Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [344]
My biggest thing that I have stood firm on is I just don’t like the fact that people think I “cursed Jesus.” That I was drunk? Fine. That I was inappropriate? Yeah. That I was at a level of out of control that I shouldn’t have been at a work-sponsored roast? You bet. I made a fool of myself. I embarrassed myself, I embarrassed the company. But I did not curse Jesus!
I was scared for my job, even. I didn’t get in trouble ever in my life, except once in sixth grade, I think, on the playground. So I was scared; was I going to have a job? What was going to happen? I was suspended before the Deadspin article came out. I was suspended on Friday, the Deadspin article came out on Sunday. It was a week. A week’s suspension without pay. I accepted that as my punishment. I knew when one of my supervisors came down after the show on Friday that clearly I was going to be suspended. There was no other reason that he was down there. Then we needed to go to building five, which was Human Resources. I was, like, “Okay, I’m getting suspended,” and the worst thing, in some ways, was I missed the Winter X Games from it, and I do stuff there and I left them in a lurch. So even worse that I had already embarrassed myself and let people down, I then let them down as well. Calling my parents that weekend to tell them was one of the worst phone calls I’ve ever had to make, knowing that it was in an Atlantic City paper, knowing that my dad goes into work and googles.
I got some nasty mail; there were a lot of phone calls. It was not a bright, shining spot of my career. The following Monday, when I came back to work, I did an apology on the air that I wrote—a lot of people think it was written for me; it wasn’t, I wrote it. I mean, it makes me laugh, I’m a writer for television, it’s what I do, I write my stuff; why would somebody else apologize for something I did? Golic and Greenie were great actually. I called them Sunday right after it happened and I was very emotional, crying on both their voice mails. When I came in on Monday and saw both of them, they both just gave me a big hug.
RECE DAVIS:
We’ve all had our moments. I remember we were once doing a series where Jay Bilas had gone all-access with different basketball programs throughout the country, and he had done something with Sherri Coale and the Oklahoma women’s basketball program. I don’t use a prompter unless I’m doing SportsCenter, so what came out on the air was, “Jay Bilas takes you inside the Oklahoma women.” As soon as the tape rolled, my head immediately hit the desk. Bilas was across the room cackling and just killing me.
DANYELLE SARGENT, Reporter:
It was an after-midnight show, it was me and Robert Flores, and it was literally about 1:30, two o’clock in the morning. We were just waiting for one game to be over so we could finish our show. And the ESPN board went out on SportsCenter. So they, like, tossed it over to us and we had no idea what we were doing. They were, like, we’re coming over to you. And so we vamped for, like, ten, fifteen seconds, and they had cut to a tape segment we had already done because they had nothing—technical crew had nothing ready to go because we weren’t even supposed to be on. So they cut to a taped segment of Robert and me saying, “What the f—was that?” It was not really my personality, though. I don’t get wound up with this kind of stuff. My audio person never cut my mic, so I blasted the United States.
Right after they told me about it, I was, like, oh, my god, I’m, like, am I gonna get fired? And then the next morning, I called the guy who was in charge of ESPN news at the time. He was, like, yeah, come in and talk to me. And they weren’t making a big deal about it. They were, like, yeah, you shouldn’t have done that. Anyone who works in TV knows it’s something that everybody does. It’s no excuse.
BONNIE BERNSTEIN: