Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [65]
TOM ODJAKJIAN:
I was originally against us doing wrestling, but I finally got on board with it when Loren said, “Ideally we’re going to saturate TV with it and kill off the sport. Or, we’re going to jump on the bandwagon and benefit from it.”
CHET SIMMONS:
One of the things that happened between this new guy who was then made president and Evey was to get rid of everybody who really was associated with me, people who were really close to me, Scotty being very high on that list. And there were others.
LOREN MATTHEWS:
Scotty ended up interviewing all the members of the programming department one-on-one to ask about Steve and what we thought should be done with the department. He left me till last, and, candidly, I didn’t know if I was being set up or what here. Scotty and I were very close at the time. It was a very uncomfortable situation. And when he asked me, I looked him in the eye and said, “Steve deserves the job.”
He just looked back at me and said, “Okay, this meeting’s over.” Our relationship was pretty much over after that.
GEORGE GRANDE:
I saw the handwriting on the wall well before they moved Scotty down, and it was at that point in time that I started to think about moving on. I loved my time there, I loved the people there, but at the same time, I didn’t want to be part of what direction everything was heading in. Chet Simmons and Scotty Connal were ESPN. Scotty was still the heart and soul of production, the heart and soul of what the essence of ESPN was, but he was in Bristol, and with Chet gone, he had no ally in New York. Chet had always had his back. When Chet left, little by little, Scotty lost the protection that he’d had among the suits in New York.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
Scotty ran production for a year or so, and then Bill made me head of production and programming, and that was sort of the end for Scotty. He had to report to me. I tried to work with him. He was not incompetent, but clearly there was this whole cabal of his supporters making things such a soap opera up there, and I wasn’t about to allow myself to get sucked into it. Ultimately, I had to get rid of Scotty.
BILL GRIMES:
Scotty didn’t like Steve; I don’t think he felt comfortable with him, and I think Steve looked at Scotty and thought his time had come and gone. There definitely wasn’t a good feeling between the two. Steve was doing a great job, and if he couldn’t live with Scotty anymore, then I was going with Steve.
ROGER WERNER:
Ultimately Scotty had been around there a long time and was a good guy in many ways and made a big contribution in many ways. So what we tried to do—what I tried to do—is arrange as graceful a transition as we could under those circumstances, and that meant a kind of retirement as opposed to a termination, and it meant a fair bit of lead time and a reasonably kind of humane approach to it, I think. If Scotty were alive today, he might contradict me. I don’t know.
GEORGE GRANDE:
Ohlmeyer came in as a consultant, and I’ll never forget, right after we had gone to the Olympics, he said, “You guys did a pretty good job with the Olympics, what did you spend?” So I took out my Olympic folder and looked. Our whole Olympics coverage—pre-Olympics, Olympics, post-Olympics, everything—came to $242,000. And he looks at the thing and starts to laugh. “Two hundred and forty-two thousand dollars?” He says, “I spent that much on limos when I was at the Olympics with the network.”
ROGER WERNER:
Obviously Steve was a protégé of mine and so I was trying