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least. Then I wrote a thirty-two-page memo to Bornstein, saying, “Here’s what I think the network should be.” One of the recurring themes in my memo was that in the media, you amass a certain amount of material—data and other types of information. At a place like ESPN, every hour of every day you have editorial choices to make and you have to be selective. You need to say, “I’m going to communicate the most effective part of this to reach the largest possible audience for the longest possible time.” And that’s one of the important things that I was concerned with back then—making the best choices that are conducive to the presentation. The fact that I was now talking about television instead of print meant that I now had to consider the most effective way to use moving pictures. I didn’t know much television when I got here, but I knew news, and I knew sports pretty well.

JANN WENNER, Publisher, Rolling Stone:

John had energy and enthusiasm, and lots of ideas. He was a charismatic guy; we all really liked him. He was here for about six months or so. He was too much energy for Rolling Stone. It was almost like we were too small a field for him. He’d come from Newsday, where there were like thirty or forty people, and here we had six or eight in editorial. But he moved us into a more modern era—started a copy desk, proofreading, systematizing all that kind of stuff. He really liked Hunter [Thompson], and he made a lot of lifelong friends here. He’s quite the talent.

BILL CREASY:

During those days, I was consulting for Steve [Bornstein], and he says to me, “I’m thinking about hiring this guy, John Walsh, and I want you to work with him, teach him everything you know, so you’re going to have to spend more time up here.” The first time I’m with Walsh, I was in his office and we were talking about what the place needed. He was sharing his thoughts and I was sharing mine. It gets to be like 5:58, and he says, “Crease, I gotta watch SportsCenter.” He gets up from his desk, goes up to the wall, basically puts his face up against the TV screen, and squints his eyes. And I thought to myself, “Holy fuck, the guy can’t even see the goddamn set.”

STEVE ANDERSON:

Hiring John Walsh was a risk because he was a print guy with very little TV experience, but that’s what the entire place was about then. We wound up being a great team. John needed me, and there’s no way I could have done it without John.

JOHN WALSH:

The consulting gig became a full-time job in January of 1988. It was a leap of faith on Bornstein’s part to hire me, a big leap of faith. The first day I was officially on the job, I couldn’t go into the office because Bornstein didn’t tell the guy I was replacing that I was coming in to replace him. So I actually went to work on Tuesday, January the eleventh.

The very next day, Steve Anderson said to me, “You and I and Al Jaffe”—who was then running part of the news operation—“have to sit down together because we have to hire some new on-air people. We don’t have the bench strength that we need.” It was late afternoon. Al begins by saying, “I have some tapes of people,” and the first tape he put in was of this guy named Keith Olbermann. The first tape. Everything about it was brilliant—point of view, knowledge, the playfulness, the whimsy, combined with seriousness when he had to be serious. So I turned to Al and Steve and said, “Man, this is going to be easy.” Thus began a recruitment drive to get Keith. We didn’t get him for four years.

In the coming months and during the next year, we looked all over the place for talent. ESPN was hiring women before I got there, and of course CBS had hired Phyllis George, who was a real firecracker and made a big impact. Lesley Visser was the first woman who made an impact on the sidelines, and she made the Andrea Kremers of the world possible. You can’t overstate how much credit these women deserve. But Gayle Gardner was also incredibly important. She showed the world that a woman could anchor every day. That was a huge achievement. So that standard had already been set.

The network