Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [340]
Parting was much more sorrowful than sweet when Dan Patrick announced, in the summer of 2007, that he was leaving ESPN after eighteen years with the company. Fans were heartbroken; Patrick had been not just popular but deeply popular—a “voice of witty sanity,” as Richard Sandomir put it in the New York Times. Patrick was one of the ESPN greats, and he personified the kind of integrity that can’t be faked.
Patrick had played just about every role available at ESPN on nearly every possible show, but of course his greatest success had come as co-anchor with Keith Olbermann on SportsCenter. But Patrick’s versatility had become something of a curse. ESPN worked him to a frazzle, and in announcing his retirement from the network, Patrick said that “management knew I was tired and needed to recharge my battery” while denying there was any “animosity” between him and his ESPN bosses. Inside observers were skeptical. Patrick conceded he’d just been “going through the motions” in his last couple of years at the network.
Executives balked when Patrick wanted to talk on his ESPN Radio show about where he might go next and issued a terse, hard-nosed statement: “ESPN contractually bans all employees from making specific announcement of their futures on the airwaves.” Later, executives would grumble about, and threaten, any ESPN personalities who wanted to appear as Patrick’s guests at his new venues.
A devoted family man and clever wordsmith, Patrick could write even better than he talked, contributing popular features and columns to ESPN: The Magazine and later serving as senior writer for Sports Illustrated. He was one of a kind, yet so productive and prolific that there often seemed to be three or four of him working at the same time.
DAN PATRICK:
All I wanted to do was simplify my schedule so I could be at home with my kids—that was it. It was nothing. It wasn’t money. I don’t care what anybody will tell you. It was so simple that the quality of life was all that I was asking for, and they refused to do it. All I’d asked George to do is help me stay there, and he didn’t, and it was disheartening that I only heard from him after I left, and then he called to say, as if he was reading from a piece of paper, “Dan Patrick, we really appreciate you being here,” and after that I was, “Yeah, okay, great. Thank you, George.”
No matter what anybody says there, that was what it came down to—“give me quality of life,” and Norby wouldn’t do it. I obviously got knocked back—it took the wind out of me. So I blame myself because I could have said to Shapiro, “Fuck you,” but I didn’t, because this is where I’m supposed to work, so it was “Thank you, sir, may I have another?”
I’m not a victim, and I don’t want to come across as “Oh, woe is me.” I thought it could have been run in a more civil way, like grown-ups, but everything was precedent setting, and that’s a shame, because I didn’t want it to end like that. I just felt bad that that’s the way it ended. And it didn’t have to. That’s why I told you, if I was taken advantage of or manipulated or whatever, I did it to myself—big deal. Big boy. All I wanted was a little respect in the final days there; if we could have done something, I would have been a lifer.
Television is, of course, awash in awards. ESPN not only doles them out but has shelves full of those it has won. Among the most meaningful were the first two that the network ever received from a group called Military Reporters and Editors (MRE), which, in 2007,