Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [40]
ELLEN BECKWITH, Director of Production:
When Jim Simpson was in the booth with Dick Vitale, he did a thing to get Dick to stop talking. He had gotten tired of telling Dick to stop talking and poking him in the arm, so he would take a white napkin or handkerchief, put it in front of Dick’s face, and just drop it. And that meant, shut up, Dick.
DICK VITALE:
One night we had a game that I didn’t think was that big, and Jim Simpson said to me, “It’s a big game to those kids and coaches who are playing.” And I always try to keep that in mind and make sure I make every game special. That really came home when I realized people were paying attention to what I was saying.
I believe it was Michael Jordan’s sophomore year. North Carolina was playing Virginia, which was number one in the country. Virginia had Ralph Sampson, who had been the player of the year for three years in a row, and they were a super basketball team. They were up maybe seven or eight points with about two minutes to go, and all of a sudden, Jordan goes out of his mind, making one great play after another for an incredible comeback. I said something to the effect of, “Forget about Ralph Sampson! My player of the year is the magnificent Michael Jordan.” A bit later, I went to Virginia to do a game down there, and Ralph Sampson looks at me and says, “Here comes Michael Jordan’s PR agent.”
JED DRAKE, Senior Vice President of Production:
Jim Dullaghan was one of our top financial guys and a former Marine Corps drill sergeant. He had a sign above his desk that said something like “I’m the meanest son of a bitch in the valley.” He offered me a contract, a $45,000 to $55,000 three-year deal. I quickly said, “If you factor in my overtime, I’m making more money than that right now.” He just looked at me and smiled. “Overtime’s not guaranteed; if you don’t sign this contract now, then it’s off the table.” That’s when I knew that I was going to be here for three years.
We were single and young. We used to go out at night and hang out together. We were together all the time. I ended up marrying somebody who worked for ESPN.
JEFF ISRAEL, Camera Man:
One of the odd things back then was that even though our service was satellite based, we didn’t have a lot of money to spend on uplinking. When we were covering our first Masters, we would finish the day’s stories, then drive them to this small airport in Augusta to put them on a plane for the 11:00 p.m. show. Well one day, I was on Seve Ballesteros, and he had this great shot. I had followed the flight of the ball as it hit the green and went in the hole. Obviously that was a big part of our story for the day, because that was the shot that put him ahead for the tournament, and he actually won a green jacket. So we drove that to the airport. The next day, CBS came to us and said, “We’d like that footage to put in our preview show,” and they couldn’t understand why we couldn’t give them the tape and had to turn them down. It was because it wasn’t in Augusta; it was in Bristol. They couldn’t imagine us not using satellite technology to get that stuff up to Bristol.
Throughout most of 1980, and despite previous promises that it would be a nonstop operation, ESPN’s programming was decidedly not nonstop. Apart from early rounds of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, after each weekday’s final SportsCenter, which aired between 3:00 and 5:30 a.m., ESPN simply signed off until it signed on again—at 6:00 p.m. On weekends, the televised day wouldn’t begin until sometime between noon and 2:00 p.m.
In 1979, Bill Rasmussen had promised that ESPN would soon air ’round-the-clock, leaving Simmons furious because he didn’t think there was any way that they were ready for it. Nevertheless, Don Rasmussen, Bill’s brother, working on affiliate relations out of his basement in Peoria,