Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [172]
I show up in the newsroom and the whole place is in a scramble. Nobody knew what the hell was going on. O.J. didn’t show up.
SCOTT ACKERSON:
I happened to be walking by the control room and there were all those people watching O.J. in the Bronco. Once I realized what was going on, I said, “Everybody out of here, we’ve got to get on the air.” I got Jack Edwards, who was still around from the previous SportsCenter, and we basically just stole feeds from whichever station was up. Whoever had a better shot, we’d cut to them. Jack did a great job.
STEVE ANDERSON:
It was so bizarre. Once we understood what was happening, it became very obvious that this was something we had to cover, but we had no rulebook. We were making it up as we went. A week before, if someone had asked if ESPN would ever cover a police chase, I don’t think anyone would have ever imagined that it would be something we should or would ever do.
JUDSON BURCH, Producer:
The O.J. Simpson car chase was unbelievable. I was too young and too inexperienced to know all that was really going on as we covered it, but I knew I could take a step back from it and say to myself, “Just watch. You’re going to want to remember this someday.”
I remember vividly how challenging it was to find a satellite feed of the NBA finals because NBC was on O.J. Simpson. So the guy whose job it was to screen the NBA finals that night was sitting there knowing the game was going on but he couldn’t see it. The anchors were out on TV for a very long time that night and were getting kind of fried. At one point, Gary Miller did one of the TV techniques where he said, “If you don’t want to know the score, turn away from the TV,” and he gave the score, but it wasn’t for the basketball game, it was for a World Cup game. He wasn’t sure what he was doing.
NORBY WILLIAMSON:
We had some passionate Knicks fans here, so when NBC went to the double box, they were like, “Are you kidding me? We’re in the finals! Let them chase him some other time!” That’s what this place is. It’s a different mix of people.
I think we did a smart thing on O.J. We didn’t overplay the sports angle. We basically admitted to everyone we were going to cover it because he was a big sports figure, but we didn’t go crazy and make fools of ourselves by reminding everyone all the time that he rushed for two thousand and three yards. No one cared about that. This was a murder case.
SCOTT ACKERSON:
Pretty soon after the O.J. deal, I got a call from Fox and met with them on a Tuesday. They made me an offer and told me I had to decide by Wednesday whether I was going to take the job. I had been at ESPN since ’86, it wasn’t so easy a decision, but I went and told my good friend Barry Sacks that I was going to take the Fox job. We called down to where Anderson, Wildhack, Walsh, Creasy, and Bornstein were. It’s my understanding that the vote was two to two on whether they should let me stay or escort me out immediately and the person who cast the deciding vote was Creasy, who said they had to get me out of there. So they called back and Barry said, “This isn’t me, but they told me you’ve got to get out. You’ve got forty-five minutes to get your stuff together.” So I said, “Let me get this straight: I don’t have to stay here tonight till 3:00 a.m. like always?” I wasn’t the first employee to be escorted out. It was what it was. I don’t harbor any bad feelings and am happy with the way things worked out.
By the end of 1994, ESPN was in 63.1 million homes, the most of any cable network. To Steve Bornstein’s dismay, the network was now very much in the business of breeding stars, and he knew all too well what would happen next: the people on the screen would want to get paid in proportion to their popularity with the people at home. Adding to the pressure was the advent of the five-hundred-channel digital universe and all the other attendant new technologies. Heavy expenditures