Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [238]
And it’s everything we can do to get him on the set, and every ten seconds he’s asking me another question. I’m trying to get answers for him, and now we hit the open and I’m like, there’s no way this thing is going to fly. But the light goes on, and Chris says, “Hello, everybody, welcome to NFL Primetime.” And the show went fine.
I realized at that point in time that it was almost Chris’s own internal way of getting himself prepared, getting himself fired up, getting his adrenaline flowing where it needed to be to deliver this piece of work to the audience. And, sure enough, the next week the same thing happened again and I was thinking, “You’re not going to get me this time ’cause I know that this is just the way you do it.”
JACK EDWARDS:
I did my last SportsCenter in July of 1999 with Bob Ley, who is not only a pioneer but also a survivor. And because he had that seniority, he was able to say a line and not get reprimanded for it. After I’d said my little fifteen-second good-bye, Bob Ley said, as we were dipping to black, “And another one escapes underneath the fence.”
TONY BRUNO:
Al Gore came on with us in ’99 at the first BCS championship game in Arizona. Tennessee had won, so he wanted to come on our radio show. I introduced him by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, the next president of the United States of America, Vice President Al Gore.” And he says, “Well, I don’t know about that, but thank you for mentioning it.” Oh, he was great—not as good as Clinton, but he handled a couple of curveballs that I threw at him and talked fantasy football.
By then, they had finally taken me off weekends, and I was doing the morning show with Mike Golic. They hired Mike, who was doing radio in Phoenix, and Mike wanted to come out to work with me. So before there was Mike Greenberg—Mike and Mike—there was Tony Bruno and Mike Golic. That was the morning drive show. When we launched, we were just on in Chicago, and they were really slow to bring us out as a national radio show. They weren’t sure that people would take a syndicated morning show, so Mike and I did that for a year and then they changed management people. The new guy was very Disney-ized.
STEVE ANDERSON:
Tony was much better at night reacting to games. Once we put him on in the morning with Mike Golic, Tony and I had strong disagreements on taste issues. Tony felt strongly that the audience wanted “guy talk,” and he wanted to go places that I didn’t think were good for the show or for ESPN. Tony didn’t want to change, so I felt it was important that we go in another direction. Tony was taken off the show, and within a few months, we made the move to pair Mike Greenberg with Mike Golic. It was a move that turned out very well for the two Mikes, the show, and ESPN Radio.
TONY BRUNO:
People think that I left ESPN on bad terms, but I really didn’t. Steve Anderson was the guy that pretty much led to my resigning from ESPN. He just kept micromanaging the show to the point where I resigned. I couldn’t do what he wanted me to do. I did the shows that they loved for eight years, and then all of a sudden, because Anderson didn’t like the fact that I was having too much fun—which, oh, by the way, was what I had done my whole life—I finally said, “Hey Steve, you know what, I can’t do this anymore.” So I resigned. I started at ESPN making $35,000 a year and went to making half a million dollars when I left. Even Keith Olbermann wasn’t making that much. Chris Berman and I were two of the highest-paid guys at ESPN. So in 1999, I walked away from a half-a-million-dollar-a-year contract—not to take another job, just because I couldn’t do what they wanted me to do.
MIKE GREENBERG, Anchor:
I think SportsCenter is the Rolls-Royce of sports news broadcasting; it’s number one and nothing is number two. So that is why I came, to do SportsCenter. I wanted to be like Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick. That’s what an entire generation of young sports broadcasters wanted to be. Golic was doing the show before