Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [326]
MIKE TIRICO:
I’d had a lot of experience in a three-man booth, plus I had studio experience; PTI is a studio show, and that’s where Tony thrives. Tony had done some radio hosting and things like that, so Tony’s skill set for what he could bring to the game, the vision of what he was going to bring to the game, I think they felt that my pure experience would make them work and would give them the best chance to succeed. So that’s where I think I ended up as the person that they pointed to regarding that. I hope it doesn’t come off as conceited. I think the work I had done as a football play-by-play guy in college for most of those eight, nine years before that—on those merits I deserved the opportunity as well. I had not done it at the NFL level, but I had hosted NFL studio shows for over a decade. I heard there was a lot of effort to make Tony understand the rhythm of the booth and that it was very difficult in the first year. We tried to rewrite the way football on television had been broadcast. I think a lot of it gets pointed to Tony, but there was also the philosophical decision to be more than just broadcasting the football games, that it would be stepping out a little bit for pop culture, incorporating some of that within Monday Night. The difficulty came when we tried to rewrite the way football on television had been broadcast. We were the only broadcast that was trying to do that, so there was uniqueness to that. Take that and combine it with someone who had never worked a football game before, and you had some pretty significant hurdles, no doubt about it.
TONY KORNHEISER:
They may have had Cosell on their minds, but I’m not Howard, I don’t have that intellect. I don’t have that bombast, and unlike Howard, I never worked in that setting before. Howard was so brilliant. I used to watch Howard do his radio show. There’s no clock on the wall, and Howard gets to three minutes and fifty seconds [snaps fingers]—ends the story, that’s a wrap, it’s done, you can go home, and you go, “Oh, my God.” The only other person I’ve ever seen do that is Costas. It’s Costas and Howard—Howard one and Costas two. Nobody else can do that, clocks in their heads all the time, know how to end it, how to stretch it, how to make it work. I was awestruck by that. But it’s hard for me because there’s a game going on and you’re supposed to talk to the game. I mean, I used to like to hear Howard say, “I had breakfast with Liza the other day and Liza…” But they apparently didn’t want that from me. I’d hope they’d want that, but they didn’t want that from me.
JOE THEISMANN:
Tony’s tough on everybody. Tony’s a cynic. Tony doesn’t like anybody. Come on, let’s be honest. As a matter of fact, I worked hard to get Tony to go to production meetings. Tony didn’t want to go to production meetings, and he’ll tell you that. Tony’s very honest about that whole thing. I loved working with Tony. It was going to be a lot of fun. I really feel like I could have helped him a little bit more possibly, given the opportunity. But Tony did not want to meet with coaches, and the reason he didn’t want to meet with coaches or players is that he was afraid he would like them. And if he liked them, he couldn’t be critical of them. And it would take away what Tony is famous for. That’s criticism. Everybody’s got a shtick, okay? Tony’s is liking nothing.
TONY KORNHEISER:
In my life as a sportswriter, I never believed that athletes didn’t read the papers when they said they didn’t read the papers. I believed they read them and they just said they didn’t. The first criticism I read of me was in my own newspaper by Paul Farhi, a duplicitous backstabbing snake and weasel who I would happily back over with a bus, okay? After I read that, I said, “You know what, I’m done. I’m not reading anything else.” When my son would read something and say, “You know what, this guy hates you,” I would