Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [319]
JASON WHITLOCK:
On The Sports Reporters, Mike Lupica and Joe Valerio had a problem with my perspective on the steroid issue. They had pretty much decided that they were going to beat up Barry Bonds and kind of portray him as the most evil person in sports because of his steroid use, and I came at it differently because I felt like all these guys were using steroids. We’d have arguments before the show, and I would kind of express that perspective, and this was before it became clear that steroid use was rampant throughout all of baseball and really throughout all of sports.
Joe Valerio and these guys would try to send a message to me that they didn’t like the way I addressed it, so they’d keep me off the show for a month or two—they just wouldn’t ask me to come on. And it would just so happen that every time I would come back on, something would happen in the news related to steroids; the last time I think it happened, it was the guy who won the Tour de France after Lance Armstrong, I can’t think of his name. And I’ll never forget it, Lupica says to me on the air, “You know what? Then maybe you need to be on the Entertainment Tonight Sports Reporters.” It was basically a threat—he told me on the air that “we’re booting your ass off the show.” I said something like, “Hey, Mike, do you know what the ‘E’ in ESPN stands for? It stands for Entertainment. We’re already on that show”—which was basically my point.
Those guys were pissed at me after the show—Lupica and Joe Valerio—the exchange was pretty heated. It was great television. So the next day, I called Jim Cohen, who was in charge of The Sports Reporters, and just said, “Man, these guys are pissed at me.” He said, “Look, I saw it, it was great television. I don’t understand why they were pissed.” And then I think I did an interview with that blog The Big Lead, and they asked questions about my work at ESPN and I took potshots at Lupica and then at Scoop Jackson, who was writing for ESPN.com. And I did it knowing it was going to piss Lupica off, but, you know, I didn’t care.
Jim Cohen called me the next day and said, “Hey, man, you can’t be on our TV shows anymore.” And I said, “Fine, no problem.” I think ESPN’s original thing was “Okay, we’re going to suspend him from our TV shows and that’ll show him and shut him up.” But I was, like, fine, no problem, and I wrote a column for a dot-com the next day saying, “ESPN called and fired me because of X, Y, and Z.” I’d had it with Lupica, I’d just had it with the whole deal, so I didn’t care what they did—and that was that.
JOHN WALSH:
David Stern said at one time, “Would you have liked to have a camera in the bunker with Hitler, yes or no?” It’s an interesting analogy. You’d have access to stories. I think we mishandled that internally, because internally there was such a brouhaha over it and the press got it and it was, like, “This is journalism, this is journalism.” Probably the most famous modern-day interview of a president, which is now made into a Broadway play and looks like an award-winning movie, was a paid interview. That doesn’t justify it or make it right, but that happened. I spent one evening with Barry Bonds. And I think that Barry Bonds is an interesting character who would love to tell his story but he’s got to be made comfortable telling it. And given all the factors coming into play for this particular show, that wasn’t going to happen—because there was this knee-jerk need for us to ask him every other minute, “Have you taken steroids?” Do I think that there’s a great story there? Absolutely. I don’t know if we would have had it, but in the time I spent with him and watching him talk about himself, talk about his life, I think there was a chance that we might have gotten a real interesting look at him.
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