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I saw the movie Kill Bill. I intensely despised it. And what especially upset me is I’d played some very peripheral role in the company that had produced it, since it was a Miramax movie, which means it’s a Disney movie. [Disney had purchased Miramax in 1993.] And I’m a moralist on this, and I really didn’t argue about whether moralism is correct or not, but I hate movies that glorify violence. I despise the fact that people make them. And I’m not talking about serious movies that show the violent aspects of history, like the movie The Pianist, for example. If you’ve seen it, you know it is a horrifically violent movie, but it needs to be because it’s about the Holocaust. So I wrote an extremely negative review of Kill Bill for the New Republic website and I had a sentence in there saying, “Jeez, the guy who runs this company, Michael Eisner, is Jewish and—of all people, to approve a product that glorifies violence—shouldn’t a Jewish person be exceptionally sensitive to the glorification of violence?” And that pretty much got me fired twenty-four hours later.

Now, I was puzzled because the New York Times ran a news-section article about my blog post as if it should have been a speech to the United Nations General Assembly. But it was the New York Times article that called this to everybody’s attention.

Now, I will also say, I apologize for what I wrote. If you go back and look up exactly what I said, within the context, it’s a defensible point, but I did a terrible job of writing it.

On October 20, 2003, Mark Shapiro and his deputy, Jim Cohen, launched yet another new show, but this one was from New York. They were convinced that sports fans—i.e., ESPN viewers—were also deeply interested in the news, politics, and pop culture of the day, and that shared belief served as the foundation for Cold Pizza, ESPN’s answer to the Today show and Good Morning America. The hope was that the series would satisfy all of a typical viewer’s informational needs and serve as a one-stop-shopping experience for two hours live each day (with the live two hours then repeated on tape, for a four-hour total); theoretically, there’d be no need for viewers to go wandering off among nonsports channels in search of nonsports information. That was, anyway, the theory.

Cohosts over the show’s four-year run included Dana Jacobson, Jay Crawford, Jeremy Schaap, Linda Cohn, Tom Rinaldi, Ahmad Rashad, and others, with Skip Bayless and Woody Paige handling a segment called 1st and Ten, Victoria’s Secret models reading weather reports, and such notable guest contributors as Peter Bonventre, a sports buff who was also an editor at Entertainment Weekly. Celebrities as diverse as Senator John McCain and bling-bedecked Dennis Rodman stopped by to be interviewed.

ESPN, along with at least several high-paid consultants, tried a slew of adjustments in an attempt to save Cold Pizza, but the high costs stemming from the New York location and tepid response from viewers would eventually kill it.

While ESPN was busily trying to invent new forms of sports journalism, it had already been hard at work trying to reinvent a staple of sports coverage. The Great American Sideline Reporter—job and species—had been hanging around football fields since 1974, at least according to Jim Lampley, who claims to have been the first in history, working the outer limits during college football games televised by ABC Sports. Lampley was “discovered” during a talent search by ABC, whose executives thought handsome or pretty young-looking personalities would help lure larger numbers of youthful viewers to ABC’s coverage.

Then the traditionally male sideline-reporter role morphed through the years into a traditionally female role, which then created its own set of problems, including people being accused of getting jobs just because of their looks and, perhaps inevitably, extracurricular activities. Whether it was weightless palaver about baking cookies for athletes, or having affairs with coaches and dating players,