Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [186]
I thought America should learn a little bit about Lou Gehrig. I’m a history guy, and I was bringing with me one of the best, Buck Martinez, one of my dearest friends. The perfect guy for it. If anybody would understand what was going on, it would be Buck—in Major League Baseball for twenty years and knowing what it was like to go to work every day for fourteen years and never call in sick. He broke a leg and still made a tag at the plate.
Now it’s the night before and I can’t sleep. Oh, my God, this is going to be unbelievable. Everybody is going to be tuning in to see that moment after Anaheim bats five times, and 2,131 comes down. We interviewed Cal when he got to the park. I looked him straight in the eye and said, “Cal, do you think you might get in tonight?” And he just lost it. Cracked up. He goes, “I hope so. I haven’t seen the lineup card.” He thanked me later. I’m the only one who put him at ease the whole couple of days—not that that’s what I was trying to do.
Joe DiMaggio—representing Lou Gehrig—was there; Brooks Robinson, Earl Weaver, and the president, they all came by. The president [Clinton] showed up an inning earlier than we had heard he would, sat down, and it was the easiest inning we did. He talked about work ethic, America, even our forefathers. Before the game, I had said to Buck, “See left field? See that scaffolding over there? See that guy up there? Look at that third window over there.” He says, “Okay, you got me. What are they all about?” I said, “Do me a favor. If a pen falls while the president is sitting in here, don’t make a quick move to get it. Those are sharpshooters up there.”
So then it happened. 2-1-3-1. It was unbelievable. It was America.
CAL RIPKEN JR., Professional Baseball Player:
Chris had asked me if I had listened to him do any baseball games and asked me for my thoughts. I don’t think he had been doing baseball long, and I think he was trying to figure out what he was going to do when it became official. I certainly didn’t tell him what I was going to do, because running around the field never crossed my mind until Rafael Palmeiro and Bobby Bo [Bonilla] pushed me out of the dugout, so there was no choreography known in advance. I just surrendered to the event, which is what my wife had advised me to do. It was, Okay, whatever happens, happens.
CHRIS BERMAN:
As Cal was running around the park, we were crying half the time. We couldn’t have spoken. We were crying. So it was twenty-two minutes of quiet. We wanted America to just see this.
CAL RIPKEN JR.:
People commented on the fact that they thought it was really cool that the action was all by itself with no commentary, but I didn’t really have much of a perspective on it besides what people were telling me. For the longest time I wouldn’t even look at the tape. I wanted to preserve it and remember it how I experienced it, not looking from the outside, but looking from the inside out. When I finally looked at the tape, I didn’t realize so many things were happening at the same time. And I got to see great glimpses of my dad and the rest of my family while it was all going on, because the camera was on them quite a bit during that time. That really opened up and broadened the entire event for me.
By 1995, ESPN had been shunted through a maze of majority owners and co-owners. What started with a family loan and Stu Evey writing a Getty check led to partial ownership by ABC, then varying interests held by RJR Nabisco, CapCities, Hearst, and even Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the famous private-equity firm. Michael Eisner, who had been busy building Disney into a Goliath, was running out of big moves. Now, in 1995, he looked at CapCities and its 80 percent ownership of ESPN as a new golden path. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought about it either.
MICHAEL