Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [315]
However tempting and however generous the offer, Montag advised Kremer to turn it down. For one thing—one very important thing—he did not want to betray or alienate Ebersol, the man who’d just signed Montag’s star client, John Madden, to a fabulous deal of his own.
ANDREA KREMER:
I did not leave ESPN for more money. That’s almost comical—ESPN ended up offering me a lot more money than NBC—and the reasons that I chose to go to NBC were threefold. First, I’d never worked full-time in remote production. I had the opportunity to work on the top-rated show on the network, to do a prime-time broadcast with Al Michaels and John Madden, and to work first and foremost with Dick Ebersol, who to my mind is the top sports producer in the business. To work with him is something I always wanted. That’s all number one. Number two, I’d never worked an Olympics before. And, finally, I had the opportunity to work with [HBO’s] Real Sports, which enabled me to tell stories, and that’s what I built my career on. So after seventeen years in one place, I would get to do something new. You have to understand, I was very content at ESPN. I was not looking to leave. I never solicited anything.
MARK SHAPIRO:
Some people get away, you lose ’em, okay. But some people you can’t lose. And there’s very few of those at ESPN. I would never have let Andrea get away. She is the best reporter, the best correspondent, we had. Andrea would have never left if I had stayed; not in a million years would I have ever let her get away. She never would have wanted to leave. But this was just before I left there myself. So she calls me as a friend: “I need your advice. ESPN blah, blah, blah. NBC this and that.” She said, “The money’s going to be more at NBC, but I think I can push this.” Sandy called me, you know, “What do you think?” I said, “She’s a huge asset. If they lose her, that’s their fault. But you’re asking me now outside of ESPN—I’m not wearing my ESPN hat now—what I think she should do.” Andrea really trusted me. That’s why they were calling me. And I said, “Not even a contest.”
When she went to NBC, she told me, “I have you to thank.” It’s the only time I know that anybody over at ESPN got mad at me about anything I did, because I really stayed away. I was told that a lot of people said my fingerprints were on it, and what a jerk I was to let her move out of there. But she was asking me as a friend, and I felt like I couldn’t lie to her. “You’re going to get to work the Olympics and do Sunday Night Football. And your work load will be 20 percent what it was at ESPN. And they’re going to pay you just as much, if not more? Get out of there!” And she went.
“What is it about you?” David Letterman asked Keith Olbermann on a 2007 Late Show broadcast. “You seem to burn bridges wherever you leave.” To which Olbermann replied, “I don’t burn bridges, I burn rivers. If you burn a bridge, you can possibly build a new bridge, but if there’s no river anymore, that’s a lot of trouble.”
Back in Bristol, Mike Soltys, vice president for communications, remarked, “Keith Olbermann doesn’t burn bridges; he napalms them.”
Olbermann did come back to the wonderful world of ESPN, but ESPN executives were damned if they’d embrace him without caveats and qualifiers. Bloggers reported, and Olbermann confirmed to Letterman, that although Olbermann did return to the empire in 2005 via ESPN Radio, cohosting an hour-long segment of the Dan Patrick Show with his old SportsCenter cohort, ESPN issued a warning that under no circumstances was Olbermann permitted to set foot on the Bristol campus. They didn’t say security guards would shoot him on sight but came just short of that.
For Olbermann, being banned from Bristol was probably not a devastating blow. He was never fond of the facility or the town in the first place. Besides, Patrick’s radio show originated at ABC studios in New York City—and even ESPN muckety-mucks were powerless to ban him from there.
KEITH OLBERMANN:
Dan first managed to talk a few in management into having me contribute once a week to the radio