Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [256]
MAX KELLERMAN:
Mark Shapiro came up with the broad idea for the show: “We want a different sportswriter in each different time zone,” and Jim Cohen named me the host and Bill Wolff the coordinating producer. Just a couple months before, I had told my manager that I was quitting talking about boxing and that I wanted to be an actor. I had taken Meisner technique for two years, and by this time I was twenty-seven. I met with Michael Price, my manager, and he told me, “You’re not going to quit your job and become an actor. This is what I think you need to do if we want to work together: I think we need to cross you over from boxing into sports talk.” Within two weeks, I was auditioning for Around the Horn, and within four to six weeks, I was named the new host.
BILL WOLFF:
Jim Cohen called me and said they wanted to spin off Pardon the Interruption and do a show with this asshole big-mouth know-it-all, Max Kellerman. You ever hear of him? Actually, I call him an asshole and a big mouth right to his face. And he eats it up. That’s who he is. And for the record, Max Kellerman is the best guy I met in all of sports television, and the most loyal. I’d take a bullet for him. People who don’t like his bravado are just insecure.
So Max was going to be the host and they were going to surround him with some bastards. Cohen asked me what I thought, and I said, “It sounds miserable, lonely, and terrible. I’ll do it.” So I rejoined ESPN to produce Around the Horn.
MAX KELLERMAN:
I believe I invented the mute button, which I wanted to call the mooch button, but we all made contributions. On PTI they have Stat Boy to clean them up at the end, and I thought, “Okay, we should have a Stat Boy equivalent,” and I started thinking of Mork and Mindy, like when at the end of every episode Mork would talk to Orson, so I figured that the equivalent on our show could be a disembodied voice who I wanted to call Orson. But again, Jim Cohen, who’s very sensible, said, “No one’s going to get the reference; let’s call it the Disembodied Voice.”
Bill Wolff’s idea was that the set should look like a cross between a video game and a game show. We’re sending up the genre. The sports talk shows take the genre so seriously. It’s not that we don’t take sports seriously—we’re all very passionate about it—but at the moment that you’ve gotten carried away, that you’re in the throes of your passion, you have to catch yourself and make fun of yourself, because the fact is, it’s a trivial subject. The emotions are real; it’s just that the consequences aren’t.
The idea of Around the Horn was that no one ever wins a sports argument. So we’re going to score it. We’re going to keep track of who’s winning and who’s losing. It’s wink-wink, you know; we’re joking, and very loudly, with everyone arguing. When I see shows where they’re calmly discussing sports—when is it ever like that in life? No one ever calmly discusses it; we’re passionate about it.
We were sending up Sports Reporters too, with more cutting-edge analysis and a much bigger sense of humor about ourselves—more like a genuine sports bar argument. Sports Reporters was not for a generation who grew up on Sesame Street. That was where we felt there was a major departure. We got criticized in the media critics’ circle about it being this crazy show and it’s not sophisticated and dah dah dah. They were missing the point. It wasn’t for them. You know, who’s watching TV at five in the afternoon? College kids, frats, and young adults; it was for them.
BILL WOLFF:
Very few things in my career have ever been more poorly received than Around the Horn. The sports media just destroyed