Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [219]
GARY BELSKY:
Papanek came in over Hoenig, who had been number one. So he should have, by any rights, wanted to get rid of him. He should have thought, “Hoenig can only be a cancer.” But he didn’t. Likewise, Hoenig should have responded to being passed over by saying, “I’m going to get the hell out of here.” But he didn’t. I think both of them had enough experiences in their careers, good and bad, that made them open to seeing what might happen. Their attitudes set the tone for the whole place.
NEIL FINE:
Of course that didn’t shelter us from “the drive-bys.”
GARY BELSKY:
That term was invented by one of the editors in the early days to describe John Walsh’s visits to our offices.
NEIL FINE:
Walsh lived near Bristol, and he was never down here in New York much before the launch. But once we launched, he was here a lot.
GARY BELSKY:
When I came to the magazine, I didn’t know who John Walsh was. He was just this polite albino man who looked like Santa Claus, but it was clear that he was to be respected and feared, not from a punishment point of view, but because he was looking at every single thing we were doing—and he cared. For the first year really, he was here all the time.
NEIL FINE:
When we were closing our first issue, Walsh had me cornered, literally against a wall in a corner! Not threatening me, just pressing a point intensely. I had never had that sort of give-and-take with an editor before, or with any superior. I was arguing about something I felt really strongly about, and in the end I think I probably got to do some version of what I wanted. It turns out Walsh just likes the dialectic of it all. He likes having the conversation, but once it’s over, it’s over.
Sundays, when we would close an issue, Walsh would just show up at four o’clock and start telling us all the things we shouldn’t have done or that we should change. I was working on the front of the book—stuff that was supposed to be clever or humorous—and he’d stop by my desk, holding page proofs, and say, “This isn’t funny.” And walk away.
JOHN PAPANEK:
John Walsh is very moralistic. It’s not that he’s afraid of insulting people, I just don’t think he likes it. And apart from ESPN’s business relationships with the leagues and their bosses, he was always very, very, very vigilant of how someone was portrayed. We had this feature called “Chump Cards,” and we would pick for each issue someone to be Chump. It might be the president of the American League or Bud Selig. One time, Walsh took a shoe and banged it on the table and said, “There will be no Chumps! That’s the end of the argument!”
I have a personal private collection of Chump Cards that never got published because Walsh banned them from the premises.
GARY BELSKY:
Early in the magazine’s history, in a snarky news-commentary section we had called the “Big 10,” we were taking friendly shots at Bob Costas. We weren’t saying anything really bad, just that he was a stuffed shirt or something. We like Bob. He gave us one of our best young editors, a woman who handles college basketball and the NHL for us, and she was instrumental in convincing a lot of athletes to agree to take off their clothes for our first “Body” issue. She’s very talented, and she was recommended to us by Bob. So we love Bob Costas, we really do. But at the beginning of the magazine, we were poking fun at him. Then John Walsh came down and gave us all these reasons why we shouldn’t poke fun at him: he’s this, he’s that, he’s a legend, all of which was true. But that’s also why you sometimes make fun of public people, because they’re legends, because they’re a little bit puffed up. It turned out the company was also talking to Bob at that point about doing something for us. And that was the real reason John wanted us to stop poking fun at him. If John had simply said that, we would have been like, “Okay, we’ll lay off. That makes sense. We get it. It’s business.” Had John just told us that, it would have been fine. But instead we spent two weeks going back and forth with him explaining to us, journalistically,