Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [323]
JOE THEISMANN:
They wanted to recreate PTI. But this is what executives don’t understand sometimes: the dynamic of a booth. On PTI, Tony and Mike can spend a minute and thirty seconds in conversation on a subject. In a booth you have about an eight- to ten-second sound bite, and Tony really needed time to set things up. Every one of his opens was telepromted. It had to be because that’s what Tony was used to. Tony came from a different element of television than the live booth.
I loved working with Tony. And I really felt like toward the end of the year we had started to develop, I guess, what management was looking for—not that management ever told me or anyone else what they wanted.
TONY KORNHEISER:
Joe’s always the quarterback. I had terrible reservations about working with Joe because I could picture me literally kneeling at his feet, taking quotes at his locker after a game, because I covered him, I wrote columns, I had to get quotes. I didn’t think that was a good posture for two people working together as equals.
But Joe could not have been more welcoming to me. Joe said, “This is going to be great. I really like your work. I’ve loved your work for a long time and this is going to be great.” But—and these are the parts that I’m reluctant to say—Joe would say things like, “You just stick with me, I’ll lead us, everything will be fine.” Joe’s the quarterback. Joe had to be the quarterback. Joe didn’t even respond to me in the booth. So I had two guys not responding to me.
JOE THEISMANN:
On March 23, 2007, I was called to New York for a meeting with the executives, and what they basically did was explain to me that they wanted to make some changes. And you see, here’s the thing: Jaws, Ronnie, and Tony had done some stuff—Jaws had done some stuff on PTI with Tony, and I think they liked the chemistry and interaction. So what they did was—this is only pure hypothetical on my part—they liked the looks of it, and I’m only assuming that that’s the way it went because Jaws wound up taking my spot in the booth. So at that meeting they explained that they wanted to take the show in a different direction, and this is a direct quote: They noticed that when the telecast came back to me, I talked about football.
I had been asked to talk about football. This is what Jay wanted me to do, focus on football. You basically follow orders, and when they ask you to take a certain approach, you just do the best you can. And that’s what I tried to do. The thing I said to Norby and Skipper was “Look, you already made your mind up. You don’t want me, so I’m not going to sit here and beg for my job.” But I did say to them, “The only thing that I would’ve liked was, if you didn’t like my work, I would’ve at least appreciated the opportunity for you to say to me, ‘Joe, we would like you to do this.’” I think if you don’t like something that someone is doing, if you want to keep them, you give them a chance to modify. It was never pointed out to me that I had to do something different. In fact, they were extremely complimentary of my work when I got into the meeting. They said they thought it was one of the best years I had. That’s when I knew that something was coming. That’s when you sort of stick your jaw out and wait for the right hook.
Jay had no idea that I was fired. I called Jay and told him. Normal management, if there is such a thing, sits down with the people in charge of an entity that they put them in charge of and talks about changes that they want to make. The only thing that bothers me about the whole situation is that I only would have liked Norby and Skipper to sit down and honestly look me in the eye and tell me the truth, and the truth was: “Hey, Joe, look. We’ve taken over from Mark Shapiro. We’re changing the booth and we’re going to bring