Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [220]
NEIL FINE:
Skipper would tell us what he liked and what he didn’t like, but after the fact. Walsh didn’t want to wait until the magazine came out. I mean, I love the guy, but he had opinions that he couldn’t wait to express. And he was right just enough of the time that you had to listen to him.
GARY BELSKY:
That was probably the most annoying thing about Walsh back then: he was right just enough of the time that you needed to pay attention.
JOHN WALSH:
I spent four days out of every two weeks at the magazine. I wanted to read every single word of every issue. On Sundays, I would get in at noon, and wouldn’t leave till midnight. I had three goals in mind: first, to make sure the magazine was integrated properly into ESPN; second, to ensure that standards of excellence were part of the magazine; and third, to give people autonomy. I bowed to those guys’ wishes a lot.
GARY BELSKY:
When I got here I was told they had a “no asshole policy” in terms of hiring. And for the most part it worked. Even when people got mad, nobody took it personally. It was impressive. But we had hired lots of comedy writers, people we knew were way funnier than us, and still we’d get notes or a drive-by from Walsh saying, “This isn’t funny.” It got so frustrating that Neil and I adopted this trope that we would revert to. We’d say, “You mean, this isn’t funny…to me.” We were thinking, “You hired us to be funny. We think we’re pretty funny, people seem to laugh at us, but more importantly, we know the people we hired are funny, professionally funny, and they’re producing this content. Trust us, it’s funny. Leave us alone.”
But eventually we realized that we weren’t always getting the right message. Meaning, Papanek or Walsh would send something back and say it’s not funny, but what they were really saying was, “It’s not worth this joke to piss this person off.” And they were probably right. We were never held back from serious journalism or commentary, but a joke better be funny enough to weather a call from the commissioner of this or that league. And what we found was, some commissioners—David Stern, for example—had big senses of humor. We’d do a visual joke and get a call from the NBA saying, “Can you give us [an original print] of the page, ’cause we want to have it framed?” But other commissioners, whose names shall not be mentioned, would be pissed off. So we started to realize that our bosses were responding to us because a series of phone calls could result if a silly joke pissed off somebody important.
NEIL FINE:
Walsh was arguing from both a business perspective and a moral aesthetic. He doesn’t want you taking a cheap shot. He doesn’t want you to be mean. He’s not wrong about that, although it is the easiest way to be funny sometimes.
GARY BELSKY:
You can be really funny, and even cutting, without being mean. That’s one of the things that Walsh was basically saying: don’t be mean. Hoenig was the same way. He hated fat jokes, for example; he thought they were cheap and nasty. There are always people who will make fun of other people’s physical presence—not just fat jokes but however somebody looked. But Hoenig didn’t let us. He was like, “You can make fun of Matt Millen for how bad a job he did as the general manager of the Lions, but don’t make fun of how Matt Millen looks or what he wears, because that’s just mean.”
DONNELL ALEXANDER, Writer:
They had a crew of people that were sort of looking for different voices, and my sense was that those people didn’t get to make as much of a new path as they had wanted to. They didn’t really get the magazine that they had set out to develop.
I wasn’t happy with it. I had some problems with racial policies. I don’t really want to put it all in one incident, but in particular I remember being really upset when they put Ricky Williams on the cover with the dress. It seemed like a very unfair thing to do to a young athlete, and that was the beginning of a