Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [46]
GEORGE BODENHEIMER:
Australian rules football was one of our bedrocks and we put up a graphic on the screen that said, kind of in ESPN style, “We don’t know the rules either. If you would like to know the rules, send us a postcard.” And we got fifty thousand postcards.
CHRIS LaPLACA, Senior Vice President of Communications:
It was crazy. Some kids in Florida started an Australian rules football league in their hometown, they liked it so much.
BOB LEY:
When Johnny Carson did his first joke in the mid- to early eighties about Australian rules football on ESPN, I said, “Oh, man, it’s a crossover moment. Carson’s watching, which is nice, but also it takes you to a whole other realm.”
GEORGE GRANDE:
We were doing reports in ’81 from Super Bowl XV in New Orleans. One night, we were rushing to get to the airport to send the tapes back, and Fred Muzzy and I didn’t have any packing material. I said, “Muzz, get some paper,” because we didn’t want the tapes to rattle around or break, and he says, “I don’t have any paper, but hold on.” He goes off to another room, comes back, and closes up the box. I said, “What did you put in there?” He said, “My underwear.” I said, “Was it clean or dirty?” He said, “Dirty.” So we sent the tapes back to Bristol with Muzzy’s dirty underwear and socks in there so the tapes wouldn’t move around. I told the guys when I called, “When this box comes in from the airport, open it very slowly!”
TOM ODJAKJIAN, Director of College Sports:
The day I started at ESPN was the day Major League Baseball went on strike in 1981. So ESPN, which of course didn’t have the rights to the majors, said, “Let’s do minor-league baseball.” And since I didn’t have any assignments yet, they said, “Let the new guy jump on it.” So I became the minor-league expert and picked all the games. I tried to find some hook, like Yankees versus Red Sox minor-league teams, or Cal Ripken Jr. highly thought of as a minor-league player. We got a lot of attention for doing live minor-league baseball to fill the fans’ needs during the strike.
It was also my job to outline the twenty-four-hour schedule. Back then, we aired so many things that had been taped, and we repeated a lot, so live events weren’t driving the schedule. In order to keep track of what was on, I did weekly charts, and I would literally color them with Magic Markers. I remember red was boxing for blood, brown was rodeo, green was golf, and blue was swimming. There wasn’t that much original programming.
GEORGE BODENHEIMER:
I spent about 90 or 120 days in the mail room before I was promoted to the videotape library. And I remember vividly that my first shifts there were 4:00 p.m. to midnight and then midnight to 8:00 a.m., so I saw all the different sides of the place. But I remember sitting in the tape library one afternoon, minding my own business, when a producer barged through the door and says, “You! You know how to run camera?” And I’m like, “Well, no.” He says, “Good, come with me.” And, like, two minutes later, I’m operating a camera for a college football program. But I quickly came to the conclusion that my interest was more in sales and marketing than in television production. And then I went to meet the heads of those areas and because of the informal nature of the place, you could easily ask, “Can I come by and have a cup of coffee with you?” So I met the heads of the sales and marketing groups and basically concluded that I would take whatever opportunity I could get to move into either the affiliate area or the advertising sales areas.
CHRIS BERMAN:
In ’83, the ABC affiliate in San Francisco was looking at me to be their sports guy. The GM loved me. They’d changed news directors and they were worried. They wanted me. I don’t know if many people know about this one: Giants, 49ers,