Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [263]
But it was not agonizing in the sense that I knew what was right. I knew Tony was wrong. I have no problem with that part of it, none whatsoever. When Steve Anderson made a judgment like that, he was dead right, he was dead right.
STEVE ANDERSON:
He was talking about people in our workplace, including the guy who was running radio and some poor kid who worked there as well. He was blasting our promotions.
It was a no-brainer; he had crossed the line—way over the line.
TONY KORNHEISER:
I was sitting by the pool at the Otesaga Hotel in Cooperstown, New York, on vacation, and I got a phone call from my agent, and he said, “We gotta go to Bristol.” I asked him, “Why do we have to go to Bristol? I’m on vacation.” He said, “We gotta go to Bristol. They want to see us in Bristol.” “Well, what’s this about?” “I don’t know, but they really want to see us.”
I knew they were angry at me. I made a mistake and I insulted a product. But not only did I immediately say, “This is a mistake,” I said, “What can I do to correct this?” There were two, I guess. I made fun of Toyota, which I didn’t think was so terrible, but there was some guy who took out an ad and I basically said he was a charlatan, and I made my apologies on that. And I was wrong about that, and then I cursed on the In-ter-net, okay? I never cursed on the air. I never came close to that line on the air. I never did that.
Now, somebody may have felt that I was trying to become a Howard Stern, but I wasn’t. I was just different than the others, and I was an outsider, and I didn’t do it there, so there was antagonism toward me. When I had a national show and they said, “You better have someone from San Diego today,” and I’d go, “What the fuck…” it was that. Now they don’t care if they ever talk to athletes. They just want to talk to sportswriters. Everything I did then and got in trouble for, they now do. Everything.
I always wanted to make the radio show more about me, which worked for me in Washington. I always wanted to make it more about me than about ESPN, and I did. I’m guilty of that. I’m guilty of understanding what radio is. It’s the most personal medium there is. TV is not, radio is. I’m guilty of knowing that and I tried to do that. And when they went to hire me for radio, I said to John Walsh, “You don’t want me. You don’t want me; I’m not going to do the show you want.”
“Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we want the show you do.” “No, you don’t.” “No, we do.”
Well, of course they didn’t. I started doing the show, and they didn’t want the show that I did in Washington for four or five years before they hired me. I had some sense that they were angry at me because I had said some negative things about a coworker and a sponsor, and I had a real terrible conflict with my boss at the time, who is no longer at the company—an imbecile and a spiteful little asshole who shouldn’t be in charge of anything, including a washroom. He would yell at me right in the middle of my radio show. You don’t do that to talent in the middle of the show. Are you crazy? You pay me a lot of money; presumably you think I’m pretty good. And he would always micromanage me and was a dick. And so we had an e-mail jihad at some point to just make fun of him, and he started screaming about how he was violated and he felt raped and I said, “Fuck you. Shut the fuck up.” And then he went and researched all the bad things that I had done and gave Steve Anderson a bill of particulars—like curse on the Internet. Who gives a shit? I didn’t curse on the air. Insult a sponsor, you know, show lack of respect, all of the things that Howard Stern and Don Imus have been doing for years,