Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [273]
JOHN SAUNDERS:
The person I felt the worst for through the whole thing was Tom Jackson, because he was in a live TV show and he has a colleague on the air say something so reprehensible, but he also has somebody in his ear who may have been talking at the same time Rush was saying those words. Even if he wasn’t, when you do shows like that, if you’re going to be good at your job, you’ve got 70 percent of your brain listening to them and 30 percent of your brain preparing for what you are going to say next.
TOM JACKSON:
Mark asked, “What do you think we should do?” And I remember telling him rather strongly, “I don’t know what the hell you should do. I’m waiting for my company to do the right thing.” I had told Lou, “I want to see if ESPN will be comfortable with the show coming on on Sunday with me not there and with Rush Limbaugh on that set.” But because Lou had said to me, “Whatever you do, do not tell them you quit,” those words never really came out of my mouth. I think they had understood from different places that I actually made calls to at least one other network trying to find out if there might be interest in me if I wasn’t working for ESPN anymore.
I will say this: the couple of words I had on the phone with Mark that day—I knew he had never heard anyone talk to him like that. It’s amazing the things you say when your job at that moment has no value to you. So it was a pretty tension-filled couple of days. You don’t know what it’s like to answer the phone and hear, “Hello, this is Bill Cosby.” And I go, “Is this Bill Cosby Bill Cosby?” He didn’t mention race, he just said, “I know the way things can be when these situations come up, and I just wanted to call and offer my support.” And I was like, “Wow.” All it indicated to me was how big this thing had gotten.
RUSH LIMBAUGH:
Then Wednesday, during my show, I get an e-mail from Shapiro saying, “We’re losing Tommy”—meaning Tommy Jackson. “He’s saying it’s either you or him. Will you call him?” So I said, “Sure.” So after my show ended at three o’clock I called Jackson, but I got voice mail. I then had to fly to Philadelphia for a speech, and Shapiro calls me and says, “Tommy is out there saying young black kids are coming up to him saying, ‘Does this mean I can’t play quarterback in the NFL anymore?’” Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson also got in gear and said I should be fired, that there was no place for this kind of thing inside the National Football League, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone had gotten hold of Tom Jackson and said, “Tom, you sat there and didn’t do anything? Didn’t say anything? A buh buh buh buh…” Pressuring him because of his race. So who knows? I could see where it was going. Tom Jackson at that time had been there sixteen or seventeen years. This was my fifth week.
Shapiro called me and I talked to him Wednesday night from my hotel room in Philadelphia. That’s when I’d also made the decision that I was going to get professional help for my addiction to pain pills; it all happened in the same week. And with those two decisions, I was destined not to be on that ESPN show. Shapiro was probably going to ask me to quit if I didn’t mention it first, and I made the decision then to just resign because the last thing I wanted to be was a distraction.
MARK SHAPIRO:
It was pretty clean. He got on the phone with me and said, “Do you want me to walk away?” and I immediately told Bob [Iger] and George. They said, “Take it.” So I called him back and said, “Yes,” and within twenty-four hours he was out the door.
GEORGE BODENHEIMER:
I okayed the hiring of Rush Limbaugh and I was involved in the decision to end the association. I spoke with Rush after his comments, and he said, “Welcome to my world. You guys have been great. You gave me an opportunity. I love ESPN. Let’s agree to part friends. But you don’t need this.” So I remember him being extremely gracious about the whole situation, and I’ve seen him subsequently