Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [25]
CHET SIMMONS:
“Now we take you live to Colorado,” and all I could see to my everlasting disgust was Simpson’s mouth going and nothing coming out of it. I turned to the guys in the control room and said, “What have we got?” And they said, “We got nothing.” I said, “Good, let him stand there. Maybe some people who can read lips will have a good time with this sucker.” And we sat there for whatever the interview was, eight minutes, seven minutes.
GEORGE CONNER:
My heart sank.
GEORGE GRANDE:
We had trouble getting feeds in, and we were supposed to have three live shots but didn’t end up with any of them.
BILL SHANAHAN:
I ended up being a floor manager with my headset, and all you heard were these people screaming at each other, swearing at each other, and it went on and on. So Lee Leonard is sitting there patiently waiting and says, “May I ask what the delay is?” So all I had to do was lift up one of the headphones from my headset and he could hear this string of invectives come out. And he says, “Ah! I understand.”
BOB PRONOVOST, Director:
I was walking down the hallway to go into the truck for SportsCenter and Creasy’s coming down the same hallway on the other side. As he passes me, he goes, “Don’t worry, young man. It can’t be any worse than that. You got no place to go but up from there.”
When we got on the air, there was even a bulldozer still going in the parking lot. People in back of me were saying, “Oh, he’s getting awful close!” And I’m hearing this while we’re on the air. The bulldozer was making so much noise that it became difficult for me to hear what George and Lee were saying, and I needed to hear them to change the graphics. It got to the point where I couldn’t hear anything, so I had to guess what they were saying by reading their lips.
Then the bulldozer actually tapped the remote truck and shifted it a bit on its side. It knocked some of those phones off, which created a little more anxiety, because when you knock them off that means you’re calling someone and that means somebody’s calling you back. So now the phones are ringing in addition to the bulldozer roaring. It was pretty wild.
Lee Leonard had an IFB which was loose, and it pulled out of his ear at the last second, but I figured I didn’t have time to worry about any of those types of things. When I walked out into the hallway, Scotty was there and I wanted some approval about all I had just done, and he looked at me and said, “If I ever see an IFB hanging out of a talent’s ear again, that’s the last day you’ll ever work here.” It kind of ruined the whole thing for me, but what I learned that day was that Scotty was right. He didn’t want the audience seeing something sloppy, and all the audience ever sees is what they see on television. They don’t care about our problems behind the scenes.
SCOTT RASMUSSEN:
We had the Milwaukee Schlitz playing in the very first event on with all the Anheuser-Busch people standing in the room, and we joked about that with them. We told them not to worry, nobody was watching anyhow.
BRUCE CONNAL:
My father called afterward and he said, “What have I done? What in the world am I doing here?” He was really questioning the move he made.
CHET SIMMONS:
When we were finished with the first night, which went from seven to midnight, everybody gave a big cheer, and there was some champagne. I rapped on a glass and got everybody’s attention, and I said, “I just want to thank you for your efforts tonight; I know you’re exhausted, and you’ve gone through the first night, but I want to tell you something: you’ve got to do this sucker every night, seven nights a week.” And then Rasmussen makes the announcement—without checking with me—that we’re going to go twenty-four hours a day within the next couple of weeks. I could have strangled him right there on the stage. That was the way he operated. It was still