Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [405]
Earlier, quietly, Bill Creasy walked these halls—despite his rapscallion ways, one of the greatest executive starmakers in media, relentlessly supporting one young Turk or another who’d take the culture and flip it around like it was some Cirque du Soleil act. And before that, a cadre of SportsCenter anchors, not fully realizing how popular they were because they so seldom got out into the real world. And a deceptively innocent-looking utility closet, memorial hideaway over the years for disparate yet like-minded couples expanding on the definition of “utility.” Once, after their favorite team had won, a contented couple got so excited they summarily dumped colleagues and spouses and ducked into the closet to make love.
And there’s the old original newsroom, where in a different era propositions got proffered and porn was unreeled.
Going back in time, if we could, we’d zero in on a pair of thick glasses, a mane of Kringle-white hair, and a furry white beard, their owner caught in mid-rant as he insists that what this daft factory can produce is not just information but journalism, not mere sequences of numbers but artfully articulated thoughts, the mock-professorial sage holding court in an office filled with books, Rolodexes, and albino memorabilia.
And the legends, some of them ghostly: Bill Fitts, the veteran quarterback of an all-rookie squad that still managed to play proud; Scotty Connal, leaving behind a generation of protégées to carry on the work; the deeply adored and still-mourned Tom Mees, like Connal gone way too soon.
And Stu Evey washing blood off his hands, literally, after desperately trying to forestall the death of a magnate’s son and then keep “the media” from learning about it. Not all his duties had been spelled out in his job description.
Further back, and further still, to a steamy summer afternoon in the middle of 1978, a drab, old, sputtering Mazda trapped on one of the jam-packed lanes of Route 84 outside Waterbury, Connecticut, its air conditioning horribly dead, a sweltering father and son, driver and passenger, arguing passionately over a bold idea that to this day has not been improved upon. The exasperated “don’t knows” and “don’t likes” and “can be dones” volley back and forth, tensions tightening with every moment until the son says, half-defeatedly, “Show football all day and all night, for all I care”—the ensuing mutual exhilaration almost transcendent.
Acknowledgments
Thanks a lot for all your help. “No problem; let me know if there’s anything else you need.” I will. Appreciate it. “Oh, and can you do me one favor?” Of course. What is it? “Please don’t mention my name in the acknowledgments. I don’t want to get into trouble because somebody thinks I was a source.”
That conversation, or one close to it, took place dozens of times with ESPN employees. Perhaps never before have so many been so helpful and yet so desirous of not being thanked. That being understood, let these few words serve as a general if inadequate “thank you” to all those at ESPN who were incredibly generous with their time, assistance, and, most of all, candor.
To ESPN management, who originally elected not to participate in the book, then changed their minds, we offer equal parts gratitude and empathy. Clearly this effort would not have