Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [316]
Late in ’05, I guess, we went from once a week to an hour a day, and of course I loved it. We were much, much better on the radio than on TV, though it’s tougher to be psychic on TV. In any event, there was talk at this time, I guess from Shapiro, of moving the 6:00 p.m. SportsCenter to New York, possibly to the ESPN Zone restaurant, and of moving the 2:00 a.m. to L.A. Dan’s pitch was to bring me back to co-anchor with him, and Shapiro seemed warm to it. This is in the pre–Special Comment era, and I had no idea where things would be going at MSNBC, and I thought, “What a great solution.” Just like the Sundays-only idea in ’97—they’d never have to deal with me in person, nor I with them, and it was so much fun to work with Dan again.
Then Shapiro left and Bodenheimer was still pissed at something I’d said about him when they’d hired that overmatched ex-Fox reporter to work the sidelines (namely that he should’ve been led away in handcuffs), and the idea died.
“Reality TV” has been called one of the most egregious misnomers in television history—it’s TV, all right, but is it reality?—and yet, when it became the rage, especially on cable channels, early in the twenty-first century, ESPN decided it had to get in there and snare a piece of the action. But whose reality would it be? Came the answer: Barry Bonds, the elusive and outspoken slugger who was expected to break both Babe Ruth’s and Hank Aaron’s career home-run records in the summer of 2006.
What better time to follow Bonds around with cameras and strap a microphone pack to his back? Whatever Bonds was seen doing in the show, it was bound to seem at least interesting, maybe fascinating, to the fans at home. There was one little problem, however: Barry and his representatives wanted the subject of steroid use avoided, which was a pretty big request considering it had been all over the papers, as well as on TV and radio, for months. Steroids were, in fact, considered potentially responsible for Bonds’s hitting seventy-three home runs in 2001 and bulking up in 2003.
Steroid use in baseball proved to be the show’s proverbial elephant in the room—or eight-hundred-pound gorilla, if you like—and it was going to be awfully hard to shoot around it. The series premiered on April 4, 2006, and by June, relations between the producers (Mike Tollin and Brian Robbins) and Bonds’s agents and lawyers—and Bonds—were so bad that the final show was yanked from the schedule and never aired.
But then, relations weren’t the only things that were bad. So were the ratings. ESPN wasn’t exactly risking a huge public outcry when it canceled the series and called it a day.
JOHN SKIPPER:
There are people who’ve been up there for twenty-eight years who still think, “It’s the little company that can, we’re up here in Bristol, middle of nowhere, we’re the underdog.” It’s the classic mentality that created the place. The most typical experience I’ve had, and John along with me in this, was the Barry Bonds thing, where we contracted with a filmmaker named Mike Tollin to do a reality series in which he would follow Barry Bonds around.
MIKE TOLLIN, Producer:
I wasn’t close with Barry, but it was a nice relationship and we knew each other a little bit.
Barry’s injured, but he comes back the last month and hits like eight homers to get within like eight of Babe Ruth’s record. He gets to 706 or 708. And it’s like, wow, Barry was hurt but Barry’s still got it, and next year’s going to be amazing; all the eyes of the sporting world are going to be on Barry. And so Rachael [Vizcarra, Bond’s PR person] called me out of the blue and asked to have lunch and sat down and said, “We want to know if you’d be interested in doing for Barry what you did for Hank.” That’s where it started. What does that mean? “Do a documentary which shows the other dimensions of Barry Bonds and introduces a Barry Bonds to the world