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One time we were doing the tale of the tape between, I think, Razor Ruddock and Mike Tyson, and there was a ten-inch reach advantage, and she says a “ten-inch advantage.” Then her mind goes to the gutter, and now she can’t collect herself. She can’t stop laughing because she’s making a dirty joke about Razor Ruddock’s ten-inch advantage over Mike Tyson. And this is happening on TV. Don’t forget, this was mom-and-pop cable operators, and here she was laughing her ass off.

It was kids putting on a show in the backyard. We didn’t know shit from shit. We were there in the middle of the fucking night, a bunch of twenty-three year olds and maybe one twenty-nine year old. You think John Walsh was there? Hell, no! He was sleeping like everybody else.

STEVE BORNSTEIN:

One of my biggest contributions to the network was that I recognized that the SportsCenter franchise was really valuable but that it had no direction. It was a little bit of the inmates running the asylum. I’m looking at a business that basically cost nothing to produce other than the people I hired to put it on the air. There were no rights fees. We’re making all our profit out of SportsCenter, so I needed more SportsCenter on the air. But all I had was a bunch of kids at 2:00 a.m. on the weekdays, an average age of twenty-two and a half, trying to figure out what to put on the air based on what they used to watch in their dorm rooms at Syracuse a year and a half earlier. I mean, this was insanity.

BILL WOLFF:

It was the Wild Wild East. There was no union, no managers, no supervision, and certainly no ombudsman. There was one girl on staff for every twenty guys. Part of ESPN’s success was there was no place to go, so there were no distractions. It was like being on Parris Island. You were working in this box all the time, and your whole life was that. Then it was like three o’clock in the morning, let’s get the fuck out of here. You went back with your roommate, who also worked there, hopefully somebody had bought a six-pack of beer before eight o’clock when the liquor stores closed, and then whoever came to the apartment that everybody from work was at, you split six beers ’cause there was no getting any more.

STEVE BORNSTEIN:

I needed a grown-up. We had personalities like Chris Berman and Bob Ley, but I can’t have them running it, and no twenty-two-year-old is going to tell those guys how to do their jobs. So I needed someone who was intellectually capable of handling some very bright guys who were shooting from the hip. I had to bring in somebody intelligent, smarter than the talent, and in the case of Bob Ley, that’s not an easy thing to do. If Walsh wasn’t smarter, he was at least their equal. SportsCenter needed to get under control.

JOHN WALSH:

In addition to hiring talent, I did two big things: first, I went traveling with two marketing-research guys. The head of marketing was Dana Redman, and he hired a marketing consultant named Ed Wolf. Ed Wolf was made for ESPN, a sports nut, and he went out and did field research. I went with him all over the country. In the first year we saw upwards of seven hundred or eight hundred people, two or three days at a time, watching focus groups. We talked to the viewers about what they were looking for from ESPN. The second thing I did was to sit down with everyone so I could figure out what wasn’t quite right with what they were doing. Fifty to seventy people, on-air producers, even PAs.

STEVE ANDERSON:

The decision was made that John was going to run SportsCenter. What John instilled was this notion that we need to be journalistically sound, we need to be a news organization, we need to think about SportsCenter as a franchise. Part of it was as simple as rethinking how we formatted the show. CNN was doing a score-and-highlights show. In those days, they would start with baseball and you’d do all the American League, and then the next segment would be all the National League, and then the third segment would be the NBA. Once you started