Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [365]
Then there was the grand Tony Kornheiser experiment. John Skipper and John Walsh had rolled the dice on their biggest crap table—Monday Night Football, with its $1.1 billion per season price tag—when they bet on Kornheiser to be the third man in the booth. By 2009, Kornheiser had been on for three seasons, and while it is true that there had been improvements with each, there were also fundamental problems that remained—chief among them, Tirico and Kornheiser… and Berman and Kornheiser.
Yes, there was absolutely no chemistry between Berman and Kornheiser, and yes, Kornheiser would repeatedly tell colleagues and friends that Berman had never even addressed him by his first name. It’s not like the two hated each other. Oh wait, they did.
TONY KORNHEISER:
The whole time I was on Monday Night, Berman never mentioned my name. He loathes me, in part because of stuff I used to write about him. Berman and I have an antagonism that goes back many, many years, long before I ever got to ESPN. Once in Minnesota, the big grand poo-bah stood there and lectured me, screaming at me about how great he was, how significant he was, how he built the network, and how I ought to be more grateful. That was when he accused me of writing the blog about him and that leather thing. He said, “I know how it got on the Internet.” I asked him, “What the hell are you talking about?”
CHRIS BERMAN:
In the mid-nineties, somebody said I was in a bar and used a pickup line on a woman wearing leather and she left with me. I really didn’t know what they were talking about. But a colleague of mine, Mr. Kornheiser, chose to run with it, and the Internet chose to run with it for years. I don’t even know what “it” is, but it’s a very dangerous thing, especially when a colleague piles on and gives credence to it.
I can’t believe it still has legs. Legs of what? We’re all learning what the Internet can do. A lot of good, a lot not so good. Guess I was at the head of the boat, the first one in our place to be run through the Internet mill. But we just had to let it go. No choice but to move on from there.
TONY KORNHEISER:
Walsh had wanted me to mend fences with him, and I remember going to Walsh and saying, “Well, I tried. I just got screamed at.”
Still, Berman was in the studio and Kornheiser was on the road. Tirico and Kornheiser, on the other hand, were locked in a booth together, inches apart, every week, performing for an audience in the millions. There was no way to hide the clash. Each approached the assignment in a totally different way. Tirico would spend hours studying players, games, strategies, teams, and league history. Kornheiser didn’t have the patience for any of that. He believed—and this made sense to his supporters—that you didn’t want two guys like that in the booth (actually three, since Ron “Jaws” Jaworski was as knowledge-hungry as Tirico). No, Kornheiser believed in doing what he did best—making off-the-cuff sardonic references to both sport and the culture at large that made viewers laugh.
That was Kornheiser’s idea of the division of labor, but it wasn’t Tirico’s, and no amount of prodding from Skipper, Walsh, Williamson, or producer Jay Rothman—who became Henry Kissinger–like, shuttling between the parties and imploring them to work better together—could solve it. Some on campus had lost patience for all the booth drama and were upset at both Kornheiser and Tirico for making it tough on everyone. A few key individuals even brought race into the mix. “Tirico played it smart,” one ESPNer surmised. “He knew there could never be an all-white booth, and he had calculated that they were never going to replace him with either Stuart