Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [366]
Truth is, it wasn’t Tirico’s fault; it wasn’t Kornheiser’s fault. Those who blamed Rothman for not being able to control the talent were being unfair. He tried repeatedly, but he had been dealt a bad deck. Management just got it wrong. It simply wasn’t the right fit. The boys in the booth couldn’t or wouldn’t change their ways to mesh with each other.
MIKE TIRICO:
Tony is brilliant. I enjoyed watching Tony work. I enjoyed working with Tony, I really did. Tony has been incredibly successful in places where you come to hear Tony’s opinion on something, and that was obviously his column, which made him, and the radio show—national and local, which were terrific—and Pardon the Interruption. You came to all those for Tony’s opinion. But to me, you come to a football game for the football game. The football game is surrounded by a bevy of wide-ranging opinions in the pregame shows, the postgame shows, and the talk shows during the week. People come to the game for the game itself. So we were trying to make what Tony does best—strong opinions—work within the body of the game; that was the challenge. The problem for me working in the booth was you’re trying to cover the game and you’re trying to get Tony’s opinion too. A play happens on the field, right in front of us, and here’s a replay. Tony couldn’t add to what just happened. He could add to the person and give it some definite context there, but the viewer has become conditioned—at least from where I sit—to “tell me why that happened.”
It pisses me off that people will look at those three years and throw a blanket over them and say, “Well, they weren’t very good.” We were the only football show that was nominated for an Emmy three years in a row, by our peers. So I still stand on that merit that the show was not the be-all, end-all, trust me, but the shows we did were pretty good football shows. I’ll take some of the games that we did, Buffalo-Dallas, the return game in New Orleans, the Patriots playing Baltimore, where they’re trying to get the undefeated season and Don Shula is in the booth during that game. I’ll put those broadcasts up with anybody’s broadcast of anything. They were damn good. And Tony was a huge part of that.
JOHN SKIPPER:
Anybody who knows Tony at least understands what we hoped we would get on the air. I told those guys that for me, the ideal booth would make every fan think that being the fourth guy sitting next to those three guys on the sofa is the best place to watch a football game. It’s fun. It’s insightful. It’s relaxed. I said, “Please make it feel like you guys are having fun, you love the game, you’re cracking wise a little bit, and you’re listening to each other.” The fans ultimately understand whether there’s something going on that’s fun, and that doesn’t mean you have to love each other. I’m not sure that Meredith and Cosell and Gifford loved each other, but with them you had something electric going on, and we didn’t get that either. We just couldn’t quite get the chemistry right.
TONY KORNHEISER:
The schedule was terrible. I looked at it and began to shake. It was a nightmare. Two games in Washington, one game in Boston that you could drive to in eight to nine hours, one game, I think, in Cleveland. Everything else separated by at least eleven hundred miles. I have a contract that says I can fly private planes and I did it four or five times in ’08, but nobody offered to give me the Disney jet, and even if they offered to give me the Disney jet, my fear is being in a jet. My fear is being separated from the ground. I hate flying. I don’t like bridges. I don’t like being on boats. I have all the attendant phobias that go with this—the classic hallmark, textbook phobias. And I couldn’t drive to those games without missing a lot of PTI. It was untenable. It was not going to work. It came to the point where they delayed and delayed and delayed talking to me and I delayed and delayed and delayed talking to them,