Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [192]
One of those guys linked to a mobster was this dude Pavel Bure, who was playing for Vancouver. We were told not to fly there because of safety issues, so Bob and I flew into Seattle, drove at night into Vancouver, got a hotel room, showered, shaved, and put on new clothes. We went to the rink where Pavel was and confronted him about his friendship with a known Russian Mafia guy. We told the camera guy, “Whatever happens, don’t stop rolling.” When Pavel said he didn’t know the guy, we pulled out a picture, a Polaroid of this Russian mobster eating borscht in a Moscow restaurant, and he wasn’t real happy about that.
I had gotten the picture in a scene right out of a James Bond movie. I was standing by a certain dumpster in New York City with a backward baseball cap on, and this person walks up in a trench coat, reached in their pocket, pulled out an envelope, handed it to me, and walked away. I was a crime reporter way before ESPN, and I had sources in various federal agencies in America helping us out with it. Law enforcement was helping us out too. And this wasn’t just some dude off the street.
So Pavel says the guy was just a friend, but as soon as we started to push him, he would say, “I don’t understand English.” If I remember correctly, we were in the locker room, and there was a guy sitting next to him. He got upset and then Pavel got upset and then the whole thing was kind of over.
HOWARD KATZ:
We knew we had our facts right and had a good story, but it wasn’t necessarily flattering to the National Hockey League. So I called Gary [Bettman, NHL commissioner] and said, “Here’s what we’re going to do; we’d like your side of it,” and Gary said, “You can’t do that.” So he called Michael [Eisner] and said, “You gotta kill this.” Remember, Disney owned the Ducks. But Michael told him, “When Disney bought ABC and ESPN we built two moats, one around ABC News and one around ESPN SportsCenter.” He told us, “If you feel like you’ve got the right story, you should run with it.”
As many times as we were forced to do promotion for Disney things that didn’t necessarily fit, when it came to SportsCenter, we were given tremendous independence and autonomy. They never messed with our editorial content.
DON BARONE:
We wound up with stand-ups in Red Square, Washington, and Vancouver. After it aired, several people wrote stories on the report, and I heard from several newspaper guys who were pretty impressed by the thing.
BOB LEY:
The story did much to embellish the OTL franchise, and it set the stage for OTL’s report two years later on sneaker factories in Vietnam. That one had some people around here a bit uncomfortable, given the fact that Nike was a rather big advertiser. We also wound up doing follow-up reports on the Russian organized-crime influence on the lives of several NBA and tennis players.
My deal at ESPN was coming up just as CNN SI was coming to be, and ESPN and I were going through a tough negotiation. Meanwhile, Jean McCormick, who had worked at ESPN and had gone to CNN SI, wanted me to join her. So I went down to Atlanta and talked with Jim Walton and a couple of other people. They put an offer together, but then ESPN stepped up and that was that. There is an ethic that pervades at a moment like that. There’s the comfort level of not having to uproot. There is the fact that your thumbprints are in the concrete of the foundation. You’re in the DNA of the place. And I knew I could walk into anybody’s office at ESPN, put my feet up on the desk, and talk about anything. If you have a problem, you can get it dealt with. You understand who you’re dealing with, and you have the ability to call on that shared history. That counts for something.
LINDA COHN:
I’m not married now, but I was for