Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [26]
BILL RASMUSSEN:
Two days after we went on the air, Stu told me point blank, “You don’t have anything to do with ESPN, Chet’s in charge, he reports to me, and stay out of the way.” He wasn’t firing me, he just told me to get out of the way. I had become a real burr under his saddle. The media kept calling me and not him. I was a little guy and this was a big idea. In one instance, one of the big magazines had called when Scott, Chet, and I were crammed into this tiny office and the secretary said there was a reporter on the line. Chet said, “I’ll take the call,” and the reporter said they wanted to talk to me instead. Well, that didn’t go over very well with Chet. Another time, there was an article in Sports Illustrated and it didn’t mention Stu’s name, and he let me know he was really upset.
BOB PRONOVOST:
One of the first nights of SportsCenter, there was a car that hit a pole across the street right in front of the building. It knocked all the power out; we couldn’t go on the air. A guy had actually died in the accident, and they left him in the car longer than they should’ve because he was right on the line between Bristol and Plainville. There was a jurisdictional thing between the police departments and it took much longer than it should’ve, so we stayed off the air for quite a bit of time.
BILL SHANAHAN:
Outside what was then the main entrance, there were construction trailers—the standard kind of blue metal mobile trailers that you see at construction sites—and ESPN was using two of them: one as our tape library (it had no shelves on it; you just put the tapes on the floor) and the other was the quote-unquote executive office. If you’ve been around those trailers, you know that you need to reach up and open the door and step up the high steps to get into the trailer. When they were paving the parking lot, the crew that was responsible for that came in and graded the whole area that was going to be paved, but left these two trailers up on this, like, four-foot dirt bluff, so the only way to get into the trailers afterward was to stand on a five-foot ladder.
The other trailer, the tape library, had no real archive system. We were just building it every night as we did events. We didn’t do that much live because our contracts said so much of our programming came in on tape. Like all the NCAA football games couldn’t air until after midnight on Saturday, and they’d be delivered via courier, big one-inch or two-inch tapes, and they’d be stored in this trailer up in the bluffs. When it rained the trailer was deemed unsafe, so we weren’t allowed to go in and get the program reels. We would think, “Okay, what are we gonna do—the tape is in there and it needs to be on the air in a couple of hours.”
But maybe best of all was the fact that we didn’t have indoor plumbing for at least a month, so if you had to go, you had to go outside and find one of the construction company’s Porta Potties. Now, during the day that’s one thing, but at night, when it’s raining, and you’re out in the mud with a flashlight, that’s something else. The few women we had working there at the time really were like, “Oh my God!” I think Pagano will probably tell you that he and a few others found another suitable—hmmm—“outdoor site.” Oh, man!
There weren’t many doors, because things were still under construction. Flies would come in. It was awful. They were all over the place. I remember being in the newsroom one afternoon. It was noisy. In the hallway, we had these old wire machines—AP and UPI—and they’re clacking away. There’s no furniture outside of the folding tables, so the wire copy is piling up on the floor, and they’re clacking away at these typewriters and finally Lee Leonard says, “Okay—listen up, everybody—fly break!” And everybody knew what it meant: you’d grab the nearest newspaper and roll it up like a bat and everybody would walk around—bam, bam, bam, bam—killing the flies on the wall. And then after