Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [334]
STEVE YOUNG, Football Analyst:
Oh, there’ve been some classic fumbles, that’s for sure. Tom Jackson loves this one: I had written down a quote from a player that he’d told me, that I felt like I needed to say on the air verbatim, and so at some point in my comments, I looked down at my piece of paper to read it—but my handwriting is very, very small. It was so small, I couldn’t read it. I was trying to read the quote and Tom had to say on the air, “You can’t read your own writing,” and I had to admit it. I said, “Yes, you’re right, I can’t read my own writing.”
There are times when I go on the air and my wife will text me, “You forgot to shave half your mustache” or “You look awful; comb your hair.” Because at ESPN, they just talk sports, they don’t look at you before you go on. I was actually on-set at the game and my hair was flying up in the air, and it goes back to Chris in Bristol, and Chris says, “Steve, that was electrifying.”
COLIN COWHERD:
If this were a small business and I owned it, I’d just have to be accountable for me. But as it is, I have to be accountable for advertisers and the affiliates and the company, and as I’ve grown in stature at the company, that’s a bigger shield to carry. I’m always okay taking the heat. It doesn’t bother me. But I always worry about my kids, or the company, or my bosses, or the brand. That’s where it gets uncomfortable. I’m never uncomfortable reading about me because I know me better than anybody else knows me, and I know I’m a good guy. I get along with my ex-wife. I get along with every woman I’ve dated. I don’t have any enemies. My best friends have been my friends for years. I have an incredible group of friends. So I’m never worried about the criticism of me. What I’m worried about is that other people suffer because they’re associated with me—my kids, my friends, my company, my advertisers. So when I’m being broadly attacked, I tend to, like most people, build a fence around those who are close. I get closer to my kids, probably. I spend more time with the people I trust. I think any time you’re a politician or a media person, if you’re going through a horrible personal tragedy, you just draw closer to the safest and most loving people. I think you have to come to terms with it. The one thing that I shake my head at is people who criticize yet can’t be criticized. I always laugh at these people. Keith Olbermann’s brilliant but he’s so thin-skinned, and yet he criticizes for a living, sharply and often with daggers. You can’t do that for a living and then not take a punch. I’m always shocked at the talented people who criticize and then are seemingly outraged at any salvo directed at them. I know the way I speak is going to generate hate mail and criticism, and I’m ready for it. I accept it.
That “end zone” thing was really just nothing. That was more Internet babble. I read something that somebody sent to me anonymously. I’d never seen it before. I just said, “This is funny,” and then we read it on the air. We didn’t know who it was. And then we got a bunch of people e-mailing us and killing us for it, and after a while I e-mailed back to somebody and said, “Come on, dude. Get over it. We get it. We made a mistake.” And then I wanted to apologize, and the company said, hey, they wanted to review the situation. ESPN’s an aircraft carrier, not a sailboat. Our turning radius is pretty slow; when controversy happens, it takes twenty-four or thirty-six hours to get everybody huddled, listen to the tape, see what they think. So I would have apologized immediately but management said, “Stay away from it for twenty-four hours, then we’ll address it.” And I did. But that was nothing. Now with the Sean Taylor thing, my superior, Mo Davenport, an African American, listened to it and had no problem with it. A lot of it was turned into a racial issue. “Insensitive.” And