Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [37]
There were people who would move up to Bristol and didn’t have an apartment yet, and Bill and his wife, Fran, would say, “Just come stay with us for a while.” People would end up staying there for months.
I haven’t worked for Bill now in twenty years, but I could go to him right now with any favor, and he’d say yes.
JOHN COLBY, Composer:
Bill had a lot of pressure on him and was a very volatile guy. You could always gauge his level of agitation by the size of the sweat rings under his arms.
TERRY LINGNER, Coordinating Producer:
I was working for ABC at Lake Placid and played hooky from the Olympics a couple of times in February of 1980 to go down and visit Scotty Connal in Bristol. After the games were over, I interviewed with him and was able to get a gig, so I didn’t even have to go home. Frankly, I thought ESPN was going to be a better fit for me. I was tired of all the screaming and yelling at ABC. They had this saying, “Did you get tattooed?” and ostensibly that meant, “Did someone scream at the top of his lungs and dress you down on the headset?” I guess they had fun with their own egos. It was just mind-boggling to me. It made me think, “I may be learning from the best people, but this is not the way I want to work.”
Bill Fitts was the brightest guy I’ve ever met in the business. I consider him my mentor, almost a father figure. He once told me there wasn’t one aspect of our business that he didn’t like. He didn’t care if he was pulling cable or writing for Summerall or Musburger. He just loved it all—top to bottom.
FRED GAUDELLI, Senior Coordinating Producer:
Bill was the type of guy that you really didn’t want to ever disappoint. He inspired you to do good things and actually to try to do great things. Scotty believed in specialization; if you were a football producer, you should be doing as much football as possible. If you were an auto-racing producer, you should be doing as much auto racing as possible. Or if you were an event producer, you should not be producing SportsCenter. Bill believed the total opposite. He didn’t think there should be any specialization. He thought that such specialization would inhibit your development as a production person. He never wanted you to work on the same thing more than two times in a row. He wanted you spread across the spectrum doing as many different sports as possible.
I’ll never forget something he said once in a meeting about our written reports. “When you guys finish your shows, take that file and throw it out. Do not keep one piece of paper, because next year when we have to come back and do this again, it will force you to rethink everything you did, not just pick up from where you left off and implement the same procedures and production elements that you did last year.” And he was 1,000 percent correct about that.
STEVE ANDERSON:
We knew how good CBS, ABC, and NBC were, and we realized we weren’t as good. Part of it was their resources, part of it was their talent. They had guys in the trucks who had years and years of experience; we had guys like myself, who were just starting out. Bill expected us to work like dogs, and we knew it. He wanted us to take a lot of pride in what we did and keep in mind that we could do what we needed to do with less.
GREG GUMBEL, Anchor:
I don’t know how they heard about me other than the fact that both Chet Simmons and Scotty Connal had previously worked with my brother at NBC Sports. I kind of freely admit that they probably needed a face with color on the air, and I don’t deny that probably played a part in why I was hired. Now I’m awfully quick to point out that that’s not the reason why they keep you.
I wound up living in the town of Simsbury,