Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [353]
WRIGHT THOMPSON, Writer:
About a year and a half before the 2008 Olympics, my editors and I came up with a story we thought was important. The idea was to drive across China, on back roads, into the small places, into the places that weren’t getting a lot of attention outside of the cities. We wanted to see what people really felt about these Olympics.
I wrote a long pitch to John Papanek, who was then the editor of ESPN.com, and made my case. The top editors, I think, were worried about what we could do in China, what we could do efficiently, what we could do affordably. And I basically said, if this were the 1930s and we were prepping for the Berlin games, I would hope we would go write a story about what was happening in Germany. I think when a sporting event coincides with a force that is changing our world, it’s our job to cover that.
The trip itself was nuts. The road was Highway 108, and the driver spoke no English and drove like a maniac. His name was Singing Songs and he roared around these thin mountain switchbacks. We were in a green Jeep Grand Cherokee that we really beat the hell out of. In my small act of cultural exchange, I introduced Singing Songs to Mötley Crüe and Bruce Springsteen.
ROB KING:
Wright’s got a bunch of talent. I didn’t have anything to do with bringing Wright here, but one of the first things I did when I got here was make sure that he had a contract that laid out for him a huge commitment to making sure that he gets to cover the kinds of stories he wants to cover for some time. He just asks the kinds of questions and talks to the kinds of people that make the experience for the reader deeper and richer. I am far from the only person at ESPN who understands how important he is as a storyteller, and that’s one of the reasons why he found himself on E:60.
Rob King had held many jobs during his twenty-two years in print journalism—even editorial cartoonist and graphic artist—before arriving at ESPN in 2004. In those next few years, his responsibilities ranged from golf coverage, including the Masters and the US Open, to Outside the Lines. But the biggest job, and one of the most strategically important at ESPN, came in August 2007, when King was named editor in chief of ESPN.com, the empire’s Internet voice.
King’s extremely varied background in both print and television had to serve him well in dot-com, since, as he’s said himself, “The Internet is a space where all those things tend to coexist.” ESPN’s website claims eighteen million unique visits monthly and draws upon talent from the entire ESPN spectrum. King reports to John Kosner, general manager of digital media.
Though he hasn’t tried his hand at on-camera work, King cuts a striking figure on the campus. The fact that he’s African American has helped inspire him to promote the employee diversity in which ESPN was once considered deficient. King’s father, Colbert I. King, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning (2003, Commentary) columnist for the Washington Post. Rob says, however, that his father actually went into journalism after Rob did.
Twitterers who follow King know that many of his tweets relate to his kids—example: “Picasso said it took his whole life to learn to draw like a child. Amen.”
RICK REILLY:
I think the moment I realized the power of the Internet was when I wrote this column about Virginia football and they had this new rule that you couldn’t bring signs into the game—no signs.
Al Groh, the coach there, had had a bunch of bad years, and I was, like, “Are you kidding? What they’re trying to do is censor the students, because the students were unhappy with Al Groh.” I said, “That can’t happen at Virginia! This is Thomas Jefferson’s school! He practically invented freedom of