Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [250]
My team and I had multiple daily conference calls with production—discussing, debating, and contemplating just how much we could cover. Games were getting canceled right and left, so we had a choice of either airing archival classics or going live with news reports. I’m proud to say we wound up carrying more live hours of coverage with each passing day. Since George and I were both holed up in his Denver hotel room, he got to witness firsthand how a combined programming and production operation would work under my leadership. Don’t get me wrong, George was very involved, and to his credit, provided great leadership. He was incredibly dynamic during that time and had a strong sense of what to do, but I do believe the entire episode definitely played a motivating role in his ultimate decision to combine the programming and production groups and put me in charge.
There really aren’t a lot of stars at ESPN. Stuart Scott’s a star; I made him a bigger one. Dan Patrick’s a star; I tried to make him a bigger star there. Berman’s a star, but he’s maxed out. There’s no more that he can do. He can’t do play-by-play. But Bob Ley was a star with regard to journalism. So when 9/11 happened, that was the thing that really sealed Bob’s getting in the chair.
BOB LEY:
The day of the attacks, without a pressing need to go on the air immediately, there was a pretty robust debate about whether we should be doing anything, whether we should be on the air instead of just airing ABC. It was pretty passionate. Nobody was right, and nobody was wrong. Some people were saying, “We have no role to play; it’s as far from sports as it can be; this is as irrelevant to us as anything you can imagine.” And yet others were saying, “Yeah, but all of this is going to impact the world of sports, in some way, shape, or form.” I think by about two o’clock the idea was “All right, let’s go on and do a show at six. And then we’ll play the news.” I was certainly in the camp of “This is horrible, this is irrelevant to sports, this has nothing to do with us, but there’s a necessity to put down a historical record for this network of just whatever tangential elements exist in service of sports. We’re going to get lost otherwise.” And so we did the show. It was not an easy show to do, obviously.
STEVE ANDERSON:
George called me that Tuesday morning and I remember him saying, “So, Steve, how’s the security at ESPN, how secure are we at ESPN?” And I don’t mean to make light of it, but I said, “George, you’ve been here as long as I have. We don’t have any security.” And we didn’t, really. In those days, you could literally drive on campus, walk on campus, and walk into the buildings. I think we realized then that if terrorists wanted to communicate to the whole country, they could do it from this facility. We weren’t prepared, at that point, to stop them. We were here in this sleepy little town feeling safe and secure. But 9/11 changed all of that. Gates went up, and it changed the way we thought about who we are and what we are regarding security.
JEREMY SCHAAP:
My father probably had been hosting The Sports Reporters for ten years before he ever set foot in Bristol, and that really amused him. He had no firsthand knowledge of Bristol, so he wound up being an important part of ESPN while being completely removed from the day-to-day life of the network. What was clear was how much it meant to him that ESPN valued him as much as it did. In television, elder statesmen are often shoved out the door. I don’t think that was ever going to happen to my father at ESPN. The network gave him the respect he deserved, and he rewarded them with brilliant work.
He would steer the conversations, offer perspective and wit, and drive home the most salient points in the discussions. He also liked to counterpunch and play off the panelists, and his “parting shots” were a responsibility he took very seriously. He’d take shots,