Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [363]
This is where I’m being totally open: fear has to drive you if you are a sportswriter in this day and time. ESPN has contracts with everybody; it is a partnership. Now, at no time did they ask me to compromise myself or my journalistic ethics or principles, but that doesn’t mean that as a human being I don’t see the specter of Commissioner Stern hovering over me, or Roger Goodell hovering over me, or Bud Selig hovering over me. And if you want to be in that position and your foundation is journalism, breaking news stories, telling it like it is, being willing to reveal stuff that most people wouldn’t reveal, and you work for a company where there are contracts with these people, it does scare you that one day you’ll wake up and everything that you’ve accomplished will be gone at the snap of a finger. It scares the hell out of you! What you need to do at that point is diversify your portfolio so at least you’re working for the next forty years or so. I’m forty-one years old. I’m not about to retire within the next couple of decades. I want to know that I can work, and I don’t want to be where somebody can snap their fingers and all the work that I’ve put in over the past sixteen years is gone just like that.
On April 3, 2009, John Skipper let me know that ESPN was not renewing my contract. It’s their right to do that, but it doesn’t take Einstein to see what happened. All you have to do is just look. It was very, very obvious.
What people need to remember is I was a general columnist for the magazine, I was a columnist for ESPN.com, I was a radio host for ESPN Radio, I was a television host for Quite Frankly on ESPN2, and I was the NBA analyst for ESPN. And then, by one person’s wand, it was gone. Because everything was under their umbrella, I was out of five jobs! Not many people are talented enough to have five jobs—but I did.
JOHN SKIPPER:
I like Stephen, and he did many good things for ESPN. He rapidly became a signature voice for us, and we did pile on the work. He had a daily television show, Quite Frankly; a daily radio show; he continued to write a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer; and he was one of our regulars on NBA Studio. And with each of these assignments came more money. We cancelled Quite Frankly, and we wanted Stephen to leave the paper. We did want him to concentrate on fewer things, and with that came less money. We made him an offer, and he chose to pursue other options.
ROB KING:
Stephen blazed a meteoric path here to the point where he had his own show based in New York. He was bringing different voices to our air and working on several platforms, including having quite a following on radio. From my perspective, that was a pretty tall order, and he started spreading himself fairly thin. Personally, I never had a day where I couldn’t get Stephen on the phone, never had a problem with getting him to do things for me. But I think there were some other folks who didn’t have the same experience. I would hear he missed some meetings and would be checking e-mails in the middle of a meeting, and generally didn’t seem engaged. Now, is that fair to Stephen or just the result of him being overwhelmed by so many endeavors? But it didn’t meet his vision of what a substantial role is. Stephen has very clear ideas about what he wants and what he expects.
GEORGE SOLOMON:
I mentored Stephen A. Smith for a few years. I never hired him, but I used to give him advice when he was coming up. Then one day I looked at Sports Illustrated and there was five thousand words on him! With a big picture! And you know why? Because