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an award-winning director of photography. I held firm to this decision, although my peers in Bristol were very disturbed by it. They didn’t get it. They thought I was being foolish, and thumbing my nose at the collection of interviews in the Bristol library. But I wasn’t. I wanted one consistent, slick, warm, intimate feel to permeate the series. I wanted a mood, and since the profiles were going to be overdosed with testimonials as the common and primary element, they were the pivotal pieces to establish that mood. Of course, contextual elements such as sound bites, films, commercials, TV appearances, newsreels, press conferences, or local television interviews were going to be used, but no sit-down interviews that ESPN had already churned out through the factory. Even if an athlete or observer had passed away and the only sit-down interview had been done by ESPN and was lying in a warehouse somewhere, my direction to my producers was to watch it for research purposes, but it was not to be used. I simply wasn’t going to have a potpourri of different looks and ugly sit-down interviews messing with the tone. Walsh couldn’t believe I wouldn’t use snippets of a ten-hour sit-down interview the company had done with the late Arthur Ashe. I told him that the viewer would see plenty of Ashe speaking on camera by the way of contextual elements, but not an on-camera interview. I also promised him that he’d thank me for it in the years to come, as we’d be building the best collection of interviews of any news organization anywhere, a great intangible benefit to ESPN that you could never put a price on.

I couldn’t guarantee that all of the firsthand participants, the athletes themselves, were going to agree to be interviewed for the project. You had to figure that recluses like Bill Russell, Johnny Unitas, and Sandy Koufax, athletes that never did interviews, especially without some kind of compensation, were not going to share their time. So our strategy was founded on getting firsthand witnesses—writers and observers that were there and had reported on the story—to sit down and retell the stories. The athletes also weren’t always so candid or colorful. They might have a bias or remember the game from just their point of view with a certain slant. On the other hand, the writers were often personable, full of detail, and more objective. And there were so many of them.

Probably my favorite parts of the project were those actual testimonial interviews. Walsh and I clashed about me doing the interviews. He wanted me in the office, but I said no way. First off, interviewing was my passion. Secondly, you were literally sitting there hearing the stories firsthand from legendary writers. They were there. They could talk about Jesse Owens like he was a member of the family, given the amount of time they spent with these athletes on the road. I must have done over one hundred interviews myself, covering twenty to thirty topics with each writer. I did the last interview ever with both Jim Murray from the Los Angeles Times and Shirley Povich of the Washington Post. I had Shirley in the chair for almost four hours. He actually passed out and fell out of the chair two hours in—the lights were hot, and he was in his nineties—but I made him keep going.

PETER BONVENTRE, Consultant:

Walsh called me about the time they were starting SportsCentury and told me that this young kid, Mark Shapiro, was going to be calling me to do an interview, and would I be nice and help him out. Mainly he wanted to talk about Muhammad Ali because I had followed Ali and done a lot of writing on him. I was in Manila and had a lot of good stories. So I invited Mark over and said, “I’ll give you an hour and that’s really all I can do.” He says, “Fine! No problem!” He sits down in our conference room, and he asks me about Ali. I tell him Ali stories, and then he says, “Did you ever do Pete Rose?” “Yes.” “And John McEnroe?” “Yes.” And he keeps going on. Then I said, “We’ve got to cut this short, I’ve been here an hour and a half,” but he said, “No, no, I’ve got a few more