Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [367]
I had never ever heard a discouraging word about my part in the performance—never from Skipper, Walsh, or Norby. So, if they had been planning a change, I was utterly oblivious to it.
Look, Mike Tirico’s charming. He’s witty. He’s clever. He’s an amiable dinner companion. But if you injected him with truth serum and asked him if I was ever his first choice to be in the booth with him, he would say no. Mike once said to me, “I’m stuck, Tony. I really don’t know what to ask you. You didn’t coach. You didn’t play. I don’t really know what to go with.” I think he saw in me someone who was essentially plowing the same ground that he would have plowed—looking from the outside in, being somewhat literate, being somewhat jocular, and taking it out wider. So it was really: if I’m there, what is he going to talk about?
We had a lot of philosophical disagreements, especially about the extent to which it was an entertainment show. When they had guests in the booth, many of them stunk beyond words. But I was for conceptual guests in the booth. I was for Monday Night Football as I remembered it as a child with Cosell and Meredith and Gifford, but Mike really just wanted to be the play-by-play guy on Monday Night Football.
Early on together I said, “Mike, you know what really works well on PTI is when Mike and I talk over each other—” and he cut me off right there and says, “That’s a nice little studio show, but Monday Night Football is very important, so don’t ever interrupt me when I’m talking.” You think that works with a guy sitting one foot to your left for three hours a night?
I had watched Mike Tirico on air for years, and this guy was poured into a tuxedo, he was so smooth. I watched what he did in golf. He took unlikable Nick Faldo and Paul Azinger and he made them into Desi and Lucy. He’s got a great ability to bring out the best in people when he wants to. And the same goes for me. I had done that with Wilbon, so it wasn’t crazy for me to keep thinking that it would happen between me and Tirico. But for two years he didn’t even look at me.
Finally I said, “What do you want from me? Why don’t you even call me by my name?” He told me, “I’m so disappointed in you because you don’t prepare. You’re just not prepared. You’re not professional.” I said, “I don’t prepare like you prepare. It doesn’t mean I’m not prepared. I’m not here to know the names and the colleges of these people. That’s not my job.” So it went on and on and on and on. I felt as if we were competing against each other rather than working with each other, and I kept on waiting for him to treat me like he had treated so many others in the past who he had worked with. Look, I know that Mike Tirico is smart and funny and as quick if not quicker than I am. I admire him and respect him, but it killed me that he had none of that for me. After many conversations, I came to believe that he has little respect for sportswriters and remembers all the sportswriters who wrote bad shit about him. He loves it when sportswriters get something wrong. And I felt he put me in that group, because I’m part of them. It wasn’t that I was right and he was wrong. We just couldn’t agree. I had lots of conversations with Rothman and Walsh and some even with Norby, and I’ll admit I would get upset. I said, “He’s killing me, and it keeps happening.” They would say, “We’ve talked to him, and it’s going to get better,” but it never did. He was doing it deliberately; anybody with eyes could see it. He just wouldn’t engage with me.
Look, am I happy now? Absolutely. In PTI, I’ve got the best show in America. I’m thrilled. But I thought I could have been better on Monday Night Football. I did the best that I could, given everything we were working with. But the happiest guy in America today is Mike Tirico, because I’m not in that booth and he’s got a coach, so he doesn’t have to worry about anything else.
BILL SIMMONS:
Announcing is like wrestling; if you’re not going to sell the other guy or guys in the ring, they are going to look like they suck. Tirico’s always been