Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [23]
One day over lunch, the question came up, have any of you seen the studio? No! Four days to air and we hadn’t even seen the facility that we were going to be working in. So we drove over to Bristol, and it was a construction site in every sense of the word—guys in hard hats, plastic tarps hanging where there were supposed to be doors, mud parking lot, Porta Potties, delivery trucks. It was busy as hell because they had to make a deadline too. We wandered around for a while and someone came up to us and asked, “What are you guys doing here?” We said, “We’re supposed to be doing shows out of here in about four days; we thought it might be nice to take a look at the facility.” It didn’t matter to them. They told us, “You really shouldn’t be here,” so we didn’t get back in there until launch day.
CHUCK PAGANO:
I still have the footprint of my father kicking me in the ass when I told him I was leaving a Tiffany network affiliate to come to Bristol. “You want to go where? Are you out of your fucking mind?” But I liked the idea of uncharted waters.
We had September 7 on our dashboard as the launch date, so we didn’t have time to smooth out any wrinkles. We were working eighteen-hour days, usually seven days a week. Conditions were rough. One day, Fred Muzzy and Ralph Eno, a guy who had joined us from Channel 3, had come back from a late lunch. I remember Muzzy had this brown Mustang that they pulled into the lot, but when they did, the ground underneath became weak because it had rained so much. So Muzzy’s parking where he thought he had left his car before, but as soon as Ralph stepped out of the car, all of a sudden the damn sinkhole in front of the car erupted and the freaking Mustang went into the mud pit. Ralph went into the sinkhole trying to get Fred out, which they did eventually. It was comical as hell. Fred had mud up to his chest. It looked like he was wearing brown fishing bootleggers.
BILL LAMB, Vice President of Engineering:
I got a call on Friday the 7th, which was the first day that ESPN was on the air, asking me, “Do you know anything about production switchers?” I said, “Yeah, I spent the last ten years behind production switchers.” He said, “You’re kidding me. I need you to come up tomorrow morning as soon as you can get here and relieve a guy named Chuck Pagano, who’ll be switching all night long since about six o’clock.” I said, “What time do I need to be there?” He said, “Well, how about 6:00 a.m.?”
CHET SIMMONS:
Scotty was a somewhat emotional guy; we were very close, but we fought like God-knows-what over the simple fact of who should announce what the first night. We came to an agreement, because we always came to an agreement. It was sheer bloody exhaustion.
SCOTT RASMUSSEN:
That twelve-and-a-half-month experience of going from the idea on August 16 to on air September 7 was incredible. There were days, lots of ’em, when my father was convinced it was going to die. There were days when I believed it was going to die. But there was never a single day when we both believed it at the same time.
BILL RASMUSSEN:
Right before the first show, Scott and I went out for a walk. Of course, there was no grass, it was just a construction site. I’m guessing it was after six o’clock, within an hour of going on the air, and it came to a point where we stopped and said to each other, “Can you believe what we’ve done and what’s going to happen here in the next hour?” This was going to go all over the United States. It was just an amazing feeling. We stood there for a few minutes and hugged each other.
SCOTT RASMUSSEN:
As we got closer to air, Stu wanted to get a picture of everybody and got my father and Chet and looked over and called for Scotty to get in the picture. I knew he meant Scotty Connal, who was right behind me, but I jumped in anyhow. I don’t think he liked that, but we