Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [30]
CHUCK PAGANO:
We were working eighteen freaking hours a day and they were serving us this crap from a place called Dexter, which was right up the street. You can only eat so many grinders and soup after a while, so I think it was early December and we went to Kentucky Fried Chicken to get some freakin’ chicken. Just as we sat down on our ass in the hallway, everything went to snow on the video. You couldn’t see anything. Bill and I were sitting there eating our chicken and we both looked at each other and said, “Fuck it, we’re gonna stay here ’cause we put enough time in here and all we want to do is enjoy one goddamn meal.”
DICK VITALE, Analyst:
I got fired by the Detroit Pistons back in—actually, I remember the date: November 8, 1979, and I didn’t know where I was going to go with my career. Then all of a sudden the phone rang about two weeks later, and a fella by the name of Scotty Connal said, “Hey, Dick. I was the producer of the last game you coached when you played number one in the country, Michigan, in a tough game in the Sweet Sixteen. I heard you speak to your team before the game at a practice and I wrote your name down. I wanted to get you involved in television if you were ever available. I just saw you were let go by the Pistons and I’m in charge of a new network and our very first national game is going to be DePaul and Wisconsin on national television, and I’d like you to do the game.” I said to him, “I’m not interested. No desire. I know nothing about TV. I want to get back to coaching on the college level.” But he called me again a week later and said, “Come on out and try it.” My wife says, “Go do it.” So I said to Scotty, “Well, who do you represent?” He says, “I’m with a new network called ESPN,” and I swear I said something to the effect like, “That sounds like a disease. What is ESPN?” I’d never heard of it.
I actually did the very first game that was a national-caliber basketball game, DePaul and Wisconsin, the first week of December of ’79. I went into it with no idea of what I was getting into. I mean, I came out of a locker room, I knew nothing about television, and somebody just gave me a microphone.
Scotty told me after the first game, “Look Dick. You’ve got three things we can’t teach: your enthusiasm, your knowledge, and you’re not afraid to be candid. But you have no clue about the world of television, how to get in, how to get out, how to be concise.” He said, “I’m going to assign you a giant, an absolute giant.” I was a sports fanatic, so I obviously knew about Jim Simpson over the years, Orange Bowls and tennis and all that, so I was honored. Jim said, “You listen to me. I will try to help you because Scotty tells me you got great potential.” In our first game together I was talking so much that he told the producer, “Cut his mic off. I’ve got to teach this guy a lesson.”
LEE LEONARD:
It was shortly after the very first show and it was the first football game we were going to do. I think it was Oregon and Oregon State. I remember we had this beautiful picture and no sound, and they said to me, “Well, Lee, you have to do the play-by-play.” And I said, “Well, who’s wearing the black shirts and who’s wearing the white shirts?” I had no idea which team was which. There was another time when they had no sound or picture and I was trying to explain why and I remembered this article I had read about satellite transmission, that it was really just a big mirror in the sky and you shot something up there at an angle and shoot it back and catch it. So I tried to explain to the audience how that worked. I don’t know if anybody quite got it.
JIM SIMPSON:
One of the first games I did on ESPN was a Nebraska–Iowa football game, and Tom Osborne, the Nebraska coach, came to me and said,