Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [29]
BILL SHANAHAN:
Berman came in October and replaced a guy who was filling in temporarily. The 2:30 a.m. show was supposed to be a sports recap after the last event. We’d come on and it was just meant to be five or ten minutes wrapping up late scores. Well, as time went on and Chris began to realize something, I remember him asking me one night, “So, we don’t really have to be off at any certain time?” And I said, “No, I don’t think so.” He says, “Oh, okay.” So these short updates started getting longer and longer. He was solo, talking for twenty or thirty minutes straight, and he became very entertaining. It finally got to the point where the master control operator was saying, “Can you just pull a commercial break together for us?”
On another night, after the eleven o’clock crew went home, the only production people who were left were just Chris and me. I got a call from the master control operator who says, “Uhh, yeah, I don’t know how to tell you this but—the [taped] football game? We started with the second half.” So I told Chris, “We gotta go down and just sit on the set, just quickly explain to the folks what happened, and we’ll get them back to the first half of the game.” So Chris comes out on the set, I go into the control room, and I yelled out at the engineers, “Okay, take us.” We came up on Berman—and I still remember his line. He looks into the camera and says, “No, you didn’t pull a Rip van Winkle; you didn’t miss anything. It was our fault.” Then he said we were going to go back to the first reel of the game.
CHUCK PAGANO:
At the end of the late SportsCenter, one of my responsibilities was to make sure I had an ice chest with beer in it. After the conclusion of the show, I’d open up the trunk of my car and we’d have beer and just look at the stars and bullshit. Well, one night we all had a little buzz, probably not quite a six-pack each, and I had to go somewhere to take a whiz and decided to go for a tree but I couldn’t see my way back because it was freakin’ foggy, and I couldn’t find the path back. So I asked Chris to yell so I could figure out where everyone was, and Chris yells, “Chuckles, over here!” They called me Chuckles, it was like in Animal House when they gave those guys the freakin’ names like Otter. So when I got back, I said to him, “Your voice is so freakin’ boomy, your name from now on is Boomer.”
LEE LEONARD:
Boomer was loud but he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about at first. He was just a young kid in the candy store.
BOB LEY:
We had a lot of time to fill, and we were sometimes desperate. After we were on the air for maybe two months, Bobby Knight had a run-in with a Puerto Rican policeman at the Pan Am building, so that was a gift that kept on giving. We talked about that for hours.
OREL HERSHISER, Baseball Broadcaster:
I was in the minors when ESPN was born; that’s when I came across it. I would come home from a game and couldn’t gear down. It was unbelievable that there was sports on at two in the morning, so I’d get a pizza and watch bowling or billiards or any of the minor products they would just grab to fill time. It was awesome. I thought, this is the greatest thing ever.
GEORGE CONNER:
I knew with Getty money we could solve most problems, but one of my fears was the satellite, because we couldn’t control that. We’d been on the air for maybe three weeks and I got a phone call. “We gotta take you off the bird”—which was the satellite. And I said what? The guy said, “We have attitudinal problems with F2, which is SATCOM 2, the military satellite, and it’s unstable. You guys have a transponder and we’re going to need it for military traffic during the daytime. You guys aren’t on twenty-four hours a day, so it won’t be a problem. We just hope we get it stabilized. I’ll keep you informed.” My heart almost stopped that night because my worry was the Russians might shoot the satellite down or it would just stop working. I didn’t feel we could