Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [162]
SUZY KOLBER:
After the Rome/Jim Everett thing, it got even worse at ESPN2. I was horrified. And I just remember thinking, “This is going to be a bad day at work. This is going to make things difficult for all of us.” And it did. We were fighting for credibility and respect. That was certainly not a way to build it.
JOHN LACK:
I thought it was fabulous. He told us he was going to do it beforehand and Everett really went crazy, and no one expected that. He really thought Everett was a pussy, for all the reasons he said, and to egg him on was right out of late-night talk-show stuff. It was like Andy Kaufman, David Letterman kind of stuff. No one got hurt. This wasn’t the Indians and the Pakistanis here. But God, the press we got—and the press he got! That put ESPN2 on the map for a couple of weeks.
JOHN WALSH:
I thought it was a complete embarrassment. Exactly what I was worried about with this guy. Mark Shapiro called and got me out of my fantasy baseball draft in New York to tell me what happened. He just said, “Hey, you should know this happened. He walked off the set. There was confrontation. It was physical. The whole works. We gotta get PR in the room. What are we going to say? What are we going to do?” I don’t think he was elated. I think he was nervous. This was a new experience for him, and he was a young guy, so he was kind of looking for what’s the best direction here. We all got together and talked with Bornstein, and we decided we weren’t going to suspend or fire him. I’m not going to give you what my opinion was on that.
GARY MILLER:
Whenever I think about ESPN2, I think about the American League Championship Series in ’93 right after they started. We’re at the playoffs in Comiskey Park. Toronto and the White Sox. We were going to give them some live stuff before the game. So I’m riding in the cab from downtown Chicago to Comiskey with Peter Gammons; his personal producer, Debbie Robeleski; and Matt Sandulli, who was field producing at that time with me. Peter’s just ranting about this ESPN2—what a joke it is and John Lack is turning the place into MTV and he’s just going off. So we get to the stadium and Peter’s supposed to do an afternoon live shot for that SportsNight thing—you know, the one with Keith in his leather jacket? So they’re getting ready to throw to Peter and Matty says, “Peter, they want you to take your tie off.” And he’s like, “I’m not taking my tie off.” “Well, John Lack called and he wants you to take your tie off. This is ESPN2.” So Peter goes, “Fuck this. This is fucking ridiculous. Why don’t they just dress me up like a fucking clown?” And Peter could explode better than anyone I’ve ever worked with. I mean, he could blow a geyser. So he takes the tie off, and thirty seconds later they’re live and he does this flawless, perfect, relaxed, conversational storytelling report. And then as soon as the camera’s off and the live shot’s over he goes back into his rant. So the next day, we get ready to do our thing and Matty and I are sitting there ready for Peter to go on, and as soon as they throw to him Matty and I turn around and we’ve got these big red clown noses on staring at him from the camera. Then we got a bunch more so that whenever we went out after games and stuff during that postseason, everyone had a clown nose.
SUZY KOLBER:
SportsNight only lasted eighteen months. I was really disappointed that they weren’t going to give it more of a shot because I was hosting with Stuart, which I loved. SportsNight had changed five different times since it was launched. If we had wanted to be young and irreverent, we should have done it from someplace else. There had been rumors early on that we were going to do it in San Diego. That might have worked. I feel like there just wasn’t a clear-cut vision—that there was never a clear-cut vision from the time we went on our first assignment and were told to just make it different.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
Lack was a mistake. I love John Lack, but one of the things I learned with him was to be careful hiring people you like or people