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questions.” Two hours, three hours, went by. He kept me in that conference room for four hours asking me about every athlete, coach, or manager I ever covered. Finally I said, “Now that’s it. No more! It’s over.” So he said, “Gee, this has been so great, can I buy you a drink?” I said absolutely, so we go across the street and it turned out I knew his mother, Judith, because she used to work at Time magazine. As we’re leaving, he says to me, “I want you to know, I will never forget you for what you’ve done for me today.” And I’m thinking, this little pisher, what is he ever going to do for me? Well, he eventually was very generous with me and we became very good friends.

GARY MILLER:

He’s kind of a maniac. He had a reputation. He had worked with the guys I worked with at Up Close, so they were well aware of him. I didn’t know him until he became the bigwig in Bristol. I had met him at Todd Fritz’s. Todd was actually our booker at Up Close and the greatest booker in the history of television. Anyway, he got married and I went to his wedding and that’s where I first met Mark Shapiro. I had heard plenty of stories about him. Like Myers would be asking somebody a question or whatever, on the air, and Shapiro would be producing those shows, and as soon as Myers asked the coach or whoever a question, Mark would be in his ear screaming, “What the fuck kind of question was that?” and I’m sitting there imagining how in the world you could possibly do a show with all that going on.

BUD MORGAN:

I’ll tell you when I knew SportsCentury was going to be a success. We had not gone on the air yet, and there was a show that had been freelanced out on Secretariat, the racehorse. It was one of the fifty, and it was kind of controversial because a lot of people took the attitude “What is a four-legged animal doing on this list?” And it came back late, and it was a mess. If I remember correctly, it came in on a Tuesday, and it had to air on a Friday. So Shapiro said he wanted me and an associate producer to assemble every single bite that had the word Secretariat in it. We used this retrieval system, and got it all done by about three in the morning. The next day Shapiro looked at the material twice and then from memory redid the show from top to bottom. From that moment on, I knew we were in good hands and that it would be a success. And it was.

BOB COSTAS, Sportscaster:

They sat me down on three different occasions and asked me about a variety of issues and people, and those interviews became part of these shows. SportsCentury was magnificent. Not only was it a great bit of work done by ESPN, but I mean it when I say I think it’s one of the best pieces of television of the last decade.

The crew chosen by ESPN for its SportsCentury panel to name the top hundred athletes of the twentieth century included ABC News and Sports president Roone Arledge, Berkeley sociology professor Harry Edwards, columnist and bestselling author Sally Jenkins, and deep thinker David Halberstam, along with ESPNers such as Berman, Patrick, and Kornheiser.

Michael Jordan wound up being number one, with Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, and Wayne Gretzky rounding out the top five. Baseball landed twenty-three names in the honored one hundred; of the remainder, twenty came from football, twelve from track and field, eleven from basketball, and the rest miscellaneous. Naturally there had to be some controversy.

BOB COSTAS:

They never really spelled out the criteria, so each person had their own. I took it as a combination of excellence in the primary sport but also all-around ability if that could be measured. Then if there was a further tiebreaker, I factored in what was their sport’s significance in their time. Did they have a greater standing in their time that goes beyond just pure performance and pure statistics?

I had Babe Ruth as my number one, but I think the list they came up with was a good one; everybody more or less deserved to be there, with the exception of Secretariat. I thought that was silly. Plus, if I’m not mistaken, Secretariat was either