Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [232]
JOHN SKIPPER:
With Steve, it was Darwinian: I’m going to put my guys against each other and the stronger ones are going to survive. When you went to a Steve staff meeting, you were a little on edge, you were tense, and you had to prepare because you knew at some point you might get tested. And if you didn’t know what you needed to do, you’d get killed. With George, the meetings were calm, collaborative. He would not put up with anybody going after somebody else. Steve is testing you and he jumps on the mistakes. George trusts you from the get-go; he’s trying to understand it all. It’s a different approach.
When it came to the ESPYs, the network’s attempt at a sports Academy Awards show, it seemed nothing would ever equal Jim Valvano’s moving speech in 1993 for unforgettable emotional impact. In ensuing years, the ESPYs struggled to find an identity and to be accepted as a legitimate recognition of athletic excellence. Making that difficult was the fact that recognition of athletic excellence was already rife in American society; in addition, an ESPY on the mantel didn’t really translate into tangible benefits. When you won an Oscar or a Grammy, good things often happened to your career. When you won an ESPY, little if anything changed about your life; there were no real benefits. Just a moderately handsome doorstop or paperweight.
The ESPYs were also hampered by problems with the voting. Originally, winners were selected by actual players; there was even an ESPY official who made the rounds of the leagues armed with ballots to help ensure greater player participation. Unfortunately, response was still paltry, and a switch was made to having a blue-ribbon panel determine winners. Not surprisingly, it became an ESPN-dominated blue-ribbon panel, which created still another set of issues. Finally came the matter of hosts, with results being uneven at best. Dennis Miller wryly handled the first two ESPY specials, followed in 1995 by actor John Goodman, in 1996 by comic actor Tony Danza, in 1997 by “redneck” stand-up comedian Jeff Foxworthy, in 1998 by Saturday Night Live’s Norm MacDonald—who proved a tad too irreverent for ESPN executives—and in 1999 by versatile actor Samuel L. Jackson, whom the producers loved. The first seven shows were all staged in New York, though they didn’t necessarily air “live from New York”; producers liked the safety cushion they got from taping the program and airing it, edited, later.
One of the key turning points for the ESPYs occurred in 2000, when the setting was moved to Las Vegas and players of the decade were featured. Many prominent athletes showed up; the show’s popularity grew, and sports stars who’d snubbed it in the early years got out their tuxedos and turned out in greater numbers as the new century dawned. The award itself may still have meant next to nothing, but the TV special was becoming a bona fide annual event.
DAVID STEINBERG:
Money was a big issue with ESPN. That was the toughest part. They always wanted everything for nothing. One year the guy who was running the ESPYs for ESPN called me on the phone and said they were moving the show to Radio City Music Hall, and said, “I already got the budget approved.” And I said, “But I haven’t even given you a budget.” He said, “It’s just the same budget,” and I said, “You can’t do the show at Radio City for the same budget you did it elsewhere. What are you going to do with the set?” He said, “We’ll use the same set.” I said, “Do you know the size of the stage we just did the show on compared with the size of Radio City?”
They had this big meeting in Hartford. God, there must have been a hundred people from every department at ESPN, and the director, Bruce Gowers, showed them a mock-up of the set to scale and put it down on a Radio City stage so they could see it was the silliest thing in the world. But you know what? They held to their dollars. We had to just do a crappy set. But that was ESPN.
NORM MacDONALD, ESPY Host:
I wound