Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [196]
SAL PAOLANTONIO, Reporter:
I had just come to ESPN, and Peter Gammons was not available for some reason, so I got called at literally the last minute by Jim Cohen to do an interview with Marge Schott of the Cincinnati Reds. The producer was Kelly Neal, and even though I got quickly prepped through my own research, nine-tenths of the legwork had already been done by Kelly. Mostly we were going to interview Schott about the controversies over the umpires. Among other things, I think she recycled some flowers and sent them to an umpire whose wife had died.
She did a couple of things right away that suggested she was quite eccentric, to put it mildly. She wanted to know what my full name was, so I told her it was Salvatore Anthony Nicholas Paolantonio and that I was born on St. Anthony’s Day, June 13. She said she had a St. Anthony medal in her drawer, and when she opened it, believe it or not, she had swastikas in there. She pulled out the medal and started rubbing it on my arm for good luck, and I just thought, “I obviously have to ask her about Hitler.” She said of Hitler, “Everyone knows he was good at the beginning, but he went too far.” I specifically remember her saying that and thinking to myself, “This is the end for her. She won’t survive this.” And I just shut up and let her continue talking. Once she gave the answers that she gave, we knew right away that this was going to be a big story. SI had done a take-out about her where she intimated something about Hitler that was positive so my interview was not exactly the first time she said something positive about Hitler, but this time it was on camera, so it had more potency.
Kelly and I called Bristol right away and had the tapes couriered back there. Within a day, I had E! Entertainment trucks on my front lawn, and people from all over wanted to interview me about the interview. I remember being on the cover of USA Today. At that point, my wife and three children had no idea (A) what I was really doing, because I went from newspapers to TV, and (B) how important ESPN was. I certainly didn’t understand the power of ESPN either. From that point on, I did.
Of course they wound up banning Schott from baseball, and I went to Riverfront Stadium to get the reaction. I got into the elevator there, and one of the security guards looked at me and said, “Do you have a credential?” and I said, “Yes, sir, it’s around my neck.” And he yanked it off my neck and said, “You don’t have one anymore,” and kicked me out of the stadium. I had to talk my way back in through the PR department. I would say the hostility toward me there was palpable.
CHRIS MYERS:
In 1996, I’m doing the Up Close show, and we took it to Atlanta for the Olympics and taped interviews after SportsCenter. One night they asked me to stay late and do an Olympic recap, and this was the middle of the summer in Atlanta, and it’s so ridiculously hot that I actually put on shorts. You can’t see them behind the desk, just my coat and tie. We had an outdoor location right downtown in the heart of it all, on the top of the Chamber of Commerce building, and a balcony where we were looking out over the city. That’s where we would do the broadcast. There were people down below making noise, but you’re trained as a broadcaster to work right through things, get the story out, don’t be disrupted by a horn blowing or a fan hollering. So I’m reading these boxing results and all of a sudden I hear this loud BOOM. I thought it was fireworks or something, because there weren’t any events going on at that hour.
Then I looked out below and saw people scurrying and knew something was wrong. I heard sirens, and then one of our guys said a bomb went off. Then they said, “They don’t know if it’s terrorists, or if there are more bombs. They want everybody out of the downtown area.” I remember talking over the headset and saying,