Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [159]
Pretty soon after that, it was the first Saturday in college football that year, so we had baseball going on along with a million college football games. It was a really busy day and I was assigned to cut one minute of highlights for halftime at Minnesota at Penn State. Penn State had scored a touchdown and Kerry Collins was the quarterback, and I wrote on the shot sheet, “Kerry Collins to Mark Ingram,” even though it was Bobby Ingram. I wrote “Mark” because I’m from Michigan and I’m thinking Michigan State. So Chris Fowler reads the highlight and says Mark Ingram. The second I hear it, I just cringed. It was like, “Oh, my God, did I write Mark Ingram?” And people were looking at me like, “You messed up.” Chris came in talking pretty loudly—“Who did this, who wrote this”—and chewed me out in front of a lot of people for writing Mark Ingram instead of Bobby Ingram. But I had no problem with it. He was 100 percent right. Some people might get upset in that situation if they were being yelled at, but I didn’t mind. I had done the wrong thing.
JIM ROME, Anchor:
I was doing live TV for an hour a night on ESPN2 without a net and I was coming in after a four-hour radio show every day that I was hosting by myself. The only way I was going make it in the business is if I was very straightforward and not afraid. When you’re not a former athlete and you don’t have a great voice, who cares what you think? Why would anybody hire you? And I used to think about that a lot. Like, if I don’t come up with an answer to that question, I probably won’t make it. So my style was, I wasn’t going to pull any punches, I wasn’t going to be afraid, and I felt like I had to ask the questions that people wanted to hear.
One night, this kid comes in after I’d been there for about a week and he says, “You probably don’t know me. My name is Mark Shapiro. I’m a production assistant.” He said, “Let me ask you something. If you do a four-hour radio show and then a one-hour TV show, how do you prepare for the guest who is going to be on TV?” I said, “I haven’t really figured it out yet, to be honest with you.” He says, “Well, Warren Moon’s going to be on tomorrow. Can I help you out with that—can I make a few notes for you?” I said, “Knock yourself out, kid.” He comes back the very next day with this perfectly crafted ten-page research packet—questions, research, the whole nine yards. He says, “Look it over and tell me what you think.” So I read through the thing, and it is unbelievably brilliant. It was perfect. So then he says, “Hey, listen, if that was all right, can I do it again?” I said, “Absolutely.”
So then we were at the Super Bowl in Atlanta and we got this big interview with Jesse Jackson. Everybody was fired up that we had him. So I ask Jackson a question and he just starts to filibuster. And all of a sudden in my ear I hear this strange voice—not the guy who’s normally talking to me—and the guy says, “Don’t ask him another question, he’s killing us!” I’m like, “Who the hell was that?” We finish the show, I go back and ask, “Who was that?” Shapiro says, “It was me.” How’s that for balls? I mean the guy was a PA. He’d been there for just several months, and he literally grabbed the mic in the truck and got in my ear! Everybody else was just excited we had Jesse Jackson, but Mark was thinking about what was best for the show.
It was an absolutely amazing time in both of our careers, because we were both so young and hungry and pretty motivated, and we were out there and didn’t have a lot of experience. We were both raw. We were both green and we’re out there doing live TV for an hour a night. I mean these were really, really heady times, just amazing.