Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [274]
I was in Bristol the following weekend to talk to our people. The thing that bothered me the most with all of that was not the criticism the company took or the various media folks who give their opinions. That comes with the territory. What bothered me was that it hurt our employees, and to me, there’s really nothing that’s worth that.
RUSH LIMBAUGH:
After the whole thing blew up, it was Thursday and I was in my New York apartment and Chris Berman called and said, “Are you okay?” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “I’m sorry this happened. I just want to make sure you’re okay.” And then I tune in to watch the show on Sunday and they took turns dumping on me. Berman apologized for failing to be a good traffic cop: he said he should have realized what had happened at the moment, and then they all said I had violated a promise never to bring politics into it. It was clear they were saving their own asses. It was clear the pressure from way high up was dictating how this was going to be handled on ESPN. I should also tell you that the guy I was closest to throughout those five weeks was Michael Irvin. I had more fun conversations with him than with any of the other guys on the group. I remain close to him today.
Now, I don’t want to mention any names because I don’t want to cause any more stink, but the following March, I played in a golf tournament and there were two guys from ESPN—they’re both still at ESPN—and they told me that after the Philadelphia stuff started on Tuesday they were under orders not to defend me, and if my name came up I was to be criticized and blamed for violating a promise not to bring politics into the show.
Jim Nance said to me after the McNabb situation, “Rush, you have to know they were gunning for you. They resented you being in their world and they were waiting for you to step in it to make a big deal out of it.” And who knows? He may be right.
TOM JACKSON:
I got a call probably around midnight on either Wednesday or Thursday from Mark, and he said Rush had resigned his position from ESPN.
The statement I read on Sunday, I wrote late, late on Thursday night. During that entire week, I can’t remember sleeping much at all. But at some point I got on my computer and wrote that statement. It was so volatile. There was still a bit of anger in me, so when I wrote it, I didn’t pull any punches about what I thought was going on in terms of the race issues that were being addressed, and what had gone on behind the scenes in terms of Rush. I do think that in retrospect, it would not have gone over well with everyone. We spent much of that day kind of picking through this word for word, and it was adjusted by numerous people who got involved. What you saw on Sunday was a slightly diluted version of what I had written Thursday night. The one thing that I made them put in, which someone requested we take out, was that those of us on the show were in no way responsible for Rush being on our show. And what I was told during the meeting was “Everybody knows that, so there’s no need to say that.” My response was “If everybody knows, what difference does it make that we put it in?” And then everybody knows what I did on TV: I gave our statement and I think there was a tremendous sense of relief after that, that it was over.
Jackson’s statement began with “It was not our decision to have Rush Limbaugh on this show,” apparently speaking for his colleagues as well as himself in criticizing the hire. “Rush was brought here to talk football, and he broke that trust,” Jackson charged. “The fact that Donovan McNabb’s skin color was brought up at all was wrong—especially in the context of the brotherhood that we feel we have on this show.” Reaction to Limbaugh’s remarks was not immediate, Jackson said, because their “depth and insensitive nature… weren’t fully felt until it seemed too late to reply.” That Limbaugh was known in advance “for the divisive nature of his rhetoric” should have disqualified him from ever appearing, Jackson implied, ending his statement with “Rush Limbaugh was not a