Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [255]
Prior to launch, as we were figuring all this stuff out, I took a trip to Bristol. I went out to dinner with some colleagues, and Trey Wingo was there. He said, “I have a question for you. You have two old guys sitting around the table talking about sports. That is the antithesis of everything all of our market research tells us that people are interested in. They want music, they want faster video, they want exciting plays, and the last thing they seem to want is ESPN Classic–type stuff with two old guys talking to each other. Why do you think that this is going to work?” And my response was “Because no one showed me that research before I decided to take the job.”
Before our first show, I told Tony, “Mark Shapiro wants the first show to be an hour long.” And Tony says, “No fucking way, he’s out of his fucking mind!” I said, “Jim Cohen doesn’t think he can tell him no,” and Tony goes, “Fuck that, I’ll tell him no. Give me his number.” So he goes into the other room, picks up the phone, and says, “We’re not doing an hour! We’re doing half an hour on the first show! If we do an hour, you’re like Michael Cimino making fucking Heaven’s Gate!” And then there was a pause. Tony goes, “Uh-huh, ha ha ha. Okay.” He hangs up the phone and he goes, “It’s a half hour. The first show’s half an hour.” And I was like, “Tony’s going to be very valuable here,” because nobody says no to Shapiro.
However you feel about Mark Shapiro, he really knows television. He really knows what works and what doesn’t. We did our first show, and I felt like it was a mess. Shapiro got on a conference call the morning after. He had a ton of feedback and all of it was totally on the mark, down to minute details like “Don’t run any natural sound on your video.” And it wasn’t like, “You might want to try,” it was “Don’t do this, do this. Don’t do that, do that.” Then, at the end he said, “I thought it was a good start, I really do. Congratulations.”
MICHAEL WILBON:
Sometime in 2001 or 2002, when the show was fairly new, I went into the locker room of an NBA team and they told me they had actually changed their practice time so they could watch the show. I was like, “Get out of here, this is total bullshit,” but it was true. Mike Krzyzewski told us that he wanted to come on the show as a guest because his kids watched and it would earn him some cool points, and even Shaq had some great things to say about it. Then I was in Chicago back when Barack Obama was deciding whether to run for the Senate, and I was in his office and Barack was like, “You guys are onto something here.”
ERIK RYDHOLM:
Everyone knew PTI was a success. It had been doing ratings that were well beyond what Up Close, the previous show, had been getting. Mark and Jim [Cohen] had come to us and said they wanted to create a sister show, a companion show, called Around the Horn, and Matt Kelliher and I sat down and tried to sketch out some ideas. One of the things that had come up in our minds was that there were more and more of these shows with talking heads, but no one was holding them accountable. Just because they’re sitting in this chair, what makes them so great? Why don’t we have a show where we pass judgment on those who pass judgment?
There was resistance to my idea of who the talent would be on the show, not in terms of the panelists but in terms of the moderator. I wanted an old newspaper editor, a guy who could say your argument’s bullshit because of this or that. And they wanted Max Kellerman. Now, I really, really like Max Kellerman. Whenever he came on to talk about boxing on SportsCenter, he lit up the screen. He was young and had great opinions. But I also thought he was a shooting guard and not a point guard. He would be the guy you’d pass the ball to for a shot, and to put him in a moderator’s chair where he was going to judge other people’s arguments, which he had no real background in—he hadn’t been a sportswriter, he hadn