Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [346]
RECE DAVIS:
I knew exactly what Lou Holtz meant. Lou served in the military and is to some degree a student of military history, and I think from that generation I’ve heard that analogy used before, that because of the message and the way people followed him, Hitler exhibited qualities of leadership, but they were leading in the wrong direction. That’s all he meant—that when you’re a leader, you have to make sure that you’re leading to the right place. But in our culture now, that’s one of the taboo words, that’s one of the taboo analogies. It was why I immediately tried to extricate him from it on the air and say—I think if I remember correctly, what I said was, “What you mean was, Hitler was a bad leader. He led them to the wrong place.” And I tried to mitigate it as much as I could, because I sensed what the reaction would be, even though I knew exactly what he meant. I knew he wasn’t comparing Rich Rodriguez to Adolf Hitler; that was obvious if you listen to what he said.
LOU HOLTZ:
I had to apologize, and I really didn’t want to, because my intentions were good. I think the point I made was very valid, very solid, and it was a different angle than the way people look at it. I did tell ESPN I didn’t want to apologize, as a matter of fact. I didn’t think I should. But for the benefit of ESPN, I did. They had it written up there. I would have rather put it in my own words, but I read what they put up there, and it was the right thing to do for ESPN. I felt that what I was trying to say was a very solid point that people don’t always look at in that way. I think what I said was true and accurate.
RECE DAVIS:
You want Lou to be himself. That’s the magic of Lou Holtz. It’s not that he’s trained at the Connecticut School of Broadcasting. The magic of Lou Holtz is that he is a master communicator because of his personality. I remember he once was trying to make a point right off the top of the show that you have a winner and a loser, but what he said was, “Every week, 50 percent of the teams lose and 50 percent win.” What he meant was somebody has to win, and I just sort of looked at him then looked at the camera and said, “I promise we’ll try to get more insightful as we go along.”
GERRY MATALON, Senior Coordinating Producer:
I often say, talent are the same as us and different from us, and we need to recognize when they’re the same and when they’re different. To me, they’re the same when they’re sitting in a cafeteria talking about a family situation or something they have to fix in the house. But it’s totally different when we go to do our jobs, because when I have a bad day, what happens? I get a bad phone call, a bad e-mail, have a bad meeting, or possibly a change of assignment. Those guys have a bad day and they get all four that I got, plus it shows up in newspapers and on the Internet. And it’s there forever.
STUART SCOTT:
I can’t be that concerned with how I’m perceived. I care about how my mother and father think about me and how my friends and how my loved ones think about me. I care about how my ex-wife thinks about me; she and I are still good friends and we do a good job raising our kids. It matters to me. But it doesn’t matter to me what people who are writing a blog on the Internet think. I can’t think about that.
Being a father. That’s it. That’s the answer. That’s my answer. I’m convinced of that. I remember there was a day—my oldest daughter, who is fourteen now, but when she was about two or three, there was a show called Gullah Gullah Island, a Disney show, that was her favorite TV show. I was doing the late-night SportsCenter that aired all morning long. So there was one morning and I’d done the show the