Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [222]
But at the next year’s training camp, in 1996, I was passing him in the hallway, and I was like, “Hey, what’s up?” And he said, “Hey, I’ve been watching you in the off-season, you do a really good job.” And, you know, my parents love me, and they think I do a good job, and friends have always been complimentary, but there have been three people in the course of my near twenty-year career now who have given me compliments that I’ve taken to heart and will always remember, and Michael’s one of them. I just so appreciated that he actually took a random moment out of his day to share his feedback with me. Bill Parcells was another, when he was coaching the Jets. It was one of the first times I interacted with him, and I had mentioned I grew up in New Jersey, and he said, “Jersey girl, you do a nice job. I can tell you study.” I grew up a Giants fan, so that was obviously a really big deal to me. And the third important one was Bob Costas, someone I grew up admiring. It was my first year on the Bulls beat, the ’95–’96 playoffs, Bob was doing a game for NBC and I was standing by the scorer’s table. Bob’s young son was with him. And Bob walked up to me, out of the blue, extended his hand, and said, “Bonnie? Bob Costas. This is my son, Keith Costas. I really enjoy your work.” I was twenty-five years old, I’d just started at ESPN in September of ’95 and hadn’t really been there long enough to establish myself yet, and I was so flabbergasted that Bob Costas even knew my name, I was literally shaking. I went into the bathroom, looked at myself in the mirror, and tears welled up in my eyes. And I thought, “Bob Costas knows who I am, and he thinks I’m good. Maybe I actually do have what it takes to make it.” It was, unquestionably, one of the greatest moments of my career.
ANDREA KREMER:
I can’t specifically remember why we chose to do an interview with Cris Carter rather than some other player, but I can tell you it’s not like we said, “Let’s do Cris Carter and his history of drug abuse.” It was one of those things which everybody knew about but nobody talked about because he never talked about it. He never came out and acknowledged his past. Everybody knew that he had a lot of issues in Philadelphia and was let go. Everybody remembers Cris—all he ever did was catch touchdowns, and letting him go was the biggest mistake Buddy Ryan ever made—but there was never any in-depth introspection on what it was all about.
When you’ve done gazillions of interviews, you more often than not have an idea what somebody’s going to say. But when you go into an interview and someone starts talking about something that you weren’t expecting, to me that’s one of the most riveting things professionally that you can go through. That’s when you really get to be interviewer/therapist. We started off broadly and, once it was clear that he wanted to talk about this, then we started getting into a lot of the specifics. He had been through counseling and therapy, and as we later discussed, my interview was going to be another step for him, to be able to speak publicly for the first time about his drug and alcohol abuse. Then he gave me permission to speak for background to this woman who was basically his therapist, and I spoke to Melanie, his wife, to get her perspective. It turned out to be pretty significant, because he’d never come out like this.
I was in my office on Monday—the story ran the day before—my phone rang, and it was