Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [352]
CHRIS BERMAN:
Everybody thought it was cool. Several people changed their vote because they said McCain was nicer to me than Obama was.
BOB LEY:
I interviewed John McCain during the campaign, and they had to drive him away from me, his handlers, to keep him on schedule, at a raceway in New Hampshire, because he wanted to talk about the Ohio State–USC game the night before, this and that. Same thing when I interviewed Bush at the White House, for our twenty-fifth-anniversary project. He shows up early, which he had a wont to do when he was in office, so he sat for twenty and he stood around for another twenty-five to shoot the breeze with us on sports. He was supposed to go out and introduce Jack Danforth as the new UN ambassador, but they kept that waiting for a few minutes. This was the second Bush. First Bush I interviewed a couple times as well. Politicians are fans. They’re part of the numbers that people may scoff at, but there’s that cultural affinity.
In fact, I interviewed Bush 43 at the White House on the same day that Saddam Hussein made his first appearance in court. So I had a chance to ask Bush about that.
It’s quite something to go knee to knee with the president and he starts telling the story of 9/11 again. Throwing the first pitch out. Like tears in his eyes telling it. But it didn’t even occur to me, because I had Dan Bartlett right over there, saying, “None of this stuff’s airing today, right?” and I didn’t respond to that. Imagine if I had jumped in with a question as to Saddam. It would have poisoned the relationship. I mean there are ground rules you have to respect. We’re granted an interview under certain parameters.
John Walsh was determined to round up really good writers for ESPN, and sometimes he found them even when he wasn’t looking. Like when he paid a visit to the journalism school at the University of Missouri, his alma mater, to pick up an alumni award. He was intercepted at the airport by a student who said he was Walsh’s driver, even though Walsh had specifically requested that there be no car and driver waiting. He wanted to take the bus and thereby relive school days of yore—or so he said.
But the self-appointed driver, Wright Thompson, wouldn’t take “go away” for an answer, and for the next few days, he drove Walsh all over the city. Although he grew up in the same southern town—Clarksdale, Mississippi—as playwright Tennessee Williams, Thompson’s favorite among fellow southern writers was William Faulkner. He was also influenced by such bad boys of American literature as Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer.
He and Walsh had plenty to talk about.
Thompson went on to graduate from Missouri and find work at a southern newspaper or two. Then one day Walsh got a call from his former driver: “I’m ready to come to ESPN, if you’ll have me,” Thompson told him. Walsh offered Thompson a job, and in 2006 Thompson was named senior writer for ESPN.com.
Described by colleagues as relentless, in a constant state of educating himself, being a “literary lion,” and maintaining a stubbornly positive outlook on life, Thompson will call people who work at the company to ask them what they want to read about—and take it from there.
Thompson has written many a memorable story over the course of his career, including, in 2007, the profile of a young Georgia man, a promising high school athlete and homecoming king, who was sentenced to ten years in prison for receiving oral sex from a high school girl two years younger than he was. Thompson’s persistent reporting and poignant prose got the young man sprung from the slammer after serving only thirty-two months of his sentence.
“It just reminds you,” Thompson told an admiring interviewer,