Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [278]
By the way, at halftime, when Namath was introduced, he fell on his face at midfield. That’s how stinking drunk he was. Of course, we were never going to show that.
SUZY KOLBER:
After the game, we were all sitting on the bus in the stadium parking lot, and it’s almost two in the morning, and Chip always has the games on DVD, so when he got on the bus, everybody started chanting, “Put on Joe.” They fired up the DVD in the bus, and I got to see it for the first time, and we were rolling out of our seats. They played it a couple times because we were laughing so hard, and I remember thinking, “I’d do it all again” because everybody had such a great laugh that night.
At about five in the morning, there was a knock on my hotel door and it was Jay. He said, “You’re not going to believe this, but it’s everywhere,” and I said, “Oh, shit.” When we got to the game that night, everyone was talking about it. Even the officials came up to me. Shannon Sharpe was still playing, and we had some guys miked, and we heard him saying to Rod Smith, “Did you see Joe and Suzy last night?” Kenny Mayne left me a message saying it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen, but the best was my mom. Her message was “It’s good to see Joe still has good taste in women.”
Every single news outlet in the country wanted to talk to me and I refused. There were lots of press requests, but I said I wasn’t going to talk to anyone.
JAY ROTHMAN:
That Sunday, the phones are ringing off the hook in our truck. Sports Illustrated, the New York Times, AP, the whole thing. And I’m thinking, “Son of a bitch.” They wanted to know what happened, they wanted interviews with Suzy, they want the whole nine yards. So I said to Jed [Drake], “You’ve got to do me a favor. I’ve got to produce this fucking game. You need to field all calls here,” which he did. So now I do the officials meeting before the game and then my little tradition is I lap the field and walk inside the stadium just to feel the buzz before I have to go into my little tin can and produce the hell out of the game. So I’m lapping the field, and, sure as shit, who do I stumble upon? My high school classmate [White House press secretary] Ari Fleischer. He gives me a big hug, and I said, “Come with me.” I shared with him the disaster that transpired the night before, which he was well aware of, and I walk him in the truck and introduce him to Jed. I said, “Jed, I want you to meet somebody that can help you out with these phone calls you’ve been getting all day. Jed, meet Ari Fleischer.”
SUZY KOLBER:
Then it became: Oh, God, Joe wants to apologize. So he called me and the first five seconds were on the record—he said he was sorry and I said I accepted. Then we talked for forty-five minutes. He said it was the most humiliating moment of his life and that he was sorry for my family. I told him what my mother said, and he really appreciated that. I told him I was fine, and that there would be a silver lining. He was so mortified that day, and I wanted him to know that I thought something good would come out of this. And it did. He didn’t drink after that. He got his daughters back. It changed his whole life.
JAY ROTHMAN:
What I felt bad about and still feel bad about to this day is I know Suzy very well. She works her ass off. She’s credible as could be, but at every fucking airport that she travels into it’s “Can I kiss you?” There’s even a website now.
ESPN’s first attempt at reality television, Beg, Borrow, and Deal, had lasted only two seasons before being canceled in 2003, but ESPN gamely bounced back on February 22, 2004, with a second reality attempt—Dream Job, a contest designed to find a new anchor for the very iconic SportsCenter. This time, Stuart Scott was the host doling out the fabulous prizes, the most fabulous being a one-year contract with the network—and a new car! The winner then had