spend more money than we had. Money was very tight back then and the bottom line of the cost side had to be managed so frugally.
LESLEY VISSER:
At CBS we had the ASCAP contract so we could use any music we wanted for pieces, and we would go out and shoot a lot of footage. When I first came to ESPN, features were more about the brilliance of the producer in the edit room than getting original material. Then, pretty soon after I got there, John Walsh developed this show called Backstage, which was very different for ESPN. I would focus on just one athlete and have one topic. Usually, there were five producers you had to serve, and a lot of things to go over. That wasn’t the case with this. I went horseback riding with Emmitt Smith, and I went bowling with Jarell Benefi. I remember Curtis Martin collected art and we went through an art gallery; Chris Stolman, the defensive end for the 49ers, played the saxophone for me at night with the moon behind us and it was a beautiful shot. There were so many opportunities—it was a professional bonanza.
KELLY NAQI, Reporter:
I worked on a story with Bob Ley about a former Olympic swim coach who had a habit of sleeping with his swimmers through the course of his career. And I got some swimmers to talk to me about their sexual relationships with him. I scheduled an interview with him in Florida. But whoever it was in the Sports and Information Department who arranged it never asked me what the interview was about, which really doesn’t happen any more these days. But this was back in the day, when they never asked. So we flew down, and were driving to the school, and between me scheduling the interview and us driving down there, I had interviewed