Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [51]
About the same time, one of the executives found a vial of cocaine on the floor of his office, and Werner walked into the conference room once, and all these girls were in there. One was cutting the other’s girl’s hair, they were playing some kind of music really loud, and there were a couple girls on the conference-room table. That’s basically where it all started falling apart. It was amazing what was going on with these girls.
The company would have Christmas parties up at some horrible place in Bristol. A couple of them were drunken orgies, but who could blame these people out in the middle of nowhere? It became like a big frat party. There were a lot of drugs being done in the bathroom. There was quite a bit of screwing going on afterward, a lot of it extramarital. But everybody went back to business the next workday.
ELLEN BECKWITH:
When I went to ESPN in 1980, there were eighty people in the company. We worked all day and into the night. We had no social life because we worked all the time. So, what we did is we became social with each other, because who else had the same hours? And we became very social. Very social. There were a lot of interoffice romances going on because you didn’t have a chance to meet anybody else. People were working seven days a week, so it was no fun. People who you never thought would get divorced were getting divorced, and a lot of those guys didn’t have any regard for women.
GAYLE GARDNER, Anchor:
When I first got there, it was kind of small, and I was the only woman at the time on most of the assignments. I was put on SportsCenter and did cut-ins during events. We had to work really hard back in those days. We would do three SportsCenters—the seven o’clock, the eleven o’clock, and then the late one, too, at two o’clock in the morning. We worked these horrific hours. They really got their money’s worth.
SAL MARCHIANO:
Bornstein once took a trip with me to a Saturday Night Fight in Detroit, and I’ll never forget that when we were coming back that Sunday, he said, “You do this every week?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “This is tough.” I said, “Yeah, I know. I gotta tell ya, it’s ruining my marriage.” And eventually, it did.
One time I went into a meeting, and Scotty Connal said to me, “I just had a woman, one of our employees, leave here complaining that she has no sex life.” And Scotty said, “How do I answer that?” I didn’t want to tell him what was really going on. This woman must have been very proper, because there was a lusty sex life going on there. There was screwing in the hallways.
Okay, maybe not in the hallways, but there were a couple of stairwell stories. There’s a couple stories in the office late at night. I did not hang out there. I was gone. I didn’t go to the condos where people lived and had the parties. There were drugs in the building, that I knew. There was one guy who dealt pot. But I stayed away from everybody. I just came and went.
FRED GAUDELLI:
There was a lot of betting going on in the early days of ESPN. There’d be people saying, “I got ten on the Giants today” or “I’ve got twenty on the Colts today” or “I’ve got so-and-so in a parlay.” I mean, all that stuff went on. There are people there now in some pretty high positions who ran the gambling operation back then, or who were a part of it.
BILL SHANAHAN:
Here you are in this start-up, it’s very loose and you’re making it up as you go, and I look back and I realize that those who were into betting on sports were working at a place where the only other place you could be where that much information was coming in about games was Las Vegas. And here these guys are,