Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [171]
When I got home, my wife had no sympathy at all. She just said, “You just take this television shit way too seriously.” We’re no longer married.
LINDA COHN:
I thought I was doing quite well. Then my bosses called me in—John Walsh and Steve Anderson. I remember because it fell on a big day for me and for the New York Rangers. It was 1994, and they were playing the Devils. I just finished doing the six o’clock SportsCenter, and I wanted to rush home to see game seven. They call me into the office and I had no idea what they wanted to talk about, and they basically said, “Hey, Linda, we like you, you’re a delight, you’re this, you’re that. You’re great with the troops around here, blah, blah, blah. And we know that you know sports, but you’re just not showing it like we thought. So we’re not going to pick up your option but, because we like you, we’re going to let you stay for six months to see if you improve. And, if you do, we’ll keep you.” That was the first kind of feedback I really got, but it was negative and I was almost fired. It was a big learning experience for me, but it obviously put a lot of added pressure on me. I was either going to shrink or I was going to say, “OK, I’ll show them!”
They helped me, actually. They hired a consultant. She was working with some other people. I said, “Yeah, okay, I’ll do whatever it takes. You want me to see her, I’ll do that.” I would meet with her maybe, like, once every couple of weeks. We’d look over my tapes and the greatest advice she told me was to slow down during my highlights and pause. Let the viewer digest, not make it one run-on sentence. And that really helped.
You know what’s interesting? I could see that with some others, they would fake their way through conversations about sports, but with me it’s natural, because, and this is true, I’m always talking sports. You can go to anyone in that newsroom and ask them.
Americans over a certain age may never forget where they were on the night of June 17, 1994. It was a big sports night, in terms of volume, at least: the Knicks were playing the Rockets in Game Five of the NBA Playoffs, Arnold Palmer swung his way through the final round of the U.S. Open, World Cup soccer games were under way in nine U.S. cities, and New York was cleaning up after a ticker-tape parade that celebrated the New York Rangers’ victory in the Stanley Cup final, their fourth since the competition began. All very exciting—but nothing compared to the most gripping, most talked about, most mondo bizarro unscheduled event of the year, a kind of nonsanctioned NASCAR competition in which the cars moved at a mysteriously pokey, rush-hour rate. The “race” boiled down to two vehicles, basically; the one in the lead was a white Bronco driven by Al Cowlings, a friend of O.J. Simpson, football player turned actor turned murder suspect for the killing of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ronald Goldman.
For ESPN, the immediate course was clear; this was the biggest story in the country at that moment and it involved a sports figure. “Truth really is stranger than fiction,” Craig Kilborn said as he and Karl Ravech began that night’s edition of SportsCenter, which would be unlike any other night’s edition of SportsCenter. But a snap decision had to be made: to cover the O.J. chase in the same depth as other networks or to push it to the sidelines and treat it as some lunatic oddity in the news?
BILL FAIRWEATHER:
There was a complex where a bunch of guys from ESPN lived and we were all hanging out in the afternoon, talking about the show that night. I said, “Oh, the show’s gonna be a piece of cake for me because O.J.’s turning himself in and all the pieces on O.J. will already be done for the six o’clock. I’ll take all the features that were done