Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [48]
GREG GUMBEL:
At one point, they cut the eleven o’clock SportsCenter down to fifteen minutes, of which the first seven and a half were going to be live for the West Coast and the other part replayed from the earlier show. That’s how insignificantly they thought of SportsCenter at the time.
Scotty fought the advent of teleprompters. His argument, and he turned out to be entirely correct, was that if it was up there on the prompter, people were going to read it even if the stuff was wrong. And that’s exactly what happened sometimes. The guy who really tried to keep things on the straight and narrow was George Grande. He voiced our complaints and took the brunt of the criticism for the other anchors. He knew how to do things the right way.
BOB RAUSCHER, Vice President of Production:
At Super Bowl XXIII in Miami, with Montana passing against the Bengals in the second half, I remember sitting there in the press box and realizing my eyes were closing. I had been going nonstop for a week plus, and I was exhausted, but I was telling myself, “Whoa, here I am at the Super Bowl, you gotta wake up.”
BILL CREASY:
I lived at 80 Central Park West, 68th Street, right up from ABC, and Evey called me one day around noon. He was at the bar at 21, and told me to get my ass down there. We were alone at the bar, and he had been drinking, and he said, “I’m going to fire Chet. It’s over. Do you have any names?” I gave him three names, one of which was Bill Grimes. I didn’t know Bill Grimes personally, but while I was at CBS, Bill had run CBS Radio, and I always admired the way CBS Radio was run.
ROGER WERNER:
Chet was a programming guy who bought rights and made decisions about producing games, and he was very good at that, but he wasn’t the manager of a start-up business. Bill Grimes worked at CBS Radio, was a very bright guy, so as part of the consulting work, we recommended that he come on board. Getty hired him.
BILL GRIMES, CEO:
I was living in Darien, Connecticut, working at CBS Radio, and Richard Duffy, a marketing consultant, said to me on the train one morning, “I just got a call from a headhunter for a job opening as the number-two guy at ESPN, and I’m not interested, but I gave him your name.” I vaguely remember seeing something about the company in Ad Age but didn’t really know anything about it. The headhunter called me later and we met. Then I met Roger Werner’s boss at McKinsey, Carter Bales. Then it was time for Stu Evey.
Stu told me to come meet him at an apartment on the East Side of Manhattan at nine o’clock in the morning. I had never met him. So I rang the bell, and a voice comes on and says, “Come up to the fourth floor.” I went up, and the door was slightly ajar, so I pushed it open. The first thing I saw was a table with empty pizza boxes and beer bottles and I think some whiskey bottles. It was obviously the remnants of a party the night before. Then I heard some voices, and this guy comes out, and he’s buttoning his shirt. This was Evey. And here I expected, because it was an oil-company executive, to have a real formal-type meeting. So we’re sitting in this living room stinking of stale cigarette smoke and booze, and Evey produces this folder and says, “We know all about you. Are you interested in the job?” And I said yeah. That was the interview. He didn’t ask me one other question.
I was thinking, here Stu was, offering me a job reporting to a guy that I haven’t even met yet.
CHET SIMMONS:
Stu and I both hired Grimes. After I met him, I had to get Stu to sign off on it.
BOB PRONOVOST:
Stu Evey was dating this woman who everybody thought was a stripper