Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [249]
I wanted it to be “Disagree all you want in here, but when we walk out, we are one voice. End of story.” I didn’t want any negative energy; Bristol had suffered from that all the time. It had been a very, very political quagmire. I was crazy about stopping that, and God help you if I find out you’re out there back-talking, being two-faced, or whispering. I’m telling you these people got on board. They marched big-time. The key was not being so tough that I suppressed what they really thought. That’s the balance. I wanted them to have a voice.
RICK BARRY, Vice President of Production and Administration:
You really had to know your stuff for those meetings; you had to be buttoned up. What really irked me was there were no pee breaks. No pee breaks! When I was thirty-four, I could hold it, but at fifty, that prostate was getting a little big.
We had just gotten these PDAs that were coming out then, and I’d keep mine in the bathroom at night, and at two in the morning, if I had to take a whiz, I’d walk in and the light was blinking, and it would be a midnight message from Mark. So I would reply back, thinking he wouldn’t see it at two o’clock in the morning. But then I’d be shaken when the message would come back right away. I don’t know when he slept!
BOB COSTAS:
I have a good personal relationship with Mark that dates back to SportsCentury. We became friendly because they interviewed me for a lot of the installments of that. When he brought up the idea of my coming over to ESPN, I heard them out. They had planned to use me on some of their big events and then also to create a Larry King of Sports–type show that would air every night for an hour with sports as its general topic but not necessarily limited to sports. The concept certainly made sense, but I have a long-standing relationship with NBC and at that time I was able to combine it with HBO, and that just made more sense. It seemed a better fit for me to stay where I was.
On September 11, 2001, the sports world stopped dead, paralyzed by nightmarish national tragedy. Baseball postponed its complete schedule. The NFL rescheduled its September 16–17 games for January. And the PGA postponed the Ryder Cup for an entire year.
In the wake of the attacks, ESPN, for the first time in its history, preempted its own programming and replaced it with ABC’s straight news coverage. When the sports world resumed its life, so did ESPN, focusing on scheduled events and on the meaning and significance that athletic competition held for a deeply troubled country.
MARK SHAPIRO:
George and I had been to the Monday night game on September 10. The next morning, we were in the airport, boarding a plane for the flight home. Suddenly they took us and all the other passengers off, and the flight was canceled. Something had happened. We go into the United lounge, and at first just thought some idiot had crashed into the building. But when the second plane hit, all hell broke loose. George and I got stuck in Denver for three to four days. We went to the Gap, downtown, to buy clothes; George had almost nothing with him. This was my Munich, if you will. I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but I would have conference calls from George’s room around the clock. I made the decision to put the ABC network on ESPN’s air.
Historically, ESPN had been too conservative when it came to breaking news—there was always some excuse as to why a studio couldn’t be fired up, or why we couldn’t break into regularly scheduled programming. I didn’t want any of that to happen now. After all, no other network would be looking at this from a sports perspective. This was our corner, and I wanted to be live on-air for as many hours as production could literally fill. So production was leading the way and scripting our coverage. Now, as head of programming, I was clearly crossing the line into Steve Anderson and John Walsh’s world, and I was doing it two thousand miles away from Denver. I recognized that I had to be diplomatic. At the same time,