Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [324]
You get hurt, but you understand the nature of the business. We’re only leasing space in time anyway. I look at it this way: our time here on this earth is limited. The amount of energy that you want to spend being bitter or upset you could be spending doing positive things in your life and enjoying life. What’s done is done.
Don’t kid yourself and think it didn’t hurt. I mean, it hurt as deep as anything. I did learn a great lesson, and that was simply this: don’t ever do things in life and don’t ever work in life for the satisfaction of someone else.
TONY KORNHEISER:
I called Joe. I didn’t really know what to say. I can’t honestly say I was terribly surprised, because I saw what happened with Boomer Esiason. I think this happens a lot; it’s just a business I don’t understand.
Was I surprised it was him and not me? Yeah, a little bit. He had a longer contract and he’d been doing this for a long time and he was the expert. Theismann and Jaworski and Aikman—when you sit in that booth, it’s incredible. They don’t need replay. They can see it, they can see it all. I can’t even see it with the replay. So I just assumed if there was going to be a change, somebody was going to say, “Well, Tony, we need to make a change,” because what was I bringing that was so special? I seemed to be the person that was polarizing.
MIKE TIRICO:
I was just told, same thing as with Tony. I don’t exactly wield a huge amount of power here. I’m on the told end, not the input end, with this stuff.
I was disappointed that Joe left, just because Joe had been a friend. When I first started doing the NFL in ’93 at ESPN, it was with Joe in the studio. And over fifteen years you just get to know people and get to like people, and I always liked Joe. I think for whatever reason, whether it was the critics, writers, or people talking about us not doing something, or us being a part of the pop culture portion of the show, that created a negative feel about what we were doing and then created a feeling that something needed to change. That’s probably where things led to a change. I thought Joe tried to adjust and change when we all got it going the first year. What Joe did in those games was a lot different from what Joe had done earlier. I’m sure in some ways it was frustrating to him, but I don’t necessarily think that was the problem, to be honest with you.
JIMMY KIMMEL, Comedian:
I got banned from Monday Night Football. Here’s what happened: I was on in Seattle, and the truth is, no one up there seemed to like Joe Theismann. Everywhere I went, every ESPN person I ran into said, “Hey, you going to do jokes about Joe? You going to fuck with Joe? You’ve got to say something to Joe.” So it made me wonder, “What’s going on?” I didn’t know Joe Theismann, I didn’t know anything about him, but it certainly didn’t seem like there was harmony in the booth. So when I was in the booth, I did a few jokes to Joe. I asked him how his leg was. He was a little bit annoyed. He said, “That was twenty-five years ago.” I said, “I know, I haven’t seen you since then.” It was pretty light.
But then the second time I was on the show the next year, again I got people, like, “Oh, you’ve got to say something about Joe”—even though he was no longer in the booth. There’s a lot of whispering about me saying something about Joe. And I did say something about Joe because it seemed like the elephant in the room to me, the fact that Joe wasn’t there and nothing had ever been said about that. And to be honest, I enjoy making people uncomfortable, especially on live television, where there’s nothing they can cut out. So I said something to the effect of, “Do you think Joe Theismann’s watching right now? He probably has steam coming out of his ears.” The truth of the matter is, the guys in the booth were laughing, but you don’t see the video, you only hear the voices, so the guys in the booth are covering their mouths and cracking up, nervously