Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [288]
STUART SCOTT:
I’ve heard and read things, you know, people who say, “Stuart tries to be black, but he’s not really black, he’s blah blah,” or “He’s as vanilla as so-and-so,” or “He’s trying to be too black.” Can I really be concerned with what other people think about me who don’t know me? What I’ve done on television is try to work hard, try to be factually correct, try and write creatively and compellingly. I want to be myself, and anyone who says, “Oh well, he’s a hip-hop anchor,” well, that’s what I grew up on. I grew up on mostly hip-hop and show tunes. I grew up on West Side Story, The Wiz, Godspell, but also Public Enemy.
I didn’t pay a lot of attention to ESPN before I got here. I knew who Chris Berman was, I knew who Dan Patrick was, but I didn’t watch them regularly. I looked up to John Saunders because he was an African American, actually an African Canadian. Tom Jackson is one of my favorite people ever. I recognize that I was one of the first African Americans of prominence here. One of them—not the first, but one of them. Mike Tirico was here. If I can open eyes and if someone feels like I can open doors, good, because it was done for me.
I think that, more than most people, as an African American you have to make sure that you can carry yourself wherever you go and keep it real. What I do on television is part of who I am. I’m not trying to be anyone else. I’ve always been of the mind-set “Be who you are; just do the job and work hard.”
I’ve read two blogs in my life. I’m not a big Internet guy. I was talking to a colleague of mine who works here and he said, “Man, I get on the Internet, I see all this stuff written about me and I’m firing off e-mails…” And I’m like, “Why? Why are you firing off e-mails?” I’m not trying to be cool; I just think that if there are people who say I’m trying to do this, and I’m trying to do that, they can believe it if they want.
For twenty-one years, ESPN and the NHL had played nicely together. That is, they happily entered into one agreement after another. In time, though, relations grew less chummy, in part because the Walt Disney Company, both as a rights holder and as owner of the Anaheim Ducks hockey team, was extremely frustrated that the league wasn’t doing enough to bolster lackluster TV ratings.
Hoping to get those numbers up, Michael Eisner had gone so far as to meet with NHL ownership and present them with ten ideas on how to lure more viewers. (Among them: have players on the bench remove their helmets, so fans on TV could more clearly see their faces, thus making it easier for stars to be developed.) The owners refused to implement any of Eisner’s ideas, however, and that, coupled with the sizable losses ABC had incurred with its NHL deal, caused the Disney chief to throw up his hands in exasperation.
BILL CLEMENT:
We always tried ways, so many different conversations, meetings; we wanted to improve the sport and it was really difficult. We wanted to do so many things that the NHL just said nope, nope, nope, nope, nope to. Access, interviews, cameras here, there. I prayed for linkage during the lockout. In other words, I wanted salaries to be linked to revenue. Because I knew if they were, then the players and the teams would have incentive to help us grow the sport. We felt like a network at ESPN trying to grow a sport without any cooperation from the different constituents within the sport.
ESPN wasn’t entirely without blame for the NHL’s tensions. The network had totally screwed the NHL by booting its games off the mother ship and relegating them to ESPN2. In essence, the network had thrown the NHL under the proverbial bus to make room for the ESPN Original Entertainment lineup, which was so important to Shapiro and the network, and once the NHL was installed on ESPN2, ratings indicated that only friends and relatives were watching.
To make matters still worse for the NHL, ESPN was attempting to close a new and very costly