Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [77]
A new chapter was beginning. The story was getting more complex and less predictable. This was, in every sense, the Big Time.
Garnering television rights to NFL games beginning in 1987: Step Number Five in ESPN’s rise to world dominance.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
Televising the games was a big deal, but I got something else from Rozelle that year which would wind up being incredibly significant as well. We made up this tape of the way we did highlights and asked him to give us unlimited minutes of highlights, which meant he had to carve that out of the network deals, because there were always time limits on how much you could show. He agreed, and so now we would have a great highlight show on Sunday evening before our game that night. Thus was born NFL Primetime. Then all I had to do was convince Chris Berman that he shouldn’t be doing play-by-play of the games, and instead anchor that show. That turned out to be harder than getting the highlights out of the NFL, but once Berman agreed, Primetime became a huge profit center for us.
BOB RAUSCHER:
When we did SportsCenters before we got the NFL, there were always footage restrictions by the NFL on how much we could show. But once we got the NFL package, we could go as long as we wanted. We were showing three, four, five minutes of highlights! The conceit was, don’t just show me Emmitt Smith’s touchdown, show me the key block that sprang Emmitt’s run as well. One game had twelve straight completions; we showed all twelve. It was an opportunity to really take people inside the game, give them a sense of how a game unfolded. It was a revolutionary time.
On Sundays, people tuned over to see our show after the earlier games ended, and the numbers grew as we got closer to our game. They had a re-air slot at midnight. Players watched it. Coaches watched it. And Chris Berman was the perfect person to host. His passion and his love of football came through. He’s a true fan at heart. In January 1987, we had been outside the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, where the Giants beat Denver in the Super Bowl. In those days, we had a really scaled-down operation, so we ran out to the truck for Chris to voice all the highlights, which would be rolled from Bristol, but there was no net return, no video coming back to us, so Chris couldn’t see any footage. Chris wound up doing the highlights of the Super Bowl sight unseen and nailed them. He did it from memory and from his understanding of the game. We had a producer in Bristol who was in his ear telling him what was on the screen, and Chris was then basically embellishing those plays as he delivered that highlight presentation. That always stuck in my mind.
Then in 1988, NFL GameDay with Chris Berman, Tom Jackson, and Pete Axthelm—I was producing at the time—won for best studio show. It was the first ESPN studio show that won an Emmy. I was very proud of that. We all felt as if we had really made it, and made an impact with what we were putting on the air.
TOM JACKSON, Pro Football Analyst:
I had a very good relationship with the media when I was a player. I enjoyed talking to them, I think, as much as they did with me. The last game I played in was Super Bowl XXI, where we lost to the Giants, but I sat in that locker room afterward and gave anybody who wanted an interview. I was actually the last person to leave the locker room. I announced my retirement from football in the spring of ’87, and within a week I got a call from NBC, who asked me to come in to New York for an audition. After I did it, I was literally marched into the next room and asked if I’d like the job. Now here’s the weird thing: my dad always told me, when you’re going to make a big decision in life, geographically, professionally, whatever, if you can, take a week and really think hard about what it is that you’re going to be doing. So I asked NBC if I could have a week to think about it. During the