Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [342]
Salisbury would merely suffer the indignity of not having his contract renewed. But Reynolds was outright fired by a tribunal that included Norby Williamson, Marcia Keegan, and Steve Anderson. Whatever the similarities, there also seems to be a wide disparity between the two offenses. Reynolds supposedly gave an overly enthusiastic “hug” (some called it a “grab”) to a twenty-one-year-old intern while dining ever so elegantly at an Outback Steakhouse. Salisbury’s principal misdeed was decidedly more colorful; he took a cell-phone photo of his “junk”—his genitalia—and showed it to coworkers while gamboling at a bar.
Reynolds, a baseball analyst, was an eleven-year veteran of ESPN, and Salisbury had logged twelve years as an NFL analyst for the network. It would be years before Salisbury owned up to precisely what he’d done, but always he maintained that while it was “stupid,” “dumb,” and “sophomoric,” it was not a firing offense. In the hypersensitive new climate, however, and whether or not the exhibition of the photograph had met with approval or revulsion, Salisbury’s fate was sealed.
His reaction was to go ballistic, threatening even to sue Deadspin, the web mag that had never been successfully sued even though it ran inside scuttlebutt all the time. Reynolds went less public with his anger, even though his firing occurred just four months after he signed a six-year, $5 million contract.
Lest the punishments seem unduly harsh, both men suffered from damaged reputations—from previous complaints that had been biding time in their files. Reynolds probably had the thicker file, and yet he was also a particularly well liked guy around the office—and elsewhere. A former pro ballplayer, he volunteered time to Little League kids and became “the Pied Piper” of the sport, according to a colleague who also accurately summed up the case: “Sad, it was sad, but it is what it is.”
SEAN SALISBURY:
The incident didn’t happen on campus, it was at a bar. It was just a stupid couple-of-minutes incident. It was not like somebody went into the bathroom. It was just a thing that college kids do. I’m not pooh-poohing it. It was dumb. I take full 100 percent responsibility. But I also know that I wouldn’t sell out the other couple guys that are superstars that could have got in trouble. I wouldn’t do it. I would never give up a name. You don’t sell people out, and if I’d sold them out it would have caused them embarrassment for their careers. I wouldn’t have done it, and I still won’t to this day, and nobody will ever know who it is. I will never ever let anybody inside on that, ever. Because it’s friends of mine, and they’re popular, and I would never ever get anybody in trouble. So we’ll leave it at that.
MIKE SOLTYS:
In Harold’s case, you’ve got a twenty-, twenty-one-year-old college student who’s in your employ, who wide-eyed trusts him, goes right along, and then he grabs her. And it all was work related. In Sean’s case, he’s doing crazy things at local bars. And ultimately he didn’t get renewed.
SEAN SALISBURY:
When you’re having a few drinks with buddies, and you do something stupid, you’ve got to sometimes suffer the ramifications that come with it. And you ask if it was off campus, you ask if it was a private cell phone, you ask if it wasn’t walking around showing thirty people, but if it offends one person, then you’ve done wrong, and ESPN’s right. I was raised to make good decisions, and sometimes I make stupid decisions, and it’s amazing how a very short few minutes or few seconds of time can have a lasting effect on your career and life. And that incident for me did. I’m trying to forgive myself.
Believe me, I have probably done worse in my life than what I did with that cell phone in a bar one night, honestly. We’ve all gotten behind the wheel of a car when we’ve had probably three beers instead of one, saying, “I shouldn’t be doing this.” We’ve all done that, and that’s far more tragic than me doing what I did. But it’s really helped me rehab my life—my social life and the rest of it, and how I appreciate it more. I’ll