Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [228]
The draft was sprawling, with all these loose connections. There were all these long paragraphs that began with If, and then there’d be, like, a hundred words, and then there would be then, and there would be another hundred words. It was, like, sort of the first draft of Fear and Loathing if Halberstam wrote it about sports rather than Vegas. It was just intimidating to get through it all, but in the midst there, in the nugget of that, was a really good essay. It was just frightening to have to boil it all down. It was terrifying. David, bless him, was just “Oh sure, you just edit it any way you want.” I had to come back and say, “I had to take out four-fifths of your essay, do you want to read it?” He said, “No, I’m sure it’s going to be fine.” I think I insisted that at some point he take a look at the final draft, and he had a few notations, but it turned out okay.
At the end of it all, we produced a terrific coffee-table book that wound up on the bestseller list. They had a big party when the book came out. Spike Lee was there and a lot of others, and it occurred to me that what I had spent the last year and half working on—this immensely expensive book, this immensely lavishly produced book—was just a drop in the bucket of all the other stuff in the ESPN empire.
The legacy of SportsCentury, and the precedent it set for excellence in documentary filmmaking, would carry forth into the next century of ESPN. It proved conclusively that ESPN was more than SportsCenter, games, and news coverage. For the network, it was like a Super Bowl victory or a World Series championship—a trophy that can never be taken away.
ESPN’s documentary series, SportsCentury—Step Number Nine in ESPN’s rise to world dominance.
RICK SUTCLIFFE, Baseball Analyst:
My first year working with ESPN full-time they had me doing Baseball Tonight. I was sitting there playing cards with my grandpa, and he said, “How’s that broadcast thing?” I said, “Well, it’s going fine. The biggest problem, Grandpa, you know, is I don’t like wearing ties. And I still haven’t learned how to tie a tie right. I may have to borrow your red clip-on.” He always wore it to weddings and funerals, and I said it jokingly. But a month later, Grandpa gives me, as a present, a red clip-on tie. I started to laugh, but I looked at him, and he wasn’t laughing. He goes, “I think it’s the color all those guys are wearing. I hope it works for you, I hope you like it.” I get it home and tell my wife and daughter, and they go, “You’ve got to wear it; you know he’s going to be watching.”
Since this is my first year, I’m nervous to begin with, and here I am, getting ready in the ESPN bathroom to put my tie on, and I got ties in my hand. I’m five minutes from going on national frickin’ television, and instead of thinking about what I’m supposed to talk about, I’m trying to figure out what tie I’m going to wear. So finally I go, “You know what? My grandpa, he’s always been there for me. He got me into baseball when my parents were divorced. I moved in with him when I was eleven. For everything he’s done, I would rather get fired and disappoint ESPN than disappoint my grandpa.” So I put on the clip-on tie.
So I go walking in, they were at a commercial break, and I have to walk right in front of the desk with Dan Patrick and Kenny Mayne. I had known Dan for a while and he