Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [322]
TONY KORNHEISER:
When we started, we never got panned. We got praised beyond words, beyond words! It was like we came down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments. It was great, so I knew that had to end. I knew that I was going to be in for something much rougher than that. And I was afraid of failure.
JAY ROTHMAN:
God bless Mark Shapiro. I love him to death. He was on a mission, and he got what he wanted, man. When we first got Monday Night Football, he was shrewd but there was also this whole enthusiasm going around that “We’re going to do it bigger and better than ever. We’re going to blow it out. We’re going to have a great opening. It’s going to be star-studded. It’s going to be a celebration. It’s going to be a bigger-than-the-game kind of thing.” And we all bought into this stuff.
One part of that was we were going to have booth guests every show. Huge stars every week. That obviously didn’t pan out, but there were a couple that were pretty good. And you know a funny thing? Truthfully, the reaction that these stupid things got. If you talk about actual TV time, by the time these people actually sat in the booth was like nothing out of a three-hour telecast, and yet from the negative reaction and criticism and feedback that we got, you’d think that we were, you know, violating something. It was outrageous the feedback we got. I think the playbook we were running with was not aligned with what our fans wanted.
JOE THEISMANN:
ESPN hired Rush Limbaugh. ABC hired Dennis Miller. So you have to understand that ESPN to a degree catches itself in the middle of sports and entertainment. It knows that it does sports better than anybody in the world, but it keeps wanting to sort of reach over into this world of entertainment and see if it can combine both in certain areas, which is part of the progressive nature of ESPN. But when it comes to football, I think that the game is something that the football fan wants to see. So in an effort trying to increase the demographic, they add certain entities, certain individuals. And in doing so, it doesn’t work. And they always wind up going back to a football booth. What everybody at ESPN has tried to do—and ABC—is try to recapture the Howard Cosell, Don Meredith, Frank Gifford booth. And you can’t do that. I think you have to allow people to create their own identities. And that’s really what Paul [Maguire], Mike, and I did. We’re as different as night and day to those three guys, but the fun part was we were able to make our own connection to the fans.
RON JAWORSKI, Football Analyst:
I’ll be blatantly honest with you. When guys like Christian Slater and some of these other booth guests came by, I would have to ask my wife who they were and what they did. I’m pretty much a television guy. I wish I could say I was this worldly guy that understood all the movies and things like that, but I’m not. I was a football guy. And I would have to ask my wife and kids, “Hey, what movies did this guy do?” Quite honestly, it was a distraction for me. I knew it was a direction that ESPN wanted—the entertainment part. But it was very difficult to maintain flow and to stay focused when you’d go eight or ten minutes and pretty much not break down the game.
MIKE TIRICO:
We had Russell Crowe and Christian Slater in the booth. When those guys are in the booth, you’re trying to broadcast a football game and trying to get these guys involved in it. With Sylvester Stallone it was easy. With Charles Barkley it was easy, because he was talking about football and the game right in front of you. But when you get somebody who is a superstar and a huge attraction but they can’t add one drop to what’s going on in front of