Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [85]
I used to say John was a fountain of ideas; they’d be just popping up all over the place. So my other job was to catch the best ones and figure out how we were going to execute them.
NORBY WILLIAMSON, Executive Vice President:
One day he’s sitting there reading a paper, then two days later it’s like he’s in charge. Why the hell would we reinvent SportsCenter? It’s not broken.
FRED GAUDELLI:
SportsCenter was undervalued by people within ESPN. It had gone through ever-changing leadership. There was a new executive producer seemingly every eighteen months. It did not have a lot of internal respect, and people working in remote production felt like they were superior to SportsCenter. But Walsh came in with a definitive plan and a definitive structure. And the more you heard him talk, the more you knew. Slowly and surely, you either jumped in or you jumped out. It was clear he had the vision, and it was clear he had the power.
MIKE McQUADE:
Walsh was called the Antichrist. He was not well received at all. It’s hard to accept a guy who’s legally blind and who’s working in television for the first time. A lot of people had problems with him. The DNA of the show became very different. It used to be very much “here are all your baseball items; here are all your hockey items.” The show was laid out that way. It wasn’t until John got there that it became more of a “here are the top stories of the day.”
ESPN suddenly became more of a business. There had been a lot of talented people working, but there was just chaos. Now we were getting serious. John wanted to know what everybody did—the APs, PAs, even the producers. And to John’s credit, he spent countless hours there. It’s not like he said, “Okay, this is what you’re doing tonight,” and left. He was there.
JOHN WALSH:
Remember, the first three or four years of ESPN, the highlights were coming into Bradley Airport and being shipped overnight to ESPN. That’s what they had to put on the air. They couldn’t worry about breaking news. They had Jim Gray on the West Coast break the Eric Dickerson trade story; that was their big news scoop. They covered press conferences.
The kids were all sports fans so they lived by the highlight. I was a huge sports fan. I wasn’t saying don’t do any highlights; I was saying, hey, make the highlights better. Let’s try to do a nonchronological highlight. Let’s put some journalism or storytelling into a highlight.
After we started to think about how we lined up the show and the highlights, we wanted to put together teams. We made a decision in the first couple months of ’88 that we would put together both broadcast and production teams so that the same producers and the same talent would work the same shifts. We wanted to move Bob Ley into SportsCenter full-time. I think he was doing SportsCenter but also doing college-basketball wraps; he was a premier journalist and we thought journalism would rule at seven o’clock. Then other pieces just began to kind of fall in place. Chris Berman and John Saunders were the eleven o’clock team when I started and they were very good, but they had been doing it for years and were ready for a transition into other sports-specific programming. That opened up the eleven, and we saw Dan Patrick as a host right away and we paired him with Bob Ley.
DAVID HILL:
Steve Bornstein deserves all the credit in the world for taking one of those beautiful gambles, which is what the great hits in life are all about, rolling the dice, and bringing in John Walsh to run SportsCenter and turning it into what it has become today.
JOHN WALSH:
People weren’t accustomed to going to meetings; people were accustomed to just gathering around people’s desks. I said, “No, we want to