Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [242]
It was very difficult telling everyone at ESPN that I was going to leave. I tried to explain to them that I wasn’t leaving because of something ESPN wasn’t; I was leaving because I needed to do something for myself and my family. To this day, some of my best friends are still with ESPN.
JEREMY SCHAAP, Reporter:
In 2000, I was in Madison, Wisconsin, doing a story about their walk-on program for football, and all hell was breaking loose in Bloomington. Bob Knight had put his hand on this kid named Kent Harvey who had walked into Assembly Hall and said to him, “Hey, what’s up, Knight?” and Knight told him not to call him Knight, to address him with more respect, not an unreasonable request. Now Knight calls a press conference in Bloomington, and I’m the closest reporter because I’m in Madison.
I get a phone call telling me I need to get to Bloomington immediately. So we get travel on the phone and they say I will have to fly out of Madison to Detroit and then from Detroit to Indianapolis, then drive an hour to Bloomington. There are no commercial flights into Bloomington; there’s no way I will be able to make it in time for the press conference. So then they say, “What about a private plane?” and they have to call the office of Bob Iger—at the time he was the ABC president—because he had to approve the use of private jets. They told me they would get the approval and to just head out to the airport. By the time I got to the Madison airport, which was only ten minutes away, they literally had this jet fueling up and ready to go. Iger’s office had said yes. So I’m thinking, “All right, this is pretty cool. I’m flying a private jet to Bloomington for a press conference.” It took only forty-eight minutes, and next thing I know, I’m at the press conference, where Knight said he didn’t do anything wrong. But nothing else happens. Nobody fires him. There’s no statement from the school or anything. So the next day, I take a bus from Bloomington to Indianapolis, fly Northwest from Indianapolis to Detroit, Detroit back to Madison—it takes me six hours to do what I’d done in forty-eight minutes the day before—for the Wisconsin–Minnesota game. And then the next day, all of a sudden, they fire Knight. So now I have to go back to Bloomington to cover whatever there will be to cover, and I get a call from David Brofsky, who was in charge of all the bureaus and reporters, and he says, “I think you might be interviewing Bob Knight tomorrow. Live. [Former Notre Dame basketball coach] Digger Phelps has gotten him to agree to do an interview with ESPN, and he’s been given a choice of three different reporters, you, Bob Ley, and Dan Patrick, and I think he’s leaning toward you.” I knew immediately this would be the hardest thing I’d ever done, and the most scrutinized.
The interview was unusual—unusual because it was live in prime time, and unusual because it’s the only situation I’ve ever been in where the interview itself became an event. There were velvet ropes and police tape, and there were satellite trucks from every news entity in the country. I felt like I was going into a heavyweight match, which I guess I was. And I hadn’t seen Bob since the press conference in Assembly Hall a few days earlier. I spent all day avoiding him. Digger called me several times to say, “Bob wants you to go to the house, Bob feels he needs to talk to you before we do this tonight.” I said no, because sometimes the worst thing to do is to have a conversation just before you conduct a serious interview with the interviewee. I didn’t want to give him the chance to tell me his side of the story before the interview. So I literally did everything I could do to avoid seeing