Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [397]
MARY CARILLO, Tennis Analyst:
ESPN is very graphics oriented, and [it] was explained to me—because I was having a hard time watching the screen get smaller and smaller—that all that wizardry is there because there’s a lot of places where the sound is off. ESPN is shown in bars or people have it on in the background. They’re watching out of the corner of their eye. They’re doing something else but they’re still keeping an eye on the game. So they want to give them a lot of graphics. I got some really big issues with that. In this world of high-def, amazing camera work, and mics on the courts, I want everything else out of the way.
I would absolutely speak up in meetings, and I had a very definite idea about what good television looks like and sounds like. I have a strong sense of what we should be leaving the viewer with. I felt like we were smothering the product, that we weren’t trusting it at all. People just want to see the tennis match and they don’t really give that big a rip about all this other stuff that we’re bringing in. I would say these things in production meetings a lot. I’d go into one of my rants about us being more of a minimalist. Sometimes there would be changes. Sometimes.
PATRICK McENROE, Tennis Analyst:
You turn on basketball, baseball, football, or any other big-time sport ESPN does and you’ve got the studio setup with the host and two or three people. Then you go out to the game and you’ve got the courtside person and another two or three people in the booth. I think they’re taking that same tack with tennis now. We have a lot of great people, and that means I get to chill out a bit during the second week, but it is crowded.
ESPN had my brother and me broadcast officially together for the first time, you know, as a team. They had the balls to do it, while others, who shall remain nameless, didn’t. The first time we shared a booth calling a match I was obviously very excited. They actually had to do some major mixing of the voice levels between me and my brother because we sound so similar.
JOHN McENROE, Tennis Analyst:
It was great because we had talked about it for many years, and obviously, being brothers, the trick was I didn’t really want to step on his toes and take anything away from him. But fortunately, the last couple of years he’s been sort of working more toward doing sort of play-by-play stuff, so that enabled us to do the same match together. The only problem was we sound pretty similar. He used to take my phone calls for me when I was younger.
Meanwhile, progress made by women rising through the ranks and shattering the glass ceiling at ESPN had been pokey and plodding, but it did happen. Changes of late seemed especially noteworthy if compared to ESPN’s earliest days, when the number of women in positions above production assistant could be counted on one hand; when women were being followed home by male staffers looking for action; and when bad boys in the newsroom let the Playboy Channel play as perpetually as Muzak.
By the first decade of the new century, however, women occupied key positions on the air and even in the company’s once all-male executive suites. Times had—slowly—changed.
A milestone of sorts was marked on September 28, 2010. Not only was the day’s 9:00 a.m. first edition of SportsCenter anchored by two women—Hannah Storm and Linda Cohn—but so was the second installment, which followed immediately at noon, with Chris McKendry and Sage Steele helming.
The pairings were remarkably appropriate. Since her arrival in 2007, Hannah Storm was among the network’s most ubiquitous on-air talents, second only to Erin Andrews. She popped up everywhere—anchoring at Wimbledon and the NBA finals; hosting an event at the ESPYs; even producing one of the prestigious 30 for 30 films, a documentary about the legendary rivalry between Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Storm engendered a good deal of jealousy, with coworkers shocked at how much she did and how management favored her. Erin Andrews’s power came from outside