Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [241]
And I’m like, “Why?” And he goes, “You know, like fudge-packer, you know, like two gay guys, a fudge-packer?” So I start laughing, and Joe Theismann came in at that point and I asked him, “You know what they call this?” He goes, “Oh, yeah, they call that double-fudge,” and I’m like, “I think that’s pretty funny.” So now I see this same play eight years later in the Bears–Lions game, and I throw it up on a monitor and go, “Joe, check this out. It’s like ‘double-fudge,’ remember?” He starts laughing and says, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I remember that.” So I said, “Okay guys, when we come out of the break, let’s just show them how they blocked the kick here and then we’ll go right to the kickoff.” And Joe says, “No problem.”
So I count them out of the break, and Mike Patrick goes, “Okay, it’s ah, 7–3 Chicago. Joe, how’d they block that kick?” Joe goes, “Mike, this is what they call the old ‘fudge-packer.’” All of a sudden, Patrick and Maguire gasp, and my director asks me, “What the fuck did he just say?” And I say in his ear, “Joe, what are you doing!” So he goes on to draw the play, and Maguire and Patrick cannot stop laughing. They’re like uncontrollable, and Patrick says, “Joe, just stay over there, I need a lot of room to work.” So now throughout the whole game, every time we go to commercial, we just can’t let it go, man, we’re just like, “Joe, what were you thinking about?!” Our next game was going to be in San Francisco, and my director was Marc Payton, and he said, “Hey, Joe, we just got a call here from San Francisco. They’re going to be throwing a parade in your honor next week.” So this thing went on through the whole game, and in the local Chicago market they picked up on it. There’s a sports talk show, and whenever Joe appears on it, they start out by playing, “This is what they call the old ‘fudge-packer.’”
JOHN ANDERSON:
A guy from my hometown newspaper in Green Bay called me after I had been here for a short while and asked me what it was like to be in a place with ninety million homes. I told him, “It’s odd, I never once think about this, because when you sit in the studio, you’re just sitting at a desk in front of one camera with one guy behind it. And that’s been the same whether I was in college, or working at local stations in Tulsa and Phoenix.” I then told him I worried much more about what Bob Ley, Chris Berman, and Dan Patrick were thinking when they saw me.
STEVE BERTHIAUME, Anchor:
I got to ESPN in December of ’99 and had pretty much been doing the 10:00 p.m. to midnight shift at ESPN News and always thought to myself, “I’m just going to try to stay out of trouble, do a good job, and hope it works out.” They would send out e-mails when the anchor schedules were put out, and I remember the first time that, bang, there they were: two or three SportsCenters next to my name. I just stared at the schedule and thought, “Wow! That’s pretty fucking cool. I’m going to be on SportsCenter.” I looked around the newsroom, gave myself thirty seconds of celebration, then put my head back down and went back to work.
JIMMY ROBERTS:
By 2000, I’d been at ESPN for twelve years, and Dick Ebersol began courting me very aggressively. My wife and I had two children, and at ESPN, I not only had to travel a lot, but travel on very little notice. That’s just the nature of the beast; that’s the way ESPN works. Dick was very persuasive;