Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [254]
The first time I met Tony, Wilbon and I walked into a restaurant where Tony was having breakfast, wearing sunglasses indoors and eating his eggs. I sat down and was very nervous because this is Tony Kornheiser. He’s incredibly gruff, and Mike was doing a little bit of a sales thing on me, but I was thinking, “Wow, this is not an easygoing guy. I’ve never dealt with a guy like this.” The conversation was a little awkward. And then, just spilling out all the different thoughts I had on things, I said, “I don’t think that this show should be afraid of tackling any of the hard issues in sports, any of the soft issues in sports, or even tackling Britney Spears.” Tony stopped eating, looked up, and said, “Then I think you’re the right person for this job.” I thought, “Wow, that was freaking easy, all I had to do was drop Britney Spears’s name.”
JIM COHEN:
Tony was very skeptical, but I remember at one point he said, “If I do this show, can I wear a dress?” And I said, “Absolutely.” That changed his mood; that changed everything.
TONY KORNHEISER:
My head was spinning. I had no idea what was going on, and then suddenly they said, “We’re going to give you a ‘three’ contract. The first two years are guaranteed. The third year is at our option; here’s the numbers.” I said to Wilbon, “This is great. We’re going to go down in flames in two to three weeks and we’re going to get two years’ worth of money. Fantastic!” I knew the show had no chance, zero chance. Look at us. Who is going to tune in and look at us? Wilbon said just the opposite. He thought it would be a hit right away.
ERIK RYDHOLM:
We brought Tony by the office a day later and we had about five or six people in their chairs and he looked around. He was amazed by the fact that he might have a dressing room with his own shower, his own bathroom. He couldn’t believe it, because, you know, he and Michael came out of newspapers. He said, “If I decide to do this show, I believe it will last fewer than three months, but I have several other jobs so I’ll be just fine.” And then he left. Everyone else looked around and said, “Shit! I don’t have any other jobs!”
Cohen’s orders were to make it look totally unlike anything else on TV, and also make it “the best show on television.” Well, thanks, that’ll be easy, right? To make it look different, I scanned all the cable channels, and found that most shows were saying to the viewer, “Invest two minutes and get interested in what we’re talking about.” Two minutes is an enormous ask—in fact, it’s arrogant. I wasn’t going to sit there and say, “Whatever we’re talking about you should be interested in because we’re talking about it.” Coming out of the Internet, I felt like we had a higher responsibility toward the viewer’s investment of time. To convince the customer to come into our conversation, we put a rundown on the screen of what we were talking about—in case people weren’t interested in that subject, they might be interested in what was coming next.
Matthew Kelliher, PTI’s coordinating producer, is the one who came up with the clock on each of the topics. I had sort of devised this idea of maybe a thirty-minute clock that counts down to SportsCenter, and he said, “Why don’t we just put it on every topic?” What was key to me about the clock was that, in television, a minute and a half is a long freaking time. If you put on a minute-and-a-half piece and you start watching—if you’re not interested in the first ten or fifteen seconds, you’re going to bail, because it feels like a long time, even if intellectually a minute and a half is not a long time at all. So by putting the clock up there, what we essentially did was appeal to the rational part of your brain over the emotional part—that is, if you’ve checked out on this conversation and it doesn’t interest you at all, you know it’s going to be over in 1:15, 1:14, 1:13, so you can make the decision, “I will hang out for 1:13 until they change topics.” Whereas when you’re