Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [82]
We looked at the people at CNN. Remember, in those days, CNN Sports Tonight was out-rating SportsCenter, and so we looked at Fred Hickman and Nick Charles. But there was this guy that was also on their air, Dan Patrick. We all liked his writing ability, so we flew him in, and I thought he was very strong and that he could be a number one with us instead of being a number two behind Hickman and Charles. So we eventually hired him.
And Al Jaffe had this woman in Atlanta named Robin Roberts who he had met a couple years earlier, but she wasn’t ready for a national audience yet, and now he thought she was, so she came in. Then one time we sat down and looked at a tape of this kid just out of Syracuse, Mike Tirico; we said, “That’s like a no-brainer; we’ll hire him.” I thought we should try to get a deal with Peter Gammons. I had read him in the Boston Globe and SI for fifteen years, he knew the most about baseball, so I wanted him and that worked out. Recommendations came from all over. Steve Bornstein came in with a note from his liquor-store owner, who said this guy, Charley Steiner, who was a radio announcer, was now available. He had just been fired by the Jets as their play-by-play guy on radio, so we hired him. Jimmy Roberts had been a producer for Howard Cosell and Dick Schaap at ABC Sports, but never on air. Jimmy had a tape of pieces he had written and produced for others; he had gone back and reshot them all with stand-ups of himself. We hired him. And Andrea Kremer, from NFL films, had never been an on-air reporter before either, but she was an incredible news hound.
PETER GAMMONS, Baseball Analyst:
I was purely a print guy when John Walsh hired me. I don’t think I had ever even thought about going into television at that point. I was the lone print guy at the time, and it was really nail biting. They helped me understand that I should think of it as talking to a bunch of people who were interested in what I was interested in, who were interested in what I was doing. Once I figured that out, it made the transition a lot easier.
In 1988, we had the great Orel Hershiser year, the Hershiser playoffs and World Series. Jim Kaat was my partner, a brilliant baseball guy. We would do a lot of talking before games and then interviews. Hershiser was on this incredible run and he kept pitching, so I remember asking him, “Don’t you worry what this is going to do to your future?” He looked at me and said, “Lookit, I don’t care, ’cause I may never be in this place again in my life. This is what I set out to play baseball for. So you don’t worry about whether you get hurt or not. You worry about enjoying the moment.” And of course he did blow out and his career was never the same. But it was a great moment for me to understand how athletes think and why certain athletes have so much passion for what they do.
JIMMY ROBERTS, Reporter:
All you need to know about my career is I was hired to do television by a blind guy. John Walsh hired me, and I started the first ESPN bureau, in New York. But I have to tell you—and I’m not being falsely modest—I had never been on camera before, and I wasn’t very good at it. So those first few years were painful. I was just fortunate to land at a place where they let me be as bad as I was and learn on the job.
I had been hired in June of 1988, and my first assignment was to work the Tyson-Spinks heavyweight championship fight in Atlantic City. I was terrified because I was going to have to be on live television. I wasn’t going to narrate something on tape—that I could do a hundred times till it was right. I was going to be on live television. I had to do an interview with Robin Givens, and our coordinating producer at the time was Barry Sacks, who is a very rough kind of New York guy. He says, “This is the way we’re going to do this. Jimmy, I think you’ve got to ask her about