Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [227]
TONY KORNHEISER:
My top three were Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali, and Michael Jordan. I can’t conceive of how Ruth didn’t finish number one. He had the greatest impact of anybody on a sport by far. I was willing to place Ali so high because of the way he dominated sports for so many years, but what was frustrating was that I was specifically advised not to vote for people on the basis of cultural importance, and I believed Jackie Robinson was the most important sports figure of the century. Michael Jordan didn’t have as many championships as Bill Russell and didn’t score as many points as Wilt Chamberlain, and really didn’t do anything to advance his sport, so maybe in retrospect I upgraded him a bit too much because the way he performed was so spectacular, and because of television I got to see highlights. They may have overpersuaded a lot of us.
The flaw in the results is that the age of the voters on the panel and their personal experience determined to a large degree how they voted. For example, Dick Schaap was a contemporary of Jim Brown, so he knew that Brown was maybe the best athlete of all. I was just a kid when Brown was playing. Did Jim Thorpe get the praise he deserved? Probably not, because there weren’t enough people old enough to really remember him. In the end, there were many people named in the top fifty whose careers were contemporaneous with many of the voters.
CHARLEY STEINER:
Jordan was never number one for me. I think picking him as number one was a generational decision, not a historical one. Babe Ruth deserved it more. My biggest complaint was that I’ve never believed golf is a sport. It’s more of a skill, in the same fashion as archery. And we used to have these wonderful debates back in SportsCentury about it. I think a sport involves either cardiovascular abilities or defense, one or the other, but generally both. Golf has neither.
GEORGE F. WILL, Columnist:
Jackie Robinson was on my list because he may be the best athlete America ever produced: baseball and track star, football record holder, and he picked up a tennis racket one day and won a tournament. There’s never been anyone like him.
MARK SHAPIRO:
The project came in right on budget and was very profitable. It also garnered an Emmy and the company’s first Peabody Award.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
It was a tremendous success. Mark passed with flying colors. After SportsCentury, we put him into programming, because I believe it’s an incredibly important department.
MICHAEL MacCAMBRIDGE:
I think it’s a good indicator of the scope of what ESPN was about at the end of the nineties that in addition to this hundred-part series, this huge countdown, all these insert features between shows, and these little two- and three-minute SportsCentury moments, they said, “Let’s also do a big coffee-table book, and not just any coffee-table book, let’s do a coffee-table book with the best designer in the business, get all these heavyweight writers like Roy Blount Jr., Joyce Carol Oates, and Wilfred Sheed to contribute, and have David Halberstam write the introduction.”
So John [Walsh] brought me in to edit that, and I was really worried because after our initial conversations, I didn’t hear anything from Halberstam for three months and the book was closing. I called John and said, “You’ve got to put a call in,” and John’s like, “Yeah, yeah, don’t worry, you’ll have it.” I think it was a day or two before the drop-dead date, we had some pages saved, and he was going to write a three-thousand-word essay. Finally he called me back and said, “Okay, I’ll fax it to you in the morning.” So the next morning I’m at my fax machine and the pages start spitting out. My first concern was, would it be long enough? Then I see single-spaced pages come out; after five or six pages, I’m like, okay, it’s going to be long enough. But the pages keep coming. They keep coming and coming and coming, and it wound up being, I think, seventy-eight pages in all. It was supposed