Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [184]
DAN PATRICK:
Some people talked to us about how the SportsCenter model meant that we had to do the Mantle story up top and then do a retrospective later on in the broadcast, but Keith and I went, “No, no, no.” We told them we needed to go straight through from the beginning. There was nothing that could be put between that would complement Mickey Mantle dying. Anything would be such a non sequitur that we couldn’t do it. Keith and I wanted to let a different generation know the magnitude of Mickey Mantle’s life, and we fought really hard to get our way. So we wound up dedicating the first eighteen minutes of the show to him. It was one way to show everyone that he was more than just a great baseball player in New York, and that he represented a lot of different things to many different people. It was the right thing to do.
BILL FAIRWEATHER:
It was my responsibility to produce that SportsCenter show. I said to Keith, “Obviously, you have to write the obit for Mantle, and he said, “Yeah, no problem.” We went through the rest of the meeting, Keith leaves the room, and by the time I make it back to the newsroom, about fifteen minutes later, Keith calls me over to his desk. I say, “What’s up, K.O.?” and he says, “Hold on a second, I’m almost done.” And he had written a complete five-minute-and-thirty-five-second-long obituary! I know that because the computer would tell you how long the actual version would be on tape. So he handed it to me and here was this obit with when Mick had come into the league, what he had hit in particular years, home runs, and the dates of important milestones. Now, Keith did have a little reference guide next to him, but let’s face it, how much time did he actually have to look up a lot of things if he wrote the whole thing in fifteen minutes? You know what I mean? And don’t forget that he types with one hand, but it’s probably faster than anybody who types with two. So whatever you think about Keith—and everybody always has many different opinions—if you’re a producer, this guy’s hitting grand slams for you. Who else do you know who could sit down and do that?
The newscast that night was incredible, but I have to tell you, after producing two hundred SportsCenters a year, the eleven o’clock show after the seventh game of the World Series, being in the chair for O.J., and in the chair when we found out an hour before airtime that Jordan was going to retire from basketball, those were all big, but Mickey Mantle’s funeral, to me, was almost a responsibility. This was why I was working for ESPN. We were the ones producing the live event, and it was important that it was done right. There wasn’t going to be a second chance to produce Mickey Mantle’s funeral, and there was no way it was going on my résumé that I had screwed it up. From a producer’s standpoint, covering that funeral was like doing the Super Bowl. This is the guy who everybody looked upon as their boyhood idol for generations, and I was the guy who was in the chair to produce this. From the moment I walked into the control room, and right throughout the coverage, I was determined that it was going to go right. And it did.
As I prepared, I remembered when I was twenty-one years old and working at this local station in the sports department and Mickey Mantle came by as part of a promotional tour. He came into the sports office and wound up sitting there while the PR guy was doing some other stuff. So we’re in this room together, but I’m not going to bother him. He’s Mickey Mantle, right? The office had TV screens with different feeds and games that are going on, but one of the screens had the live feed from Boston Garden. So now it’s like 4:30 p.m., and the lights are not even on at the Garden, but Larry Bird is out there shooting, as is his pregame ritual. He would always be out there hours before anyone else, shooting a half an hour or an hour