Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [182]
STEVE ANDERSON:
We were a wreck the whole time. It was the first time a lot of these athletes had people telling them what to do or how to do it. One of the groups, I think it was the skateboarders or the Rollerbladers, decided it was becoming too commercial and they were going to walk away. Somehow Ron got them to come back so we could do the show.
RICH FEINBERG:
There was an uproar about scoring, and some of the athletes wanted us to let them rescore the event. And they said if we didn’t let them rescore the event, “We’re not going to compete tomorrow. We’re not going to show up.” Long story short, we accepted their reason, whether we believed it or not, that the mistake was more mechanical than judging. So the judges sat in the truck till three or four in the morning watching all the competition again, rescored it, and then we had to come back on the air the next day and say, “Remember those results we gave you going into the finals? Well, the judges made a mistake and miraculously, So-and-So’s back in the finals!”
FRED GAUDELLI:
You have to keep in mind that no one in the company, and probably not in the entire TV sports business, was ready to stage and produce an event like the X Games. In addition to having to make up new competitions and rules, it seemed like every hour brought a new major issue, either with the athletes, the facilities, or the weather. We were always putting our fingers in the dikes, and it felt like ten days of crisis management. But I do think we were so concerned about making everything legitimate, we ended up taking it all too seriously in terms of how we produced it.
I’ll give you an example: for the skating and bike events, the judges were kids or adults who never grew up and were stoned the entire time. They had never even used any type of electronic equipment and were either too stoned or not inclined to figure it out. So we had huge delays and major controversies, especially when the number-one in-line skater, a guy we had hyped out the yang, didn’t make it out of prelims. It was blasphemous to us, but that’s where we got caught taking ourselves way too seriously.
We could all tell right away that Tony Hawk was not only a very special athlete, but a legitimate star. There was no one else like him. But the top two in-line skaters and athletes we incessantly promoted were Arlo Eisenberg—“the prince of darkness”—and Chris Edwards—an avowed born-again Christian. God versus devil. Arlo didn’t have the goods as a skater, and Chris, the guy who couldn’t get out of prelims because the judges were stoned, got injured in the half-pipe, and we had to get an ambulance to take him to the hospital. Now, in the lead-up and in the games themselves, we were running pieces on this kid preaching the word of God and all his goodness. When he got injured, we put a camera in the ambulance to ride to the hospital with him. As the door is closing he looks at the camera person and says, “Please don’t shoot this. My wife is going to see this, and this girl next to me is my girlfriend, and my wife will figure it out.”
SUZY KOLBER:
While we were on the air it was great fun, but overall it was unbelievably stressful. I had nightmares for two weeks after the games were over that we didn’t make air, or that we weren’t done yet.
TONY HAWK, Professional Skateboarder:
I thought it was a little misguided at first that they wanted to group so many different sports together. We felt like we didn’t have a connection with bungee jumpers or rock climbers, you know what I’m saying? They were saying you’re either into all sports, or you’re into extreme sports, and that means that you skateboard, you ride motorcycles, you Rollerblade, you bungee jump, and you sky surf. I didn’t do any of those other things, and it was