Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [329]
The fans actually ultimately understand whether there’s something going on that’s fun, that’s interesting. I’m not sure that Meredith and Cosell and Gifford loved each other, but you had something electric going on, and we didn’t get that either.
I don’t think Howard Cosell cared if anybody wanted him there or not. And Tony ultimately is a sensitive human being and cared about whether somebody wanted him there.
TONY KORNHEISER:
Our season ends, no playoffs. We’re paying double! And no flex and the worst schedule humanly possible. If you get steady diets of Jacksonville and Carolina and Tennessee even when they’ve got a 10–0 record, you’re not getting the big cities. There’s no compelling reason to watch the game. We had Jacksonville at Houston. Jacksonville at Houston? I did an essay on how nobody’s going to watch this game.
NBC gets flex and NBC can live on the NFC East; you know, Dallas every week, and you’ll be fine. It’s unbelievable, but it says that ESPN is cable and it’s second-rate, it’s the minors. Look, look—Mike Tirico, Tony Kornheiser, Ron Jaworski—that is not Al Michaels, John Madden. That is not Joe Buck and Troy Aikman in peoples’ minds. That’s not. It’s just not.
Jaws is my friend now, which I never thought would be possible for any kind of jock and me. He is my friend, and I dearly love him. I’ve looked for the devil in Ron Jaworski for two years—there is no devil in Ron Jaworski. He was drafted into the pros in two sports. He was a Super Bowl quarterback, a multiple Pro Bowl quarterback; there is nothing that he does or says that would indicate to you he was anything other than a guy, just a guy. We play golf together. Our kids play golf together. He’s patient with everyone. He’s made a ton of money in a ton of different things by being a nice fella, by never having any airs. There’s no air of superiority. There’s an air of superiority with Theismann, but he can’t help it.
RON JAWORSKI:
I had worked with Tony on radio shows and PTI and things like that, so we got a good relationship. And it was interesting because—and I don’t know this to be fact, but the undercurrent was that Joe and Tony just didn’t get along. But Tony and I forged a great relationship and a friendship, and our families did. I enjoyed every second with Tony.
I think people turn on Monday Night Football for Monday Night Football. Does that make sense? They want to watch a football game. I think everyone, at least at ABC and then at ESPN, was about football/entertainment, and that was always the hard juggling act, because I was pretty much a football guy and Tony had a different perspective on the game. I think the way he verbalized it was 100 percent correct. He saw the game from the outside in; I saw the game from the inside out. I was in the locker room; he was outside the locker room. But I thought it made for good commentary; it lent a positive aspect because we saw the game differently. Mike always had a difficult job because the first couple years we were still using booth guests and things like that, and it did make it a little more difficult because he never really developed a flow for the game. So in regards to Mike, I think it put him in a tough position.
SUZY KOLBER:
When I was originally offered the sidelines job for Sunday Night Football, I was a reporter on Sunday Countdown, and really enjoyed what I was doing. So I wanted assurances that it wasn’t a typical injury-report role, that it was going to have more substance to it. The official job offer came from Steve Anderson, but Jay is who I talked with about what the role would be. And, at the time, we discussed me defining the role, because he had worked with Lynn Swann on ABC, and Lynn almost acted as another analyst out on the field. And he knew my background—that I did so many different things: I was an anchor and I was a reporter and I was a good storyteller. So he wanted to be able to utilize all of that. And we talked about redefining the role in a sense that I would be another voice—three guys upstairs and I was the fourth voice of the broadcast.