Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [22]
Then I went to Brown. I majored in history because I knew that’s what I wanted to learn. That didn’t change the fact that I knew what I wanted to do. I was the voice of the Bruins at Brown and am very proud of that.
Summer of my junior year, I somehow had an interview with NBC Sports number-two man Scotty Connal. Don’t ask me how, but somebody knew somebody. Oh, my God, it was the most nerve-racking interview I ever did. He liked me, said, “We’re starting this new job called Grandstand Coordinator,” which was their traveling football show. Each of the cities they were going to go to needed a college kid, and “We got a kid for Buffalo seven games. You can be our Patriot-game guy. We’ll pay you fifty bucks cash.” I would have done it for nothing. At any rate, whenever NBC Sports came to New England, I was their runner.
Senior year, I sent out about fifty or sixty résumés. I had a few interviews, then got hired in Westerly, Rhode Island. It was a little radio station. I didn’t do sports, did everything else. But in the summer of ’79, I got a weekend sports job at the NBC affiliate, Channel 30, in Hartford. It was just on the side, like Saturday and Sunday nights. I got $23 a show. I was only there about a month and then I heard about this new thing going on. It wasn’t on the air yet.
GEORGE CONNER:
From day one, Bill Rasmussen wanted to be on the air September 7, 1979, at exactly 7:00 p.m. So that’s what we were working on, but probably a month or just three weeks before we were scheduled to go on the air, Stu calls me from L.A. and says he just got a call from Chet, who said, “There’s no way you guys are going to get this thing on the air for September 7.” I said, “Stu, Bill and I are very comfortable that we’re going to go on the air when Bill projected. We’ll make it.” So I think Stu called Chet and told him it was a go and Chet wasn’t too happy about it.
SCOTT RASMUSSEN:
I couldn’t tell you how we came up with it other than in those days new television series debuted in the fall. It was a Friday night. It seemed like for a sports network, the weekend was a good time to start. I think, to be honest, we just had to pick a date and get started.
MARC PAYTON, Director:
I actually started at ESPN two weeks before they signed on the air. As far as I know—I’m not positive about this, but I’m pretty sure the event I directed was the first event that ESPN ever taped. I taped the American Legion World Series in Greenville, Mississippi, in August of 1979, two weeks before they signed on the air.
So we taped it—we had a mobile unit rolling there. I think I had four cameras, only one of my four camera men had ever shot baseball before, the remote truck was an old converted school bus, and we rolled in there and no one’s ever heard of ESPN because obviously we weren’t on the air yet. And we recorded the event on two-inch tape, and then the tapes were shipped back to Bristol, and then after the network signed on the air two weeks later, it was among the first programming that they aired.
It was really primitive. In fact, our home-plate camera position—which you know from shooting baseball is usually up high at home there, usually behind home plate up in the press box—well, this field didn’t really have a press-box position. The home-plate camera was shooting behind the screen at field level. That was our play-by-play camera—shooting through the screen.
BILL SHANAHAN, Vice President of Program Management:
At that time ESPN was based on the unfinished second floor of a local cable company’s business office, which is where I went for my interview. It was just a madhouse over there, every day. Folding tables, folding chairs, unfinished floor, and unfinished ceiling—you could actually see the insulation between the