Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [158]
JEAN McCORMICK:
Anyone who stayed at ESPN more than six months had to have a deep love of sports, and many times that transcended the gender stuff. That’s the true beauty of sports. I was the first female studio producer, but honestly, it was a bigger deal for me to move to northwest Connecticut and out of New York than it was to be the first female producer. There certainly were some wonderful women who were in the newsroom. Having Robin [Roberts] start at the same time I did was fabulous.
At ESPN, you find the other people who cried when a team lost. If you had never cried when your team lost, you really shouldn’t work at ESPN. You just won’t get it. But if you cry like I did when the Bruins lost to the Flyers, which still hurts all those years later, if you’re able to really touch into that feeling, then it’s a dream job and a dream place to work.
KARL RAVECH, Anchor:
When I first started in ’93, one of the first people I ended up doing the two thirty in the morning SportsCenter with was Craig Kilborn, who, of course, was as different as anybody that’s ever been on this network. I recall going into a meeting with Steve Anderson, who was running SportsCenter after a particular show, and saying, “What is going on here? I really don’t understand what he’s doing and it strikes me that this isn’t exactly what ESPN was about.” But over a period of months working together, we developed a good friendship and I finally understood what his style was and it clearly appealed to a lot of people. He was always being his own self, but there was always shtick involved. What I realized in all of this was, you needed to have people who are funny and entertaining and kind of offbeat. Kilborn was one of those, but I certainly wasn’t going to go there because I didn’t have the authority to do it.
MICHAEL MANDT:
I had come from HBO, which was Monday to Friday, nine to five. We had a gym in the office. It was the country club of sports and a great place to work with lots of smart people. But it didn’t own your life. ESPN is really a mentality, and unlike any other place I’ve ever seen. People are very competitive, and it starts at the beginning. As soon as you start out, you have to make it, either you’re good enough or you don’t have a job. So right out of the womb, you’re taught to compete, and do everything you can possibly do. Competitiveness and drive exist from the bottom up, and that’s part of the culture. So people really care about what they’re doing, and that makes for a very successful place.
The first highlight I ever cut was two weeks into the job: August of ’93, Twins at the Royals. Totally generic, nothing special, not that important as a highlight. Unlike a lot of kids there who had majored in communications and had taken lots of TV classes, I hadn’t taken anything. So this was the first time I would be doing anything—on national TV, for ESPN, and in a matter of minutes. This highlight was supposed to be forty-five seconds, average time, for somewhere in the middle of the show, around 11:15 p.m. Linda Cohn had the highlight. Now you could say, this should be pretty easy—isolation of a batter, isolation of the pitcher, a play, another play, a react, and you’re out. But I had no clue how long a play would take and the first play I cut down was a triple and I never thought, “Wow, a triple will take up twenty-five seconds of the highlight.” So my timing was all off, and I totally screwed up how the story was supposed to be told. Now I’m looking at the clock and we were always told highlights never miss air, and I’m getting a call from the producer: “Is it going to make it?” My editor slapped together a highlight that didn’t tell much of a story, with shots that were not very good and weren’t timed properly, and my writing was chicken scribble. It was arguably one of the worst highlights ever to air on the network; I’m pretty confident of that. Anyway, Linda does the highlight and did the best she could with it and, after the show, she saw me and said, “Hey, listen, I know it’s your first day.