Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [300]
In the early nineties, Don Shula told me he watched NFL Primetime. I said, “I know you’re a football fan, Coach, but do you use it professionally because you have game film?” He said, “Yeah, I do.” He told me, “We’re playing the NFC East this year for the first time in four years, and starting about four weeks out, I’ll pay a little closer attention to the Giants highlights that I haven’t seen in four years on tape, and I might just make a couple of notes from your show when we get a little closer.” I said, “Whoa, now you’re just blowing me away.”
It was the highest-rated studio show in the history of cable television by the way—sports or otherwise. And what I liked about it most was it was just football. There were no pretenses. It was not “Let’s be stars.” There was no script. Tommy and I would just finish each other’s lines. It was great. And the beauty of that show was there was very little time for management to tell you how to do it, because nothing happened until 1:01 on Sunday. We’d spend six days formatting the pregame show but six hours doing the night show.
We’d spend all week figuring out why New England was going to clobber so-and-so and then they wouldn’t, and it’s like “Oh, what the hell happened there?” Then we get to talk about it. And I loved that. I was feeding off the energy of our building, of our job, and the fact that we were all football fans. Look, I still love the game, and I still really enjoy the people who run it. It’s just that now, in getting to the post, if you will, getting the horse in the frickin’ gate so we can run the race, is certainly a lot more challenging than it used to be.
STEPHANIE DRULEY, Coordinating Producer:
It is disappointing that we can’t do those long highlights, because that’s really where Boomer was at his best. When he’s voicing highlights, they feel big and important and exciting. Nobody does it better than he did with that show. And whatever you try to do, you can’t really re-create that immediacy, because it was right after a game. But we romanticize Primetime because it’s been gone for a couple of years. You have to wonder today, with all the different ways you can get your highlights, would it have been as popular now?
Triumph was the title Jeremy Schaap gave his book about Jesse Owens’s historic performance at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, when Germany had been taken over by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party. But Schaap would score an impressive triumph of his own in 2005, two years before the book was published.
He’d already won a total of four Sports Emmys for his work and was arguably the best on-air reporter at ESPN, but nothing compared to his confrontation in Iceland with quixotic chess champion Bobby Fischer. Perhaps it was because the American expatriate, whose reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was to say, “I want to see the U.S. wiped out,” had been thought of as insane; perhaps it was Fischer calling Jeremy’s late father, the legendary Dick Schaap, a “Jewish snake.”
Whatever it was, the stage was set for a poignant confrontation.
JEREMY SCHAAP:
Ever since I became a reporter at ESPN, I wanted to do a Bobby Fischer story because of the family connection. When Bobby was twelve years old and he was the U.S. national champion, he and my father developed a close relationship. My father was a writer at Newsweek, and he was covering chess among other things. Bobby didn’t really have a male figure in his life. He was raised by his mother, sisters, and grandmother. My father became kind of a surrogate father. He’d take him to ball games and play tennis with him. They became very close. When Bobby was moving up the ranks internationally in the sixties, my father kept very close tabs on him, often writing about him in magazines. When Bobby would come back from having defeated some grand master somewhere, the first person he’d see waiting for him at Kennedy or Idlewild would be my father, and that would often be the only TV interview he’d do. And when he came