Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [79]
So in 1987 we had a scoop comparable to LeBron James in 2010. Eric Dickerson had his own fifteen minutes on the air when nobody else knew, and it was very, very newsworthy. Eric was the biggest player in the NFL at that time, and there was no Internet back then, so the next day it made the back pages of the big papers. The whole thing just exploded, and I was very proud of that. Tom Mees, Chris Berman, George Grande, and even Herb Granath said this was the night ESPN arrived as a news-making operation, and SportsCenter went from playing yesterday’s highlights tomorrow, to an organization where you could look at them as being a real news-gathering operation.
Although the Eric Dickerson interview brought much-needed and much-valued attention to ESPN, it had come about because of a reporter’s close relationship with a player—not because ESPN’s news-gathering operation was such a miracle worker. For ESPN to prove itself as a serious, credible, solidly professional news operation, it would have to grow up and make key changes in the way it did business. Fortunately for everyone involved and for ESPN’s evolving reputation, the leadership now recognized this.
Steve Bornstein didn’t know exactly what he was getting when he hired John Walsh as a consultant in July of 1987. The two hardly knew each other, and Bornstein had actually rebuffed Walsh’s attempt, through mutual friends, to join ESPN once before, telling him, “We’re not ready for you yet.” But things had moved fast since then, and with NFL games coming to ESPN in the fall, the network was entering a new era. Why not have some new names and new expertise?
Back then, Walsh was known by many names. To some friends and colleagues he was “John A.”—in the vein of “the Great John L.,” nickname of nineteenth-century heavyweight champ John L. Sullivan—and to legendary editor Ben Bradlee, Walsh’s boss at the Washington Post, he was “Whiteman.” To a select few who knew him well, he was “the world’s most dangerous albino”—as christened at a New York bar by the founder and lead singer of Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys after Walsh was invited onto the stage to sing a few numbers with the group.
MIKE McQUADE, Vice President of Production:
There were no car services for people at ESPN. Either they drove themselves to and from the airport or we went and picked them up. That was my first job there, a driver-messenger. I would often go to the airport to pick up employees, analysts, and highlight tapes that had been shipped overnight.
KEITH OLBERMANN, Anchor:
Mike McQuade used to delight in telling this story: His first day working in the mail room, they sent him to a hotel in Hartford, where a consultant for ESPN named John Walsh was staying. This is before he was the John Walsh of ESPN. And McQuade, I don’t know, twenty-one, twenty-two years old, says, “How I will know who he is?” And they all said, “Don’t worry, he’s like nobody you’ve ever seen before. Picture Santa Claus at the age of forty-five. Keep that image in your mind and you’ll recognize him immediately.” Obviously they used the A-word here; he’s an albino. Okay?
And he drives up to the hotel and there is a banner hanging outside, “Welcome National Association of Albinos.” And it is wall-to-wall Edgar Winters. There is nobody who does not look like Santa Claus at some age. And Mike’s just trying to find the needle in the haystack. Somehow, after half an hour, he