Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [401]
Now not only sports stars come to Bristol. In the past decade, entertainment celebrities have become increasingly frequent guests. A trip to Bristol can, and often does, plug both ways.
BOB LEY:
I’ll take credit for the term “Bristol car wash,” and it’s only gotten crazier since I came up with it. Let’s say you’re a sports celebrity and you’re coming to Bristol for an interview. Okay, you’ve got radio in the early morning, then from 9:00 to 12:00 some guest appearances on SportsCenter, then First Take. At some point, you’ll do a chat session on ESPN.com and probably visit Colin Cowherd along with some other afternoon radio shows. Outside the Lines will want you in the afternoon, and I’m sure there will be a couple more hits before dinner. It’s a car wash. You’ll get some underside protection, detailing, whatever, and you may look good, but you’ll be exhausted.
JEFF BURTON:
It was a long day—“the car wash.” They keep you busy the whole time, keep you humping, and it’s good to do a whole lot in one day, you feel like you’re being productive. But it’s overwhelming, to be quite honest. Interview to interview and show to show, and of course all of them are on at different times so you actually spend a fair amount of time waiting to do something. It’s a heck of a facility when you go up there, and you think about that deal being just to cover sports. And when you look at how big it is, and at the number of people it takes to do it, you really start to get a perspective of how important sports are to our country, that that much effort’s put into covering sports. Pretty amazing, really.
CAROL MAYER, Manager of Talent:
A lot more people want to come and see ESPN now. I think what’s happened is “the car wash” has gotten some cachet, and people are understanding that when they come up here, it’s almost like going to a little “ESPN: The Amusement Park,” or “ESPN: The Campus.” You see all the people you see on TV every day, it’s got a nice cafeteria, we treat them well when they come in and we’re with them the entire day, so we really provide them with a great ESPN experience.
Say we’re doing a John Smith Car Wash. What I would have done beforehand is reach out to all the different entities—we have a car wash distribution list that’s probably up to about 130 people now—so that goes to ESPN Radio, all the ESPN television entities, ESPN: The Magazine, Page Two, ESPN.com, Visual Media, Podcast, the International, a bunch of different people. I’ll send out a list like, “Hey, John Smith’s thinking about coming on June 23, which shows would have interest if he were here?” Typically if people are interested, they’ll respond in the first twenty minutes of getting that e-mail.
The main concern used to be that we weren’t going to be able to get people here because it’s Bristol. But I think as word spread, and as we started getting a sort of cachet, the name—I mean, now I can throw out that Pelé has been here. Pelé came up on his own dime, so, you know, Joe Shmoe football player, if you don’t want to come, it’s really no skin off our backs.
STEVE BERTHIAUME:
Scott Van Pelt and I had a conversation once and I said, “You know this place is really like an Island of Misfit Toys, like who else would employ these people? What else would they do?” We look around at some of the producers and the CPs [coordinating producers] and some of the talent, and they are just sort of social oddballs—where else would they find gainful employment but here, and here they thrive and they succeed.
MITCH ALBOM:
I think you just have to look at ESPN as a university, and there are some radical professors and some conservative professors, and there’s the big classrooms with the four hundred people in a lecture hall, and there’s the tiny little seminars with eight people in a room. That’s what ESPN is. So it has programs like ours, which