Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [174]
Of all the award shows, the ESPYs have got to be the dumbest award show there is. First of all, award shows in general are sort of silly and ridiculous and we know they’re just for creating publicity, but at least it makes some sort of sense within that framework to have an awards show for movies, or television, because there is no way with those to know which is the best. But when we’re talking about sports—they actually play the game. We don’t have to give an award to the best team. We know who the best team is—they’ve already won! That’s the great thing about sports, there’s a built-in objective mechanism by which we can ascertain who the winners are. But no, you have to win a second time in a tuxedo, and a spokesmodel has to hand you a trophy; that’s what’s important.
DAVID STEINBERG, ESPY Writer:
I did a lot of writing for the ESPYs, and we really tried to push the line, never play it safe. We’d always be going at it with management, battling about what could be included. The year they had the baseball and hockey strikes—do you remember that John Kruk had testicular cancer? Well, I wanted Kruk to come on the show and just say, “And the count is two strikes, one ball.” Okay? That was the joke. So we called Kruk’s lawyer at the time and he said, “I’m sorry; he will not make fun of his situation. He just won’t come out in a tuxedo and do that.” I called him back and said, “No, no, no. You don’t get it! We’re not making fun of his one ball. We’re celebrating the remaining ball.”
John Walsh was totally in favor of the sketch, but Kruk didn’t do the show.
BILL MAHER:
There’s a narcissism contest going on right there at the ESPYs, with jocks and models in the same room. Have you ever been in one of those highfalutin nightclub scenes where everyone is either a model or a jock and you feel like Billy Barty in The Wizard of Oz? Well, I’m five foot, eight inches tall, and that’s how I felt at the ESPYs. You’re meeting people and constantly raising your hand above your head to just shake hands while you say, “Hi, how are you, Amazon woman?” Or “Hello, Amazon sir.” You’re in this forest of giant bodies, and you’re only coming up to everybody’s navel.
DAN PATRICK:
The night my daughter was born I obviously missed the show, but I tuned in and saw that Keith has his glasses off and he’s wiping away tears. And I went, “Oh, no, he finally did it. This is it. He cashed in his chips. He’s gone crazy. He’s Howard Beale.” I couldn’t find out what happened because he was just laughing so hard. So I call the newsroom and they tell me, “Levy was talking about a guy with a bulging disc and he said the guy had a bulging dick.” And I just went, “Oh, no.” I thought to myself, “Steve wouldn’t be in this position if I had been able to do the show.”
STEVE LEVY, Anchor:
The good old bulging-dick reference. Sort of my claim to fame.
KEITH OLBERMANN:
All I could think of was, “I have to follow this; I better say something funny before I lose the ability to talk.” So as he came to the end of this video of NFL carnage but before I was to come on camera I mumbled, “Thank goodness you didn’t have video of that first injury,” only he wasn’t finished. Unbeknownst to me he had a graphic of still more injuries, all groin pulls. Only then did Steve lose it. I took the glasses off because of the tears. I kept them off because I suddenly realized if I couldn’t see anybody else I might not dissolve. And amazingly I didn’t.
LINDA COHN:
There’s a lot of pressure to do catchphrases, and I was talking with a friend of mine in North Carolina, who played for a coed softball team named the Master Batters, okay? And she says to me, “When someone hits a home run, why don’t you say, master batter.” So I’m like, “That’s brilliant. It’s subtle enough, and I don’t think anyone will get the whole innuendo, and if they do, then they’ll laugh.”
So of course I did it during a highlight that night: “Mike Piazza, master batter.” Sports Illustrated did a blurb on it, so I thought it might catch on. But Norby, who was overseeing SportsCenter, called me into his office