Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [195]
Then they said, “You don’t have to do SportsCenter; you’ll go to ESPN2, not on camera, just to do voice-over wrap-arounds for college basketball games. They’ll come to you and you’ll do scores. You just say, ‘Craig Kilborn breaking in, and Xavier is up by fifteen in the first half.’” But my thing was, I’d never been on ESPN2 before and some of the guys were giving me shit. So this is me, ready? “Kilborn on the Deuce, let’s check some scores.” I said “Kilborn on the Deuce,” right? And they suspended me for a week! I was just being sarcastic. That’s called good-natured ribbing. I don’t dislike them; I just think they were overreacting. They take themselves very seriously.
JOHN WALSH:
I’ll never forget, Steve Anderson was doing day-to-day SportsCenter, and Kilborn was doing the 2:00 a.m. show with Haber. That was a real load to manage. Mark [Gross] came in to me one day, totally flabbergasted, and said, “John, I don’t know what to do. Basically Craig Kilborn told me he’s not interested in anything except basketball, that he doesn’t want to do any stories except basketball, that his career was going to go somewhere else.”
DAN PATRICK:
I never thought Craig was a knowledgeable sports guy as much as he was great at delivering something from somebody who was a knowledgeable sports guy. He loved the NBA and knew it well, and he loved the Minnesota Vikings. But I give him credit: he took a Dennis Miller delivery and made this hybrid with a catchphrase or two. He had his own vernacular, and he pulled it off. He was very, very entertaining.
JOHN WALSH:
There was a big argument about the overnight show, which had always been from 2:00 a.m. to 2:30 a.m. Steve Bornstein wanted it to be expanded to an hour, and we were all holding out for it to be half an hour. He wanted it to be our decision; he was very smart about this, but he was practically on his knees begging, saying, “Guys, if it doesn’t work after six months, we’ll go back.” So we did it, and Craig Kilborn came in and demanded twice the salary because it was going to be twice as long. He’s now in L.A. somewhere.
STEVE LEVY:
Listen, guys come here to be famous. They want commercials and endorsements and cameos in movies, all those kinds of things. I’ve always just wanted to be a sportscaster, you know what I mean? I like the games and I like reporting on the games. If the other stuff comes, that’s fine, but I think Kilborn wanted to be a TV star. Not necessarily a sportscaster star. And by the way, he went on to do it. Not too many people leave here and go on to bigger and better.
CRAIG KILBORN:
I don’t have that strong desire to be the center of attention or be in the public eye. I love leading kind of a quiet life.
LINDA COHN:
Sports was not Craig’s number one passion—well, maybe basketball, because he played—but while everyone was watching late games, he was busy watching David Letterman every night. That’s where he wanted to be, and I admire that because he was honest about what he wanted. They loved him here and offered him a lot of stuff, from what I’ve heard, opportunities other than SportsCenter, because of his comedic talents, but he followed his dream. He went with that, and good for him.
BILL FAIRWEATHER:
Craig loved Hollywood, he loved show business, he loved the supermodels, and he loved Letterman. He wanted to be a television star. ESPN came to him and wanted him to do NBA Tonight, which they were starting up, but Craig didn’t want anything to do with any of that stuff; he knew that the whole world was seeing him over and over and over again because his 2:00 a.m. show was repeated all morning. He was smart in that regard; if you wanted face time, then that was the show to be on.
I remember talking to him when he told me he was going to go to The Daily Show, and I was like, “You don’t even know who