Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [175]
CRAIG KILBORN, Anchor:
When Reggie Miller was jawing at Spike Lee in the front row, I had that highlight. Now, most people would have said, “Reggie tells you to sit down or shut up,” but mine was “And Reggie looks over at Spike Lee and says, ‘Hey, Spike, develop the female characters in your movie, man.”
There were always catchphrases and jokes; sometimes the producers would even pitch some to you. I’ll tell you maybe the most irreverent one I did was when I was shooting the breeze with my brother, and told him I was working that night and Hakeem [Olajuwon] was coming back to play after being out a few weeks with anemia. My brother is a very bright guy and says, “His red cell count must be up.” I said, “Oh, that’s cool. Give me another word related to blood,” and he said, “Hemoglobin.” I said, “Thanks, buddy.” So that night, I’m on camera. “Hakeem’s back with the Rockets tonight after being out two weeks with anemia. Let’s go to the Summit. First quarter, underneath to Hakeem, oh, the red cell count is up! They go right back to him, next time down: oh, hemoglobin!” Some guy from the NBA called me the next morning and said, “I fell off my chair when you did that.”
BRETT HABER, Anchor:
Kilborn, Ravech, and I were one day marveling at the influence that catchphrases had and how much people got into them. We’d hear them repeated and you’d see people holding up signs that said “SportsCenter is next.” I think it was Kilborn who I bet that we could invent a catchphrase that meant absolutely nothing and that if we used it a couple days in a row it would catch on. We were sitting around eating Mexican food and someone said, “Let’s make it salsa.” So Craig said he’d do it, and for the next couple of nights, he’d be doing highlights and someone would have a mass dunk and Craig would go, “So-and-So… Salsa!” He did it for like three nights in a row, and on the fourth night we were watching a game and sure enough, somebody in the crowd was holding up a sign that said, “Salsa—SportsCenter is next.”
RECE DAVIS, Anchor:
The first show I did with Kilborn, I guess he was just testing me. You know, the rookie coming in, let’s see how he holds up, see if he can handle the pressure and all that kind of stuff. So I’m doing the first highlight, and he reaches over and grabs my leg, not in a perverted way, just to distract me, just to see what I would do. I just kept going. But after, I said to him, “Keep your hands to yourself.” He just basically acted as if it never happened. He was just showing the Kilborn style. He did a lot of clever writing and pushed the envelope. I think he was actually starting to put together segments of his Comedy Central show.
We caused a little controversy with one catchphrase. It was a rip-off of the Seinfeld line “No soup for you.” Actually, a guy from another network thought that he had said it first and wanted me to stop saying it. Well, Keith and Dan got wind of this and they actually did a show later where they just emptied the barrel. It was, “No beef-barley for you, no minestrone for you, no Manhattan chowder for you.” It became a much bigger thing that caught on. Then I did a whole bunch of glove-and-love puns: “Addicted to glove,” or, when a guy made an error, “Glove stinks.” When a guy hit a home run, I tried, “It’s not the size of the stick, it’s all about finding the sweet spot.” I look back on those now and think to myself, What were you doing?
CHRIS BERMAN:
In ’95, I did the Swami standing on the corner in Winslow, Arizona. I mean, we actually went there. Tommy was there too. We did the whole thing, even had a babe get out of a flatbed Ford and say, “Take it easy.” At first, we were told we couldn’t do it. “There’s no acting allowed,” and “It will make it look like you’re hitting on her”—that type of thing. Up and up the appeals