Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [272]
You finish a two-hour show and you go on to the next thing. There wasn’t a meeting of five or six of us where we said, “Oh, my God, what the hell did we just do?” or “We have a bombshell on our hands.” That never happened. I don’t think we immediately grasped the seriousness of the situation.
TOM JACKSON:
Look, I had understood what Rush was before he was hired. When we met him in New York earlier in the year, I remember at that time thinking, “My goodness, we have Rush Limbaugh on our show: I know some of his rhetoric that he uses on his radio show, but I was told he was going to represent the passionate fan and that his political views would never come into play on our show.” Now, there was a sense even as you were hearing it that you would have to be very naive to believe that, but I think we all, in an effort to get along and keep our jobs, said, “Okay.” But there was never any departure from his political views. The first essay he did was all about the Rooney Rule and whether it was something that was fraudulent or not.
When Rush said what he did, my reply to him in short was “Well, someone won those games that put them in championship games.” I understood that he had said something that was certainly—no pun intended—“off-color,” but I did not realize how serious it was until the following night, when the guy who headed up our NFL programming, Bob Rauscher, came to me and said, “When you think about what Rush said yesterday, how did it affect you?” I said, “Well, certainly you could tell it was offensive.” Then Bob said, “We’re getting a lot of calls from people who want copies of the transcript of what he said.” And at that moment, I realized really the magnitude of what we were dealing with. That was the moment that it struck me.
RUSH LIMBAUGH:
[Eagles owner] Jeff Lurie then came out and said that ESPN is institutionally racist: “They have Limbaugh and they’re running this Playmakers series and we’ve got to do something about it.” He accused me of being a racist and saying racial things about McNabb, which I hadn’t done. You have to remember at the time that ESPN was also running Playmakers and it was about a black running back who they portrayed as getting coked up before games and basically being a reprobate.
In an interview with USA Today’s Rudy Martzke, Shapiro made it clear that he believed what Limbaugh said was “not a politically motivated comment. This is a sports and media argument.” He went on to say, “We brought Rush in for no-holds-barred opinion. Early on, he has delivered.”
TOM JACKSON:
The following day, all hell was breaking loose. When I heard that Mark publicly gave Rush that vote of confidence, that was the thing that sent me over the edge. They—“they” being ESPN hierarchy—had come out and said Rush had given them what they wanted; they knew he was going to be controversial. I was very angry: I probably said a few things to Mark and the others that I shouldn’t have said, although, as I look back on it, I certainly don’t mind that I said them. I know one of the things that I said was that they had made a huge mistake in putting him on the air with us. I said, “You put this guy twenty feet from us to do what he did and now we all have to answer for it.”
I was watching Donovan McNabb being left to wiggle in the wind, having basically to defend himself against something that had little to do with him. So I talked it over with my wife, Jennifer, and my agent, Lou Oppenheim, and said I didn’t think I could work at ESPN anymore if Rush Limbaugh was going to be there. Lou told me, basically, “Don’t tell anybody else,” and I remember he set up a conference call between myself, Steve Anderson, and Mark Shapiro.
MARK SHAPIRO:
Steve Anderson told me Tom was a mess and was thinking the company was letting him hang out to dry. He was receiving a lot of calls and letters accusing him of being an Uncle Tom, and he wanted us to take him off the hook. So I flew to Cincinnati to have dinner with him. While I did so to offer him support, I couldn’t excuse the fact of what he hadn’t done. What could