Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [83]
CHARLEY STEINER, Anchor:
I was the oldest guy in the newsroom and a rookie—a lethal combination. I was a short, dumpy, almost-forty-year-old with a beard who’d never done television. Who would hire me to be on camera? Nobody, except John Walsh. Look at the people John hired during those early years; none of us had ever done live television. On my first day at ESPN, September 1, 1988, this guy comes up to me, looks at me, and he says, “You’re the new guy?” And I said, “Yeah.” Then he says, “This fuckin’ place,” shakes his head, and just walks away.
A couple hours later, a producer comes up to me and says, “How’s it going?” And I said, “I’m feeling really overwhelmed.” He said, “Well, don’t worry. We’re putting you on an airplane tonight; you’re going to Vegas tomorrow for the press conference to announce the Sugar Ray Leonard–Donny Lalonde fight.” Okay. I’d covered a lot of fights in the eighties, when I was doing network radio, and I knew Leonard a bit. And from that point on, I became the boxing guy. It was an interesting time. Don King, Bob Arum, and others were starting to figure out that in order to have pay-per-view audiences, you wanted cable television, and if you were a sports fan, you needed ESPN. So we were granted unbelievable access to all these guys—Leonard, Hearns, Bowe, Holyfield, and Tyson. I became pretty good at tapping into what these guys were thinking and feeling. I was able to differentiate between confidence and false bravado. It got to the point where I was reasonably confident, after spending the final day or two before a fight studying the fighters, that I could pretty well tell you who was going to win and who was going to lose.
GREG GUMBEL:
I have never gone to a place with the idea of moving on to somewhere else afterward. Now I won’t deny that every subsequent job that I took paid me more money. At ESPN, I was doing SportsCenter Monday through Friday and hosting a weekly NBA show. I was working with guys in SportsCenter—George Grande, Tom Mees, Lou Palmer, and Bob Ley—who all had a desire to do play-by-play. But the one thing Chet and Scotty really, really denied some people was the ability to let them leave the studio and go out and call games. And it wouldn’t have been that big a deal, because these guys were so happy and wanting to do it that they would have done it for practically nothing. Yet they were forbidden to do it. I never really had a desire to do play-by-play, but Bob Gutkowski had left ESPN for Madison Square Garden and asked me not only to be the host of various shows at the Garden, but to also occasionally call New York Knicks and New York Yankee games. So I kind of felt my way into the play-by-play thing by accident. I won’t deny that Madison Square Garden offered me a lot more money than I was making at ESPN at the time.
At that time, I think there were a lot of people who saw ESPN as a building ground, a place to learn your craft, because you had to learn how to do highlights on the fly, you had to learn to ad-lib, you had to think on your feet. Sometimes we’d be out of material three minutes before the end of a show. Not everything was scripted. That’s probably why I came away from ESPN much more self-confident, simply because of the way we had to do things. ESPN proved to be a great training ground for me.
BILL WOLFF, Producer:
We had this overnight anchorwoman who used to be on the sauce, and she would just lose her shit. I remember she called James Donaldson of the Dallas Mavericks “Sam Donaldson.” I mean, are you kidding me? Rick Tocchet was “Rick Toe-shay.” She was very proud when she called Wayne Gretzky “Wayne Gretzky,” ’cause it