Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [168]
JUDY FEARING:
This is not the easiest place to get an athlete, so what we would try to do is to look at the calendar and we would block, let’s say, two to three major shoots during the course of a year. And we would try to look at when we thought athletes were going to be in the area or when we could get an athlete to commit to being in the area. And as soon as we could get one or two big guys to say, “Yes, I will come on X, Y, and Z dates,” okay, now we had a party. So we just started bringing more and more people.
ALAN BROCE:
One of my favorite SportsCenter stories was—it was actually at the second shoot, when we all stayed at the Radisson in Bristol. And one night, in the middle of the night during a shoot, the fire alarm went off. So everybody had to come down and go into the lobby and go outside. You have all these traveling salesmen in the hotel and then you got like three Harlem Globetrotters and Mary Lou Retton and the Oklahoma State Cowboy mascot with a giant cowboy hat going outside.
JUDY FEARING:
We had Keith doing a job interview with Bill Bradley to be either an anchor or production assistant, and he asked him if he had any experience talking to large audiences. And Bill Bradley says something like, “Well, I’ve delivered the keynote at the Democratic National Convention.” And Keith looks and says, “No, I mean to a really large audience.” And his timing was just brilliant.
Keith is a very, very smart man. I think he knew that these spots were very good for him. Keith thought—I don’t think he ever wanted people to know he would play well with my guys. We needed Keith to do one of the spots on his day off. And Keith was making a huge thing about doing it. And I got a voice message in my mail box from Keith saying, “I’m gonna do it, I’m actually going to do it, but I can’t let anyone else know that I’m going to do it willingly,” or some words like that. And to me what that always said was that he understood the game. We were there to help promote his show—SportsCenter. We were always going to make him look good. He knew people loved his spots. He knew it put him in a good light. And he was going to do them. But he could never let people know that he worked with the production group.
HANK PEARLMAN:
We knew athletes were familiar with the spots. Mary Lou Retton was in that first round and we did some stuff with her where she’s just kind of flipping down the hallway and she was teaching some of the anchors how to smile. Another one was where Mike Richter did some stuff where he was talking to the talent about putting him in more highlights and sweet-talking them to get more exposure.
The good thing about getting them to come to Bristol, Connecticut—’cause everybody thought, like, “You’re crazy, you’re never going to get athletes to come to Bristol, Connecticut”—but what happened was, as a result, the people who came to Bristol, Connecticut, were there because they really wanted to be in the spots and they liked the idea. Getting Grant Hill was hard but we got guys from Boston, guys from New York. Mary Lou Retton, I remember talking to her, and she got it, she’d made fun of herself in movies and things like that. And the athletes, I think, liked the idea that they were going to just be themselves and we weren’t going to give them a bunch of lines to memorize and they would not have to perform like actors.
ALAN BROCE:
I point to the seminal moment where I think people first really got a sense of, “Okay, this is going to be really funny,” which was when Dan and Keith did the makeup spot in front of the mirror, and they had the conversation. They were talking about hockey and what represents old-school hockey and stuff, and then Keith says, “You need more rouge.” People around the set were watching on playback monitors. And they saw that, and they’re like, “That’s funny! I get it. I get what this is going to be.”
HANK PEARLMAN:
We’d talk to management and then we’d talk to talent, and you start to get a sense