Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [68]
How much the fans came to see racing, and how much they savored the inevitable crashes that sent flaming cars climbing walls and soaring into the air, can’t be known, but the action was thrilling, and putting it on ESPN civilized the sport without diminishing its sheer kinetic power.
MIKE TYSON, Boxer:
ESPN helped me a lot in the beginning. There were many people who saw me fight for the first time on ESPN, and it was great because it was national television. So anybody could see me. It turned out to be a great showcase for me. I don’t think many of the fighters back then realized they could really make a reputation by being on ESPN. I did. I would try to be on every card. I said yes as much as I could. It was “you shake my hand, I’ll shake yours” with them because we helped each other, 100 percent, 100 percent. And when I experienced it myself, watching ESPN, I had never seen highlighting like that before. They did a great job, not just with boxing but with all the other sports. They were pretty awesome at that time.
FRED GAUDELLI:
Right after the ’84 Olympics, we acquired the rights to the U.S. Olympic Festival, which was basically a way for the USOC to develop their Olympic teams during the next four years. They were all summer sports—swimming, diving, track and field. At that point in time, ESPN was not nearly sophisticated enough from a technology standpoint to pull this thing off. We were basically a bunch of young kids being taught by Bill Fitts. But Bill had us going in there like we were doing the Olympics.
After one snafu after another, with Bill producing and in master control in the truck, the truck—I kid you not—catches on fire. So the head engineer rushes into the truck and says, “Okay, everybody out of the truck!” But Bill says to the guy, “We’re on the air! We can’t go anywhere!” And the engineer says, “Did you hear what I said? The truck is on fire. Out!” So Bill says, “Okay, everybody out except me and the guy who’s pushing the buttons.” And that guy looks at him, and says, “Me?” Bill says, “Yeah, you. We’ll wait until we go to commercial and then we’ll be able to leave.” And that is Bill Fitts in a nutshell.
ROGER WERNER:
Jack Gallivan was kind of forced on us through the Don Ohlmeyer connection. Don was lobbying hard for him. Jack’s family was very wealthy and owned television stations, including an ABC affiliate, I think, in Salt Lake, and Don had some connection there, some reason to want to do Jack a favor.
Jack was in charge of SportsCenter, and his vision was that he wanted it to be, in his words, “the news source of record in the sports world.” He saw that in very serious journalistic tones, and his vision was kind of New York Times. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but where it started to create a real issue, and why I ultimately had to sit down and fire him, was that he was trying to get Chris Berman to stop using nicknames and the shtick that Chris had developed over the years, and he tried to do the same thing with Tom Mees and every other talent. Essentially he wanted everybody to be Edward R. Murrow.
My feeling on SportsCenter was that journalistically it ought to be the top-quality source for sports news—no question the source of record—but that the whole sports area was the fun and games section of the journalistic world. I felt personally there ought to be a high degree of tolerance for colorful personalities, for gags, for shtick, for whatever worked—for whatever made a sports fan tell his buddy at the water cooler the next day, “Hey, I saw Chris Berman” or whoever—Dick Vitale or any of our guys—“and he said an amazingly funny thing,” or “he had a different take on something.” That’s where Jack got himself into trouble.
I thought that if you’re lucky enough to be running and building a product like a sports network, then the job had better be a lot of fun for everybody. ’Cause if it isn’t, something’s horribly wrong. People had better treat each other with respect and make it a healthy, exciting, fun place to work, or get out.