Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [341]
A simple story of heroism and courage? To investigative reporter Mike Fish, who already had an array of awards under his belt, something seemed wrong. Many months of work resulted in the revelatory online series and documentary in 2006. Fish’s work was heaped with praise—perhaps most poignantly from one of those Internet websites that seem always to be negative: “We bloggers bash ESPN a lot, and often with good reason, but they sometimes do phenomenal journalism at the Worldwide Leader, and this is one instance of that.”
MIKE FISH, Investigative Reporter:
Imagine this whole image of Pat Tillman, the great American who joins the Army and whatnot: his death was shocking. I think a lot of people were just really taken aback by it. And I personally was, because I’d followed his career, knew who he was, and he was someone, from a distance, I thought very highly of. And his death obviously jarred me and jarred a lot of other people. I think the stories that followed are what triggered my investigation. The people at ESPN encouraged me to pursue it. None of it seemed to make sense. It didn’t add up. The idea that he’s supposedly shot by the enemy, tried to charge up this hill—it sounded too much like a drama or a movie, if you will. Too scripted.
And then the fact that it was sometime after that that it was revealed that he wasn’t shot by the enemy, that indeed he may have been shot by friendly fire. Then a lot of things started to come out. There were a lot of holes in the image that the government was putting out, that he was this great war hero, and it turns out that he was also in adjudication with Noam Chomsky, who was antiwar, and all sorts of things were starting to leak out. And at that point, probably a half dozen people at ESPN had a very strong interest in this particular story and encouraged me. Soon I was battling the military and the Washington establishment, plus trying to gain the confidence of Tillman’s family. And the other thing is the effort back in Bristol of putting that package together, like the graphics and the way it was designed—all those kinds of things which I’m totally clueless on and were magnificent.
A lot of people were really moved by it. It’s probably the thing I’ve written that has moved the most people that really had a passion and really had a lot of concern about it and really enjoyed it. There was also a faction that was just adamant, that thought that “Hey, you signed up for the military. Pat Tillman’s no different than, you know, Joe Jones from Hoboken or Saginaw, Michigan. And why are we playing up this professional football player?” Then there were other people who thought it was, you know, uh, we were denigrating the war effort or being critical of the administration, stuff like that. It went both ways.
Ultimately—I’m not saying it necessarily resulted in, but I think that the story itself kind of fueled, the Congressional hearings that followed. And at the end of the day… Well, let others judge, but I think what we did really stood out.
Perhaps in an attempt to expunge all the tales of ESPN’s allegedly having been a wild wellspring of sexual misconduct in its youth, the network got very tough with employees who faced such charges in its adulthood. Two of the saddest cases reflected the new severity: Harold Reynolds in 2006 and Sean Salisbury two years later. They seem linked by circumstance; it was even said that when Reynolds was confronted with allegations, he complained that others, including, by name, Sean, were getting away with worse.