Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [207]
When people from local markets would call me and ask, “What do I need to do to improve?” I would tell them, “Don’t try to be Keith; he’s a genius. He’s the artist you can’t copy. If you want to watch delivery, tone, and mannerisms, watch Dan. He’s a textbook.”
KARL RAVECH:
I’ve never seen anybody do SportsCenter as well as Olbermann. Nobody. It hasn’t even been close.
LINDA COHN:
Keith got into trouble a lot. Athletes couldn’t stand him. Among us broadcasting people, we thought he was a genius because he was so quick-witted and smart, but he would make fun of athletes, and those athletes would be like, “You never played; you don’t know what we go through.”
DAN PATRICK:
I remember when Olbermann said to me, “Do you how much this job is worth?” And I said no. He said, “It’s worth a million fucking dollars.” And I said, “Really?” I was making less than $200,000. He goes “Yes,” and I said, “Wow, I didn’t know that.” We were doing 175 SportsCenters a year, and I thought, “We’re doing sports, for God’s sake.” But Keith looked at it as a businessman, saying, “Do you know what they’re making off of this?” I was a terrible businessman, but I was a damn good employee. I didn’t look at the monetary aspect of it, but I appreciated Keith doing it.
KEITH OLBERMANN:
Early in 1997, I produced a really long memo to Howard Katz about the pay disparities. I showed him my math, based on the reported profits of the Today show and the salaries of its key figures that suggested that a fair ratio was to pay your talent a total figure of about 10 percent of their show’s profits. By this methodology, working off numbers I had gotten from a sales guy in the NYC office, I calculated that the correct salaries for Dan and me were about $2,750,000 a year. I actually calculated a nonrounded number; I just don’t remember it now. The next time I saw Howard, he looked at me like I was Medusa. And a year and a half later, Fox offered me a contract for something like $2,813,000 a year.
Up to that point, the top salary paid to anybody doing SportsCenter had been whatever I was getting, which I think topped out around $310,000 a year.
JACK EDWARDS:
The number-one thing that surprised me about ESPN was how little team spirit there was for a place that said that its business was sports. If I said, “I think you’re wrong” to someone who was higher in the organizational chart than I was, what I would get back was “You’re not a team player.” And on more than one occasion I responded, “When’s the last time you wore a jockstrap?” Because there are a lot of people in the administration at ESPN who throw around phrases like “be a team player” and they’ve never really been part of a team. A team is where you have your teammate’s back regardless of what happens; you defend them and you sort out any dirty laundry quietly and privately behind closed doors.
There was almost none of that at ESPN. When people would do a great job, nobody from management would pat them on the back. There was not one person who would even say, “Hey, that was a great line,” or “That was a terrific way you guys did that story,” or say to the producer, “I really like the way you laid out the show.” There was no encouragement, because the atmosphere was one of stick the knife in his back, climb the corporate ladder, get as big a domain as you can, dominate it, and then punish your alleged teammates and retain the biggest fiefdom that you possibly can. It was a very, very negative place to work. Don’t believe the mascot promos. Life is not like that at SportsCenter. It is not a place where guys give each other high-fives after scoring a touchdown. It’s just not that way, at least it wasn’t when I left.
The prevailing idea was that the network was much more important than individuals, and that prevented the star system from starting there. In many ways, Chris Berman