Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [393]
ESPN assigned a man named Bob Rauscher who has been there a long time to produce the program. Three or four days before the show I called Bob, just so I would know what the format was, and he told me what would go on in the first segment, what would go on in the second segment, and that they would get to me fifteen or twenty minutes into the program. “Fifteen to twenty minutes into the program?!” At this point, I called my friend Eddie Fabershaw to help me out as a friend and consultant on the project. He was not authorized, and wasn’t paid a penny. He had been through a lot of wars with me at NBC and ESPN, and he’s a wonderful guy. I needed someone to collaborate with, since I wasn’t hearing anything from ESPN. So I tell Bob what I want to do: ten or twelve questions before we get to the big one because I think it’s important to establish who knows, when he let them know, how tough this was, and who had influence. I even gave him an idea of almost all the questions. And Rauscher said, “We agree. Absolutely. Go ahead.” I said, “But you have to leave me room to follow up in case he says something unexpected. I need to be able to listen.” Rauscher said, “No problem. We got it.”
That night, I was with LeBron two or three hours before the show because we taped a segment for the charity. I could see that he was happy; his fiancée was with him along with his guys, he was laughing and enjoying himself, and yet it wasn’t a pull-out-the-champagne kind of thing. I didn’t want to ask him anything because I didn’t want to risk something slipping out, but I did ask Leon Rose, “Have the teams been informed?” And he says, “They will be when you go on the air. We’re going to let them know.” So that was really the only question that I knew the answer to. I didn’t want to know the answers to any others. I wanted it to be real.
All of the questions I asked were very legitimate questions, and for anybody to say otherwise, we’re just going to disagree. Okay, I did ask about the nails. That was a throwaway line that I probably shouldn’t have done, but he was a nail biter and it was meant as a joke. But all the people I was working on this project with knew all that was coming. Not only did they know it, they wanted it and agreed with it. Okay? So it’s convenient for them to say, after the fact, “We would have preferred that we got to it earlier, but ultimately it’s in the interviewer’s hands.” Well, they were in cooperation with the interviewer. So to throw me under the bus and say, like, “Our hands are off this. We didn’t pay him. He’s not a part of it. We wouldn’t have had anything to do.” Come on!
JOHN SKIPPER:
On balance, the way we did it had some upsides and some downsides. Steve McPherson called me and said Ari had talked to him about a time buy on ABC, but said, “They really should be talking to you. This thing doesn’t really fit onto our schedule.” You know why we said yes? The first date they gave us was the fourteenth, and we wanted to do it as a lead-in to the ESPYs. Then they called and said, “It won’t hold till then. We’d like to do it on the eighth.” I said “Okay, we’ll do it,” even though I knew we were losing the lead-in. I thought it was worth it for relationship purposes with Ari, Maverick, and LeBron. I also thought we’d do a good number, and it would position us at the epicenter of sports decisions. We did negotiate what I thought was a reasonable way to go, which was “We’ll do an hour special, but you